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marianne moore poetry analysis essay

In Praise of the Difficult: On Marianne Moore, Defiant Poet of Complexity

Gabrielle bellot: "i’m accustomed to difficulty.".

In “Feeling and Precision,” a contemplative essay by the Modernist poet Marianne Moore from 1944, she argued—in a sense—against the claims that her famously difficult and opaque poems were lacking in emotion. Emotion itself, she suggested, was something simple, clear language could not always capture. For Moore, “feeling” itself, “at its deepest… tends to be inarticulate.” In “Silence,” a poem Moore had composed two decades earlier, she had expressed a similar sentiment. “[T]he deepest feeling,” she wrote, “always shows itself in silence.”

When asked, as she relays in “Feeling and Precision,” by “[o]ne of New York’s more painstaking magazines” to “analyze” the structure of her sentences, she responded with a set of defiant principles, one of which claimed that “expanded explanation tends to spoil the lion’s leap.” For her, seeing a lion leap—that is, seeing a thing simply be or occur—was enough, just as it was enough to visualize William Carlos Williams’ red wheelbarrow, from the famed—and infamous—poem of the same name.

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

Williams’ poem reads in full, at once a brief masterpiece of evoking visual clarity and, when it comes to what the poem may mean, a vast brambly labyrinth in which a minotaur, following us through the twists and turns, trollishly grins at our stumblings. Let the poem be, without trying to solve the maze, Moore appears to advise her critics; read Williams’ words enough, like her own, and the words that may have seemed opaque and visual alone seem to buzz with emotion, with a quiet, not wholly definable energy.

In other words, Moore believed that poetry that was too on-the-nose failed to dip into that special, untranslatable realm in which our most complex feelings reside, that space in which our emotions live in the thrumming electric hum of atoms, or the world around stars. Difficulty, she believed, defined reality, at least in some moments. And I think it especially important, as 2019 begins, to remember the importance of complicated art.

An editor told me quite the opposite. In the Trump era, they informed me, writers of personal essays required extreme precision and bluntness. One should avoid having too many details, lyric language, and even seemingly tepid political references—the latter a bulwark against having conservative readers label their mainstream publication “fake news” or “biased” or a “libtard rag.” Be careful with your opinions and your stories; let them be simple and direct, but not too sharp that they might cut against the bad beliefs someone may hold, or force them to think too much.

Complexity and difficulty of many kinds—even political difficulty, by virtue of calling out the present administration for their lies—were dangerous, it seemed, since readers, according to this logic, were neither patient nor smart enough to process certain types of writing in the wake of the election—an insult both to writers and readers, regardless of one’s political affiliation. This editorial advice was brief, but it was also frightening, for it was an attempt to make difficult writing more palatable—even when it needs its unpleasant edges.

After the 2016 election, I wrote a response to it. Like many people, it hit me hard. The piece was published, then unceremoniously taken down the same day it was put up. It needed additional editing, apparently—which primarily meant that I had to pare down some of the more emotional parts, where I revealed that I had cried after learning the results (which I had). People needed to be cautious, the editor told me; everyone was on edge after the election. It went back up later that day. It was only in retrospect that I realized how weird this situation was. How the terror of being perceived as “fake news” had caused an editor to decide that my piece needed to have some of its sharper edges softened, so they would not upset conservative readers. How even the editor himself—and all the other editors involved—seemed genuinely upset that they had had to do this.

I’m accustomed to difficulty.

Walk through the world a certain way, and you become difficult, dangerous. Difficult women must be dealt with, brought down to size, softened, lest we take up too much obvious space. Speak too loudly, as a person from a marginalized community, and you suddenly will be—if you have not already been—branded as one of the bad ones, one of the difficult people who are too loud, too different, who ask too much when we demand basic rights and respect. I’m accustomed to the many shades of difficulty people project onto you, imagine constellating you, when you are a brown-skinned woman, and all the more when they realize you are trans and queer. We are meant to walk slowly, or sleepwalk; to walk and talk with the force of conviction, to draw attention to the blood-dark soil that a country’s supremacies bloom from, terrifies the people who use “difficult” as a code for shut up, know your place.

Difficulty is vital.

Moore’s poems were difficult in their own ways, and so, too, was Moore herself, who flummoxed and angered readers and reviewers who thought she was not the right kind of poet, not the right kind of woman. She was a poet of her era—the younger, more subversive Moore, for sure—but I think she has lessons to teach us today, even if they are written in a tongue I, too, am still trying to decode.

If Moore’s richest poems resist simple classroom elucidation, Moore, too, mystified her critics. At the height of her fame, she was known as much for her output as for her outfit, floating about in the black tricorn hat of a revolutionary soldier and an elegant dark cape, as though she were the ghost of some grand graceful spinster from an earlier century. She had purchased her first tricorn while at Bryn Mawr College; the adornment would become her trademark garment, even more than the sweeping cape. “I like the shape—it conceals the defects of my head,” she said of the hat. In its sartorial nod to the American Revolution, the tricorn perhaps functioned as something more than a self-deprecating cover-up; it symbolized the same rejection of tyranny that her poetry did, by going against poetic traditions, and was an eschewing, too, of the images of the then-modern, fashionable American woman. But her critics were baffled. Some thought it was an inexplicable affectation; others imagined it a strange George-Washington-themed joke without a clear punchline. They couldn’t let her be.

In the minds of certain (and largely male) critics, her sexuality also defied comprehension. Because she did not ever marry and rarely wrote poems expressing obvious romantic desire, reviewers often imagined her a kind of piously virginal figure from a purer age, a romanticization that ignores the wide, varicolored spectrum of how people may desire. “No poet has been so chaste,” declared the critic R.P. Blackmur in 1935, expressing a view of Moore that would dominate for decades to come.

In a 1987 New York Times review of a centennial exhibit of Moore’s “poetic vision,” Herbert Mitgang went so far as to refer to her “Mary Poppins innocence,” a comparison evoking a prim, proper, rigid woman living more in the land of children than that of adults. Such oversimplified labels ignored the fact that Moore, who had been raised in part by two women—her mother, Mary Moore, and her female lover, Mary Norcross—was queer. As with the lesbian poet Amy Lowell, who wrote far more nakedly about desire, biographers seemed to miss her queerness altogether, instead assuming she was simply a frigid heterosexual woman who would have been happier had she just found the right guy.

Particularly in her youth, Moore had crushes, a number of which were on other girls. However, she never overtly seemed to fall in love, which confounded and even infuriated readers who expected women to write conventional lyrics of love. Moore, who may have been asexual—that is, she had little to no sexual desire, though she may have been romantic, meaning that she was able to desire non-sexual loving relationships with others—seemed a Victorian curiosity in the age of Allen Ginsberg’s sexually in-your-face 1956 poem, Howl .

To a subset of second-wave feminists in the 1970s who called for sexual liberation and the freedom for women to show their rage, her sexless poems were old-fashioned, lacking the revolutionary spirit her hat suggested; despite being queer and having had a woman-loving mother, Moore seemed patrician compared to writers like Adrienne Rich, whose feminist manifesto, “When We Dead Awaken,” called for women to wake up and fight against oppression. It was no longer Moore’s time; it was also not yet her time, perhaps.

Sadly, even today, asexuality—itself a spectrum—rarely seems to be taken seriously or understood, despite the fact that many well-known writers, from Edward Gorey to Keri Hulme , have explicitly or implicitly self-defined as asexual. There is no requirement to write about sexuality, or anything else; Moore should have been free to avoid the subject if she wished to, just as any woman should be free to write explicitly about sexual desire, pleasure, and pain.

Even now, people still often look at you strange if you don’t experience desire in a way they can understand, as if something is wrong with you, broken inside you, stoppered, like a ship in a bottle that simply needs to be let out—when, instead, there are many ways to express desire, and we do more harm than help to assume that sexual desire is unambiguously universal. Asexuality, like sexuality, is a spectrum; human experience is multifaceted, not unlike Moore’s poems. Even if Moore sometimes came across as proper, she was not repressed; she was simply herself, a ship in a bottle that, if one stopped long enough to look, seemed almost to float off on waves of its own.

The then-radical poetry being published in Poetry and journals like Others —the kind of poetry Moore was drawn to from early on—was frequently ridiculed in the press, but some critics, like J.B. Kerfoot of Life magazine, recognized its subversive power. Kerfoot, who was an associate of the paradigm-challenging 291 gallery run by the Modernist photographer and curator Alfred Stieglitz, described the early 20th century’s avant-garde poetry as “the expression of a democracy of feeling against an aristocracy of form.” It was an appropriately anti-monarchical phrase: the poetry Moore, who enjoyed her visits to Stieglitz’s gallery, would become known for was a toppling of old systems of literary rule. But her writing was not difficult for the sake of it. She was attempting to get at something deeper beneath the diaphanous fabric of life. She was trying to create feelings in her readers, even if those feelings defied language.

Like that red wheelbarrow or Ezra Pound’s 1913 evocation of a Parisian metro station, Moore’s poems simply exist, wellsprings of images and abstractions, mesmeric in their meticulous, Byzantine marbling, thick-yet-thin pools to sink through, like swimming, somehow, through jewel or metal or magma. Sometimes, they are curious, almost alien visions of the natural world, like “The Fish” or “Paper Nautilus.” Other poems ponder color and form, like “Buffalo”; some freely stitch together quotations from a variety of texts, including academic exegesis, like her polyphonic masterpiece of pastiche, “The Octopus,” in which multiple voices speak through the stanzas, almost like the hallucinatory effect of Eliot’s Waste Land .

“The Fish,” perhaps my favorite of her poems, begins, unexpectedly, with the title itself as the first line, and evokes a gorgeous, lapidary seascape, beginning with fish that “wade through black jade,” almost as though they are images in an elaborate bejeweled design. The speaker observes like a camera. Strikingly, the poem is bereft of humans—except for when the subtle but fatal marks of humankind appear underwater, quietly thinning, then eradicating, swathes of marine life. There are “ash-heaps,” a mussel that moves like an “injured fan,” “marks of abuse” on an undersea wall with “dynamite grooves, burns, and / hatchet strokes.” The “chasm-side is / dead,” she reveals. Of course, these may not be the result of human violence; they may be natural. But Moore never reveals more than this. The poem ends as enigmatically as it begins: lovely, disquieting, unabashed in its opacity.

Certainly, Moore’s oeuvre is far from uniform in its difficulty—especially her later, seemingly less challenging poems. In 1947, after the death of her mother, she abandoned much of the earlier work her fans had come to associate with her. Her old poems now felt too trying and bizarre. In a sense, she transformed into a different poet altogether. “Please, Miss Moore, don’t do this,” readers pleaded with her in essays and reviews. But Moore seemed determined to rewrite herself for a new era of her life. “Omissions are not accidents,” she tellingly declared to readers in the preface to her 1967 Complete Poems . Her simplest poem was one she supplied little more than the title to: an improbable collaboration with Mohammed Ali in 1967 in a Manhattan restaurant, composed on the back of a menu, which consisted of rhyming braggadocio about each poet’s—for Ali considered himself a poet—skills.

A frequent reviser, some of Moore’s more substantial revisions at once simplified her work and left readers perplexed. This is perhaps nowhere truer than in her notorious reworking of “Poetry,” a poem originally published in 1924 that she tinkered with over the course of her life (though she preserved the first line in every rendition). Once nearly 40 lines, she reduced it to three in 1967, lines slightly modified from the 1924 opening that seem astonishingly bland, even sophomoric, by themselves, in comparison to the original. The 1967 revision simply, almost wryly read:

I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.

But to criticize her revision is partly to miss the point of it. Despite her reputation for difficulty, Moore championed precision; her images, while mysterious in their meaning, are often clear, almost cinematic, as visuals. The longest and shortest editions of “Poetry” exist in a kind of conversation with each other. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” so often considered a marvel of economy and the acme of the rich, elliptical language of Imagism, was originally much longer, before Pound cut it down to two lines, possibly while under the influence of a ukiyo-e woodcut by Suzuki Harunobu he had seen at the British Library. Moore’s revisions challenge the naïve idea that there is ever one unchangeable version of a work; instead, there are many versions, one perhaps a grander edifice than another, but all influencing each other.

Perhaps this was an intentional poetic project of sorts, composed over the decades of a life: all of her revisions, braided to each other as one long, dislikable, but genuine poem, the meaning of which becomes both clearer and murkier the shorter each revision gets.

Moore’s work and life challenge us. Even in 2019, some of her writing and some aspects of her queerness still seem potent and defiant, if quietly so, especially in an era where there is an ever-more-dangerous conservative backlash against queer identities of all kinds, and in an era all too often dominated by simplistic social media discourse.

I cherish simplicity, which can be beautiful and hard to achieve in of itself; I cherish difficulty, when it’s earned, as well. And when difficulty means affirming my identities in a world that does not always wish for people like me to exist, I shall be difficult.

Moore’s work asks us to slow down, amidst the hecticness of the world, and read something, again, and again, until it seems to achieve a new kind of meaning, even one we cannot always fully put into words. It is a privilege to be able to slow down and reread, especially those of us who must work endless hours to make ends meet, and there is always more and more to read. But it is worth it. “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction,” Rich wrote in “When We Dead Awaken, “is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.” Be difficult , Moore seems to say in her quietly revolutionary ways, more akin to Rich’s message than some might believe, and I take that simple but ocean-vast pledge, which defines the complexity of the world, to heart.

Gabrielle Bellot

Gabrielle Bellot

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marianne moore poetry analysis essay

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Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore Portrait

Born in Kirkwood, Missouri, and raised in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Moore was educated at Bryn Mawr College and Carlisle Commercial College. She shared a house with her mother all her life, much of it working on a series of jobs in the New York area, but always focusing on writing. Notably, her use of quotation in her poems is as elaborate as that of T.S. Eliot, but to quite different purposes. If Eliot aimed for magisterial allusiveness, Moore aimed for something more complex and subversive—to model the cultural constitution of knowledge and understanding. Her poems braided of multiple sources are, at their most ambitious, social and philosophical investigations of great subtlety. "Marriage" and "An Octopus" are the most important poems of this impulse, so we include them both. She also had continuing political and historical interests, as two poems here about Ireland—"Sojourn in the Whale" and "Spenser's Ireland"—make clear.

 On one level, Moore's "Marriage" is a strikingly even-handed demolition of the illusion that either party to a marriage can so divest himself or herself of self-absorption and self-interest to make a union possible. "He loves himself so much," she writes, "he can permit himself / no rival in that love." But the poem is much more than an analysis of the pitfalls in gender relations.  It actually moves centripetally and centrifugally at the same time, treating marriage not only as a site on which individuals and the culture as a whole act out their contradictory investments in independence and community but also as a figural resource that informs all compromised institutions in the culture. Thus the poem is at once about the marriage two people make and about the marriage the states made to form one country—"Liberty and union / now and forever." Both require "public promises / of one's intention / to fulfill a private obligation" and both "can never be more / than an interesting impossibility." Marriage is an institution constructed by contractualized idealization and a model for comparably problematic institutions of other sorts. Marriage in the poem is effectively thus both victim and purveyor of illusions within the culture.

Biographical Criticism

  • Elaine Oswald and Robert L. Gale: On "Marianne Moore's Life and Career"
  • Darlene Williams Erickson: On "A Marianne Moore Chronology"

General Criticism

  • Leonard Diepeveen: On "Moore's Use of Quotation in "Marriage" and "An Octopus""
  • Elizabeth Gregory: On "Moore's Use of Quotation in "Marriage" and "An Octopus""
  • Jeff Schaller: On "The Genuine Ethics of Marianne Moore"

Poet Details

Poet timeline, moore publishes final poems, "the magician’s retreat" and "prevalent at one time"; becomes semi-invalid, marianne moore is born november 15th, 1887. 15 november, 1887.

Marianne Moore is born November 15th, 1887 in Kirkwood Missouri to John Milton Moore and Mary Warner Moore.

Moore moves to Pennsylvania. 1 January, 1894

·         Moore and her family move to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1894.

Moore attends High School at Metzger Institute. 1 January, 1896

Marianne Moore attends the Metzger Intitute in 1894 until she graduates in 1905. After she graduates Moore enrolls in Bryn Mawr College in 1905.

Moore enrolls at Bryn Mawr College. 1 September, 1905

Marianne Moore attends Bryn Mawr College starting in 1905. Moore receives her Bachelor's degree in 1909. After graduating, Moore enrolls at Carlisle Commercial College.

Receives Bachelor of Arts Degree in 1909. 1 June, 1909

·         Moore graduates Bryn Mawr College with a Bachelor’s degree in 1909. After which she enrolls at Carlisle Commercial College. 

Moore takes various secretarial courses at Carlisle Commercial College. 1 January, 1910

·         Moore takes various secretarial courses at Carlisle Commercial College in 1910-11. Afterwards she becomes a teacher at U.S. Industrial Indian School until 1915.

Moore tours museums in England, Scotland and France. 1 January, 1911

·         Moore tours various museums in England, Scotland, and France with her mother in 1911. Moore visits museums in Glasgow, Oxford, Paris and London.

·         Moore tours various museums in England, Scotland, and France with her mother in 1911.  Moore visits museums in Glasgow, Oxford, London, and Paris.

Moore teaches at the U.S. Industrial Indian School. 1 January, 1912

·         Moore taught at U.S. Industrial Indian School from 1912 to 1915. Moore taught courses in bookkeeping, stenography, and typing. Moore also taught courses in commercial English and law.

Moore's First poems appear in the Egoist (London), Poetry (Chicago), and Others (New York) 1 January, 1915

Moore moves to chatam, new jersey 1 january, 1916.

·         Moore moves to Chatam, New Jersey in 1916 with her mother to help take care of her brother’s house. 

Moore moves to New Jersey. 1 January, 1916

·         Moore moves to Chatam, New Jersey with her mother to help take care of her brother’s house. 

Moore moves to Manhattan, New York 1 January, 1918

·         Moore moves to Manhattan, New York in 1918 after her brother joins the U.S. Navy.

Moore moves with mother to New York City; works as a secretary and private tutor in a girls’ school 1 January, 1918

Moore takes part-time job in hudson park branch of new york public library 1 january, 1921, moore publishes poems 1 january, 1921.

Published with additions as Observations in (1924)

Moore's Observations gets published by Dial Press and awards her $2000 in recognition of "Unusual Literary Value" 1 January, 1924

Moore becomes the editor of the dial 1 january, 1925.

·         Moore becomes the editor of the Dial in 1925 until 1929. The Dial becomes discontinued after 1929.

Moore's first poem to be translated, "A Grave," appears in Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie 1 January, 1928

Moore moves to brooklyn, new york. 1 january, 1929.

Moore moves to Brooklyn, New York in 1929, she remains there despite her mother's death in 1947.

Moore receives the Helen Haire Levinson Prize 1 January, 1933

·         Moore receives the Helen Haire Levinson Prize in 1933 for her volume of Poetry.

Moore receives the Helen Haire Levinson Prize. 1 January, 1933

·         Moore receives the Helen Haire Levinson Prize for her volume of Poetry. 

Moore Publishes Selected Poems with an Introduction by T.S. Eliot 1 January, 1935

Moore publishes pangolin, and other verse 1 january, 1936, moore publishes what are years 1 january, 1941, moore publishes other poems 1 january, 1941, moore publishes nevertheless 1 january, 1944, moore receives guggenheim fellowship 1 january, 1945, moore is elected to national institute of arts and letters; mother dies. during the period she begins wearing the tricorner hat and cape as her personal trademark (her mother had fashioned the first cape in 1905, and she had worn a cape in college) 1 january, 1947, moore receives a pulitzer prize and national book award 1 january, 1951, moore publishes collected poems 1 january, 1951, moore receives the pulitzer prize and the national book award 1 january, 1952.

·         Moore receives the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her Collected Poems in 1952.

Moore receives the Bollinger Prize 1 January, 1953

·         Moore receives the Bollinger Prize in 1953 for her Collected Poems.

Moore is a visiting Lecturer at Bryn Mawr College, which gives her M. Carey Thomas award; Collected Poems wins Bollingen Prize. Brooklyn’s Youth United for a Better Tomorrow selects her as one of the six most successful women of the year 1 January, 1953

Moore's gedichte, bilingual edition of her poetry, published in germany; the translation of fables of la fontaine is published 1 january, 1954, moore's predelictions, selected essays and reviews, is published; elected member of the american academy of arts and letters 1 january, 1955, moore publishes like a bulwark 1 january, 1956, moore publishes o to be a dragon 1 january, 1959, moore publishes a marianne moore reader 1 january, 1961, moore publishes eight poems with illustrations by robert andrew parker 1 january, 1962, moore's seventy-fifth birthday is observed by the national institute of the arts and letters;brandeis university awards her a prize and medal for outstanding achievement in poetry; the absentee 1 january, 1962, moore publishes occasionem cognosce 1 january, 1963, moore publishes the arctic ox 1 january, 1964, moore's festschrift for marianne moore’s seventy-seventh birthday, by various hands, and omaggio a marianne moore are published 1 january, 1964, moore publishes poetry and criticism 1 january, 1965, moore moves to manhattan 1 january, 1965, moore publishes a talisman 1 january, 1965, moore publishes silence 1 january, 1965, moore publishes dress and kindred subjects 1 january, 1965, moore publishes le mariage 1 january, 1965, moore publishes tell me, tell me: granite, steel, and other topics 1 january, 1966, moore receives edward macdowell medal and poetry society of america’s gold medal; receives the croix de chevalier des arts et lettres 1 january, 1967, moore publishes tippoo's tiger 1 january, 1967, moore publishes the complete poems of marianne moore 1 january, 1967.

Republished by Penguin in (1981)

Moore wins national Medal for Literature; throws out first baseball of the season at Yankee Stadium 1 January, 1968

Moore is named "senior citizen of the year" in new york conference on aging; receives honorary degree, her last, from harvard 1 january, 1969, moore publishes selected poems 1 january, 1969, moore publishes unfinished poems 1 january, 1972, moore passes away february 5 in new york city at the age of 84 1 january, 1972, marianne moore dies. 5 february, 1972.

Marianne Moore dies at age 84 on February 5th, 1972. 

Moore Publishes The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore 1 January, 1986

Moore publishes the poems of marianne moore 1 january, 2003.

This complete collection of Moore's poetry, lovingly edited by the prizewinning poet Grace Schulman, for the first time contains all of Moore's poems, including 120 previously uncollected and unpublished ones. Organized chronologically to allow readers to follow Moore's development as a poet, the volume includes an introduction, all of Moore's original notes to the poems, along with Schulman's notes, attributions, and some variants. This long-needed volume will reveal to Moore's admirers the scope of her poetic voice and will introduce new generations of readers to her great achievement. The Poems of Marianne Moore is a must have both for Moore devotees and any reader seeking an introduction to the work of one of America's greatest poets

marianne moore poetry analysis essay

Moore's Grave--Evergreen Cemetery, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, USA.

Photo courtesy of Ron Williams.

marianne moore poetry analysis essay

"Marianne Moore and Her Mother"

1925 oil painting by Marguerite Zorach.

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

marianne moore poetry analysis essay

First day (April 18, 1990) card for the U.S. Post Office's Marianne Moore Stamp.

Original painting for the Fleetwood®  First Day of Issue Maximum Card by Shannon Stirnweis.

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Marianne Moore’s Poetry, the Way She Intended It

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By Stephen Burt

  • Aug. 11, 2017

NEW COLLECTED POEMS By Marianne Moore Edited by Heather Cass White 480 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35.

Modern poets who agreed on nothing else agreed on Marianne Moore. T. S. Eliot called her work “part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time”; William Carlos Williams, who hated Eliot’s taste, wrote that Moore “never disappointed me.” Elizabeth Bishop found in Moore her best, in some ways her only, model and mentor; Wallace Stevens admired her “scrupulous … unaffected, witty, colloquial sort of spirit.” Poets today recognize her reticulated, counterintuitive syllable-counting techniques, which can rhyme “an” with “fan,” “set” with “flageolet,” or quote her most famous poem, titled “Poetry,” which recommends “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” and warns “that we / do not admire what / we cannot understand.”

It has long been hard to find, let alone admire, some of Moore’s best poems as she first wrote them. Moore (1887-1972) published “Poetry” in 1919, then cut, revised and rewrote it for decades: The same once-lengthy poem — which opens, in all its versions, “I, too, dislike it” — contained just three lines in her 1967 “Complete Poems” (which did print a long early version in an appendix). Nor were the cuts to “Poetry” atypical. This poet, whose best poems advocate accuracy, self-correction and respect for particularity, cared so punctiliously about her own lines that she would not leave them alone.

Linda Leavell’s revelatory 2013 biography helped explain why. Raised by her single mother, Mary Warner Moore, and sent to Bryn Mawr (where she thrived), the young poet hoped for urban independence. Instead, she became Mary’s caregiver after college, when Mary’s longtime lover (a woman) left. Though she did visit England and the West Coast, and supped with other modernists in New York, the adult Marianne faced a tough life in a series of tiny apartments, inseparable from a very needy Mary, and almost unable to voice her resentments except through extraordinarily indirect poems like the ones in her breakthrough book, “Observations” (1924). When in the 1940s Mary grew ill and died, Marianne lost her closest companion, but also her censor. She emerged better known and — Leavell suggests — resolved to enjoy life. The winsome celebrity Moore of the 1950s and ’60s, often photographed in cape and tricorn hat, obscured her more demanding, younger self.

Until now, publishers did not do her justice. The authorized 1967 collection left parts of “Observations” out, as well as obscuring its order. Robin Schulze’s magisterial, scholarly “Becoming Marianne Moore” (2002) gave every version of every poem up to 1924, but nothing else. Grace Schulman’s ample but confusingly edited volume “The Poems of Marianne Moore” (2003) put many poems back in print but sorted them by arbitrary categories (“World War II and After”), mixed uncollected and unpublished work with the rest, and chose versions based on the editor’s intuition or her friendship with Moore.

Heather Cass White has set things right. This elegant, big volume, “New Collected Poems,” gives “Moore’s poems as they were when she first wrote and published them,” arranged (with well-explained exceptions) in the order of Moore’s individual books, from “Observations” on: We see what Eliot and Bishop saw. We also see Moore emerging, in her 20s, from late Victorian light verse (“I could not bear a yellow rose ill will / Because books said that yellow boded ill, / White promised well”). We watch her discover her style: ultra-long complex sentences, intentionally awkward rhymes, embedded quotations and multiple changes of subject, each with its own quirky simile. Moore admired and emulated elaborate artifice, so long as its products turned out less boastful than useful; another early poem lauds “An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish,” whose “scales turn aside the sun’s sword with their polish.”

If most poets take a magnifying glass to the world, Moore brought an unwieldy microscope to discover beautiful things and diagnose unseen ills. Moore’s human and animal emblems defeat bullies, predatory institutions or narrow-minded men. “Meant for a lawyer and a masculine German domestic / career,” the composer Handel “clandestinely studied the harpsichord / and never was known to have fallen in love.” Moore too — though her contemporaries courted her — largely shunned the erotic, despite her ambivalent, scrapbook-like poem “Marriage”; today we might call her asexual.

Moore’s brother, John, became a naval chaplain; her longer poems’ resemblance to sermons echoes John’s, and Mary’s, Protestant piety. Yet the great poems’ lessons are rarely simple: It can be hard to know whether Moore approves, for example, of “a swan under the willows in Oxford” whose “hardihood was not / proof against its / proclivity to more fully appraise such bits / of food as the stream / bore counter to it.” If she saw this world as a field for experiment, a moral testing ground, she also saw it as, potentially, paradise. Consider the town in “The Steeple-Jack,” where a “college student … with his not-native books”

knows by heart the antique sugar-bowl shaped summer-house of interlacing slats, and the pitch of the church spire, not true, from which a man in scarlet lets down a rope as a spider spins a thread.

“It could not be dangerous to be living / in a town like this,” Moore concludes, though it might still be dangerous to be alive; her pages invite us to imagine those among whom we might prefer to live.

Yet the poems will not make our judgments for us. Their work of knowing how to be good is also the work of teasing apart the strands of our assumptions, slowing us down so we can avoid snap judgments: “Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools / which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous?” Moore also taught herself and her readers to appreciate what seems useless or ugly. Take her emblematic elephant, its skin “cut / into checkers by rut / upon rut of unpreventable experience,” so that its hide becomes “a manual for the peanut-tongued and the / hairy toed.” (That scarred skin, in a poem called “Black Earth,” also suggests the “spiritual poise” of put-upon African-Americans: Moore elsewhere — “The Labors of Hercules,” for example — clearly set out to write anti-racist poems.)

Moore warned us against “the passion for setting people right,” but it was a passion her early poems retained. “Roses Only” (which she later suppressed) tells its titular flower, “your thorns are the best part of you.” She saved her highest praise for animals that defend themselves in exceptional ways: the ostrich, for example, “whose comic duckling head on its / great neck, revolves with compass- / needle nervousness / when he stands guard.” This defiant bird, like the motherly, writerly creature in “The Paper Nautilus,” might represent the truthful, guarded poet or her obstinately protective mother.

To read Moore at length is at once to pick up odd facts and to gather moral advice. It’s like reading Scientific American (which she quoted) and Samuel Johnson at the same time. Moore’s longest single poem, “An Octopus,” folds into its many sunny descriptions a monitory strain — “Relentless accuracy is the nature of this octopus / with its capacity for fact.” (The “octopus” is actually Mount Rainier, the glacier and national park, whose arms and extensions make it resemble a cephalopod.) Her uneven lines, like paths across the glacier, turn multiple corners, unroll and then reverse themselves, as if they were constantly checking their prior conclusions against new evidence. The prewar Moore might condemn folly reluctantly, more Jonah than Jeremiah (she called one early poem “Is Your Town Nineveh?”), but she condemned it.

The later, much-photographed Moore, by contrast, spent most of her energy liking things: the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Brooklyn Bridge, “little locust-leaf shadows like lace.” She became a friendlier, more oratorical version of herself, and then a delightfully inconsequential eccentric, lauding “love’s extraordinary-ordinary stubbornness” or announcing, “Writing is exciting / and baseball is like writing.” It must have been fun to be her in her famous old age (Leavell certainly thought so), and it can be fun to follow, through the late poems, her still-supple syntax, but it is more fun, and more challenging, to read the poems Bishop admired, the poems Moore wrote for herself when few were watching.

Readers not familiar with Moore can use this book to find her greatest hits: “Poetry” and “The Fish,” “The Steeple-Jack” and “The Pangolin,” that allegory of hope amid violence whose “ant and / stone swallowing uninjurable / artichoke” (that is, the scale-covered mammal resembles an artichoke) is second in courage only to humans. Others will find instead, in this reliable compilation, fine non-album B-sides: “Roses Only”; “Walking-Sticks and Paperweights and Watermarks,” with its cascading half-rhymes; “Pigeons,” with its list of bred subspecies, among them “an all-feather piebald, / cuckoo-marked on a titanic scale / taking perhaps sixteen birds to / show the whole design.”

White remarks that Moore has “generations of admirers but almost no imitators,” which is not true: Poets now and in the 20th century — among them A. R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt, May Swenson, Robyn Schiff, David Baker, Linda Gregerson, Angie Estes and Robin Coste Lewis — have modeled their verse on her scrupulous, vulnerable complexity. Yet Moore remains a poet apart. Any excuse is a good excuse to discover her — and this edition may be the best we get.

Stephen Burt’s new volume of poetry, “Advice From the Lights,” will be published in October.

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marianne moore poetry analysis essay

The Fish Summary & Analysis by Marianne Moore

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
  • Poetic Devices
  • Vocabulary & References
  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
  • Line-by-Line Explanations

marianne moore poetry analysis essay

American poet Marianne Moore's "The Fish" appeared in her first collection, Poems , which was published—without her permission—in 1921. (Some of her friends decided that the world needed to see this collection whether Moore liked it or not.) In "The Fish," an anonymous speaker paints a vivid underwater scene. Sea creatures from jellyfish to crabs live and die in the shelter of a nearby cliff whose stones have been hacked and battered by humans. But humanity can't do any meaningful damage here, the poem suggests: the ancient might of stone and sea endures.

  • Read the full text of “The Fish”

marianne moore poetry analysis essay

The Full Text of “The Fish”

2 through black jade.

3        Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps

4        adjusting the ash-heaps;

5               opening and shutting itself like

7 injured fan.

8        The barnacles which encrust the side

9        of the wave, cannot hide

10               there for the submerged shafts of the

12 split like spun

13        glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness

14        into the crevices—

15               in and out, illuminating

17 turquoise sea

18        of bodies. The water drives a wedge

19        of iron through the iron edge

20               of the cliff; whereupon the stars,

22 rice-grains, ink-

23        bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green

24        lilies, and submarine

25               toadstools, slide each on the other.

27 external

28        marks of abuse are present on this

29        defiant edifice—

30               all the physical features of

32 cident—lack

33        of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and

34        hatchet strokes, these things stand

35               out on it; the chasm-side is

37 Repeated

38        evidence has proved that it can live

39        on what can not revive

40               its youth. The sea grows old in it.

“The Fish” Summary

“the fish” themes.

Theme Humanity vs. Nature's Permanence

Humanity vs. Nature's Permanence

  • See where this theme is active in the poem.

Theme The Sea's Beauty, Violence, and Power

The Sea's Beauty, Violence, and Power

Theme Change and Stasis

Change and Stasis

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “the fish”.

wade through black jade.

marianne moore poetry analysis essay

 Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps        adjusting the ash-heaps;               opening and shutting itself like an injured fan.

 The barnacles which encrust the side        of the wave, cannot hide               there for the submerged shafts of the sun,

Lines 12-14

split like spun        glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness        into the crevices—

Lines 15-18

  in and out, illuminating the turquoise sea        of bodies.

Lines 18-20

The water drives a wedge        of iron through the iron edge               of the cliff;

Lines 20-25

whereupon the stars, pink rice-grains, ink-        bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green        lilies, and submarine               toadstools, slide each on the other.

Lines 26-32

All external        marks of abuse are present on this        defiant edifice—               all the physical features of ac- cident—

Lines 32-36

lack        of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and        hatchet strokes, these things stand               out on it; the chasm-side is dead.

Lines 37-40

Repeated        evidence has proved that it can live        on what can not revive               its youth. The sea grows old in it.

“The Fish” Symbols

Symbol The Sea

  • See where this symbol appears in the poem.

“The Fish” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

  • See where this poetic device appears in the poem.

“The Fish” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

  • Bespattered
  • See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Fish”

Rhyme scheme, “the fish” speaker, “the fish” setting, literary and historical context of “the fish”, more “the fish” resources, external resources.

More about Marianne Moore — Read a short biography of Moore.

Climate Scientists and Poets Discuss "The Fish" — Listen to a multidisciplinary conversation about this poem that explores both its environmental and its artistic significance.

Marianne Moore's Notebooks — Explore digitized versions of Moore's notebooks.

Moore's Legacy — Read an article from the Pulitzer organization honoring Moore (who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1952).

LitCharts on Other Poems by Marianne Moore

Everything you need for every book you read..

The LitCharts.com logo.

Marianne Moore's five-decade struggle with "Poetry."

Marianne moore's "poetry", why did she keep revising it.

Marianne Moore. Click image to expand.

I've never been completely sure what I think about Marianne Moore's celebrated poem "Poetry." Apparently, Moore had similar feelings—revising the poem many times across the span of five decades. (You can find a couple of unpublished revisions here , courtesy of my friend and colleague Bonnie Costello, an eminent Moore scholar.)

One of the most striking moments in the poem is the phrase "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," a formulation Moore sets off with quotation marks even though, as far as I know, no one has ever identified a source. I suspect that Moore invented the image but, finding it a little too pat or studied, tempered and complicated her line by pretending it was a quotation. But who knows? By comparison, the phrase "a literalist of the imagination," Moore's paraphrase of William Butler Yeats' remark about William Blake, is almost—though not really!—simple. Moore likes to keep everything shifting and vibrating. That the reader is never completely sure suits her purpose.

The most famous (and most widely lamented) version of "Poetry" is the one Moore published in her 1967 The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore . Many readers, including numbers of Moore's fellow poets, consider this one of the most egregious examples ever of terrible revision. In that 1967 version, Moore reduced "Poetry" to just three lines:

I, too, dislike it. *** Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in *** it, after all, a place for the genuine.

This drastic compression seems designed to frustrate the poem's admirers (perhaps especially the critics and scholars who had commented on the poem), taking back the exquisitely twisty epigrams and images that readers had enjoyed, analyzed, quoted. To tease her admirers and critics—or to complicate their responses even further—Moore had it both ways by including the longer poem as a kind of endnote to the three-liner. She published the full, 1924 version (reprinted below), the one preferred by many of her admirers and later editors, in the back matter of that same 1967 Complete Poems with the laconic heading "Original Version." In various ways, the two incarnations of the poem annotate, challenge, and criticize one another. I think they amusingly challenge and criticize us readers, too.

Such pranks and ambushes allow a lively uncertainty into Moore's art: Her serpentine, sometimes erratic sentences glide across the precise syllable counts of her lines. That contrast seems central to Moore. She likewise relishes another, perhaps related contrast: on the one hand, exact details of animal behavior, like that of bats, elephants, and wolves and, on the other, the enigmas and complexities of animal actions—and of the behavior, too, of baseball fans and literary critics, considered along with the pushing, rolling, hanging upside-down of the animals. 

Moore, as I understand her project, champions both clarity and complexity, rejecting the shallow notion that they are opposites. Scorning a middlebrow reduction of everything into easy chunks, she also scorns obfuscation and evasive cop-outs. Tacitly impatient with complacency and bluffing, deriding the flea-bitten critic, unsettling the too-ordinary reader, she sets forth an art that is irritable, attentive, and memorably fluid.

"Poetry" I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. ***** Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in ***** it, after all, a place for the genuine. *********** Hands that can grasp, eyes *********** that can dilate, hair that can rise ***************** if it must, these things are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are ***** useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible ***** the same thing may be said for all of us, that we *********** do not admire what *********** we cannot understand: the bat ***************** holding on upside down or in quest of something to eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under ***** a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea ******************************************************* the base- ***** ball fan, the statistician— *********** nor is it valid ***************** to discriminate against "business documents and school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make a ******************************************* distinction ***** however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not ************************************************* poetry, ***** nor till the poets among us can be *********** "literalists of *********** the imagination"—above ***************** insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," shall we have ***** it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, ***** the raw material of poetry in *********** all its rawness and *********** that which is on the other hand ***************** genuine, you are interested in poetry. ******************************************** —Marianne Moore

Click the arrow on the audio player below to hear Robert Pinsky read "Poetry." You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate 's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.

Slate Poetry Editor Robert Pinsky will be participating in the Poems "Fray" this week. Post your questions and comments on "Poetry," and he'll respond and participate. (In the interest of keeping the discussion as rich as possible, please read existing comments before posting your own.) You can also browse "Fray" discussions of previous classic poems .

marianne moore poetry analysis essay

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On Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”

April 16th, 2019 | 13 min read

By E. J. Hutchinson

marianne moore poetry analysis essay

Why do we read poetry? Why should we?

April is National Poetry Month , so it makes sense to take advantage of it to introduce a new series on poetry at Mere Orthodoxy . Its objective is simple: to read some poems, discuss them, think about them, enjoy them.

We begin with a poem that acknowledges the difficulty many people have with the medium: Marianne Moore ’s “Poetry,” first published in Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse , and subsequently revised by Moore several times until only the first three lines of the poem remained. I quote and discuss the version in her 1924 collection Observations , which consists of a five-line stanza surrounded by two pairs of six-line stanzas and which can be found here .

Moore begins disarmingly, somewhat confidentially, bringing the reader in, as though he is having an intimate conversation with her:

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. [1]

“Yes,” she says, “many people dislike poetry; and so do I. Mustn’t there be other things more worthwhile?”

And yet, even if one hates it as he reads it, he may suddenly find himself struck. She goes on:

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in it after all, a place for the genuine.

“A place for the genuine ”–this is a term she will return to later in the poem. But already she gives us some examples of what she means:

Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must…

Though Aristotle says in the Poetics that poetry is superior to history because of its ability to express universals, [2] it comes to those universals by way of particulars. Moore here gives us some images of just the sorts of particulars to which a poem can give voice, and, in giving them voice, draw our attention to them.

The reason we should attend to such quotidian realities, moreover, might come as something of a surprise. Moore continues:

…these things are important not because a high sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand…

These everyday objects are significant not because they are susceptible to highfalutin language and verbal display, Horace’s purpureus pannus , but rather because they are “useful.” A funny thing to say, that. What does it mean? Perhaps we cannot yet understand for certain, but can only speculate. Useful to think with? Useful for getting a grip on the world as it is? Useful for cultivating the capacity to notice ?

But her meaning cannot be absolutely up for grabs. We must be able to understand something of what she means, for, as Moore says just afterwards, “we/do not admire what/we cannot understand.” But the reader in his turn might object: Is that true? Surely we can admire things we don’t fully comprehend–the human brain, for instance, or, as Agur says , “[t]he way of an eagle in the air,…and the way of a man with a maid.” One could be forgiven for finding himself in a state of aporia .

Aporia, the sense of being at a loss, should provoke further reflection. So let’s look again at what comes between the claims about the useful and about the relation between admiration and understanding: the contrast with what is “useful” about these images is their “becom[ing] so derivative as to become unintelligible.” So we can say something more: when a figure or image becomes “derivative”–a cliché, for instance–it no longer provides an aid to understanding the thing it is meant to elucidate. Think of a dead metaphor: writers often have “deadlines,” but for how many of them does that word conjure the image of “a line drawn…around a prison that a prisoner passes at the risk of being shot”? [3]

Perhaps “understanding” is different from “comprehension” as I used it above, then. Perhaps to “admire” something, to be struck with amazement at it, requires some understanding of it, even if it is only partial, for that partial, or even piecemeal, understanding can form the bridge that connects us with the object in question. Poetry done right, Moore seems to say, can help to do that, to form that connection. We may be inching closer to a sense of what she means by poetry’s having “a place for the genuine” in the first stanza.

Not fortuitously does Moore immediately return to a catalog of the real, as she proceeds to give a longer list of the kinds of images a poem can show us:

…the bat, holding on upside down or in quest of something to eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base ball fan, the statistician–…

An intriguing combination: four animals, followed by a critic who resembles an animal, and then onto further pedestrian examples of humanity. Moore knows she could go on ad infinitum (in an earlier version of the poem she says, “[C]ase after case/could be cited did/one wish it”). “Heaven and earth are full of more things” etc., Horatio says to Hamlet .

Her mundane examples, it should be emphasized, are meant to be mundane. Such ordinary things ought to be the stuff of poetry. One might say, then, that part of what poetry can do is render the ordinary visible in a way it previously was not. Moore goes yet further:

…nor is it valid to discriminate against “business documents and school-books”; all these phenomena are important.

Poetry deals with things that appear, as they appear to us: with “phenomena.” One gets the sense that these phenomena are significant simply by virtue of being in the world. And it is not “valid,” she says–almost as though it would be illogical, for validity has to do with reasoning–to show prejudice against them as having no place in art. The least remarkable things around us–“‘business documents and school-books’”–are, after their fashion, in fact remarkable.

Moore’s quotation marks around that phrase, by the way, are not incidental. Who is her interlocutor? As has often been pointed out (indeed, Moore herself tells us), she is citing the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.

In an undated note written between 1851 and 1853, Tolstoy dilates upon the seemingly permeable “boundary between prose and poetry ”:

Lamartine says that writers neglect the composition of popular literature; that the greatest ‘number of readers is to be found among the masses; and that writers write only for the circle in which they themselves move, despite the fact that the masses, which comprise persons hungering for enlightenment, have no literature of their own, and never will have until writers shall begin to write also for the people. This does not refer to books written with the aim of finding many readers: such works are not compositions, but mere products of the literary cult. What is meant is educational and erudite works which do not come within the province of poetry.’ (Where the boundary between prose and poetry lies I shall never be able to understand. The question is raised in manuals of style, yet the answer to it lies beyond me. Poetry is verse: prose is not verse. Or else poetry is everything with the exception of business documents and school books .)

Something very interesting is happening here. Tolstoy paraphrases Lamartine, who laments the lack of a truly literary literature with mass appeal, and who explicitly excludes poetry from his consideration. This prompts a parenthetical remark from Tolstoy about the blurry line that separates poetry from prose. Perhaps, he says, it “is everything with the exception of business documents and school books.”

Back to Moore. Moore in every respect one-ups Tolstoy: she writes a poem that blurs the line separating it from prose while nevertheless remaining a poem; she commiserates with an imagined ordinary reader (“I, too, dislike it”), thus attempting to extend the beneficent effects of poetry (not prose) to the common man; and she extends its possible subject-matter so widely that it must not “discriminate against ‘business documents and/school-books.’” Where Tolstoy had said that that exclusion was perhaps the one characteristic that separates poetry from prose, Moore says, “No, even those things can make fitting material for poetry.” And why? Again, “all these phenomena are important.”

Still, one must be careful here. There is a way of talking about real things that makes them unreal, a kind of poetry- manqué that is not real poetry, but rather the domain of “half poets”:

One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry…

Instead, what we need are what one might call “full poets,” whom Moore designates “‘literalists of the imagination.’” The phrase–once again, Moore tells us–is another quotation, this time from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. It comes from his Ideas of Good and Evil (1903), from the chapter called “William Blake and His Illustrations to The Divine Comedy .” There, Yeats observes :

The limitation of [Blake’s] view was from the very intensity of his vision; he was a too literal realist of imagination , as others are of nature; and because he believed that the figures seen by the mind’s eye, when exalted by inspiration, were ‘eternal existences,’ symbols of divine essences, he hated every grace of style that might obscure their lineaments. To wrap them about in reflected lights was to do this, and to dwell over-fondly upon any softness of hair or flesh was to dwell upon that which was least permanent and least characteristic, for ‘The great and golden rule of art, as of life, is this: that the more distinct, sharp and wiry the boundary-line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling.’

Moore, unlike Yeats, seems to like this description as an artistic goal–but with a twist. Moore does not wish for poets to invent imaginary concrete symbols and raise them to the ontological status of “‘eternal existences,’” but to provide the opportunity to observe, to notice , really concrete objects in an imaginary context, to depict things that, while in some sense unreal (because they are images in a poem), are nevertheless real (because taken from, and representative of, the real world)–to recognize, that is, the exalted ontological status of the ordinary.

What she wants, in other words–and what a fine phrase this is–are “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”:

…nor till the poets among us can be “literalists of the imagination”–above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have it.

“It” here is, of course, “poetry.” The phrase “for inspection” is doing some heavy lifting in this passage: as I said just above, one of the functions of poetry is to help the reader attend to the world–the one that actually exists–in a new and deeper way. Or, put it this way: poetry gives voice to the things that are, and thus in a sense speaks the world into existence for the reader. And by so doing, it helps us to see. [4] Powerful speech leads to clarified vision.

In this way poetry gives us the “genuine.” Our English adjective comes from the Latin genuinus , “innate, native, natural.” Poetry gives us what is natural to the world; it takes what was always there and, by speaking it to us, allows us finally to see it for the first time.

It would of course be possible to engage in a theological juke here, and point out how, in performing this role, the poet imitates God as Creator, who speaks the world into existence in a divine poiesis . It would be possible; but is it really necessary?

The redeemed Christian looking at creation anew, with as it were second sight, supposes that such a claim about poiesis has the sort of necessity that belongs to the truth; but, on the other hand, many poets and many readers of poetry would not accept the formulation and are nonetheless capable of making and enjoying poetry, so that the recognition of this truth does not have what we might call the necessity of use. More succinctly, poets work out their craft whether their souls have been redeemed or not. This is simply another way of saying that poetry belongs in the first instance to the order of creation rather than to the order of redemption. It is a common good that serves a common purpose.

In any case, it is past time to conclude. I leave Moore with the last word:

…In the meantime, if you demand on one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

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  • On this opening the poet Donald Hall comments : “In her well-known poem, “Poetry,” Miss Moore begins, “I too, dislike it.” This line has been interpreted as ironic, as an attempt to disarm, or as evidence that she practices her art only half-seriously. Quite obviously, however, her reasoning is serious. She refers to a kind of poetry that is neither honest nor sincere but that has found fashionable approval by virtue of its very obscurity.” ↑
  • He says : “Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” ↑
  • George Orwell discusses this phenomenon in “Politics and the English Language.” ↑
  • To quote Donald Hall again: “The raw material for poetry abounds, it is everywhere, is anything, but it must be imaginatively grasped.” ↑

E. J. Hutchinson

E.J. Hutchinson is Associate Professor of Classics at Hillsdale College, where he also directs the Collegiate Scholars Program. He is the editor and translator of Niels Hemmingsen’s On the Law of Nature: A Demonstrative Method.

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Twenty-First Century Marianne Moore pp 221–235 Cite as

“Passion for the Particular”: Marianne Moore, Henry James, Beatrix Potter, and the Refuge of Close Reading

  • Zachary Finch 5  
  • First Online: 09 December 2017

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Part of the book series: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics ((MPCC))

In this essay Finch contributes to the growing wave of scholarly interest in the late work of Marianne Moore by performing a close reading of the underexamined poem “Tell me, tell me.” By situating this poem within the context of Moore’s increasing literary celebrity of the 1950s and 1960s, Finch demonstrates how the rich intertextuality of “Tell me, tell me” fabricates a most “telling” response to the public’s rapacious appetite for insight into her personal life. Moore complicates facile understandings of a writer’s private biography by promoting an inextricably social, dialogical and collaborative model of artistic subjectivity, one whose many facets are revealed only through the co-constituting labor of her readers.

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———. 2012. “‘Still Leafing’: Celebrity, Confession, Marianne Moore’s ‘The Camperdown Elm’ and the Scandal of Age.” Journal of Modern Literature 35.3 (Spring): 51–76.

———. 2015. “Marianne Moore’s ‘Blue Bug’: A Dialogic Ode on Celebrity, Race, Gender & Age.” Modernism/modernity 22.4 (November): 759–786.

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Qian, Zhaoming. 2003. The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens . Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

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Wilson, Elizabeth. 2005. “El Greco’s Daughter: Necessary Deflection in Marianne Moore’s ‘For February 14th’ and ‘Saint Valentine.’” In Critics and Poets on Marianne Moore: “A Right Good Salvo of Barks,” eds. Linda Leavell, Cristanne Miller, and Robin G. Schulze, 192–207. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.

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Finch, Z. (2018). “Passion for the Particular”: Marianne Moore, Henry James, Beatrix Potter, and the Refuge of Close Reading. In: Gregory, E., Hubbard, S. (eds) Twenty-First Century Marianne Moore. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65109-5_13

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Marianne Moore's Early Poems

marianne moore poetry analysis essay

In October 2003 , The Yale Review printed four never-before-published early poems by the great modernist poet Marianne Moore. These poems, all written in Moore’s early twenties, bear many of the stylistic hallmarks of her later work: jaunty concision, arch humor, and a heightened attention to the syllabic (even more than the accentual) measure of the poetic line. In the same folio, The Yale Review also published a poem mistakenly attributed to Moore: “Majestic Haystack,” by Algernon Blackwood, from his 1913 book A Prisoner in Fairyland . Moore had typed a transcript of the poem, omitting a few lines, and kept it among her early papers, leading archivists to assume, wrongly, that she had written it herself.

The five poems TYR published that autumn comprised a short selection from The Poems of Marianne Moore , edited by the poet Grace Schulman and released later the same month from Viking Press. The book was groundbreaking, containing dozens of uncollected poems composed before the publication of Moore’s first collection in 1921. Many of these poems—which Schulman discovered in Moore’s archive at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, where the original versions still live—date from Moore’s time as a precocious undergraduate at Bryn Mawr. Though often shorter, slighter, and more regularly rhyming than her later work, these early poems already show the thematic eccentricity and prosodic precision that would come to define Moore’s body of work—poems with “the lacy, mathematical extravagance of snowflakes,” in the words of the poet Randall Jarrell.

Though two seemingly comprehensive volumes of Moore’s poetry already existed ( Collected Poems , from 1951, and The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore , from 1967), both books were published before Moore’s death in 1972, and both excluded much of her early and late work. Schulman was a family friend of Moore’s, and she took seriously the decision to unearth and print these early poems, which offer readers fresh insights into the development of one of this country’s most visionary and influential poets. In the same spirit and in celebration of National Poetry Month, we’re pleased to share this piece of our archive with our readers.

Marianne Moore, "As Has Been Said"

Marianne Moore, "Rodin's Penseur"

Marianne Moore, "To See It Is to Know That Mendelssohn Would Never Do"

Marianne Moore, "Man's Feet Are a Sensational Device"

Rachel Cusk

Renaissance women, fady joudah, you might also like, to see it is to know that mendelssohn would never do, man's feet are a sensational device, rodin's penseur, join a conversation 200 years in the making..

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English Summary

Poetry Poem by Marianne Moore Summary, Notes and Line by Line Explanation in English

Table of Contents

Introduction

One of Marianne Moore’s most well-known literary works is “Poetry.” She kept editing the poem over the years of her life because she was never satisfied with it. This analysis just looks at the first three lines of the version. However, there are a few further variations. The version with five stanzas is one of the most well-known and has the same themes but is significantly lengthier. The poem appeared for the first time in 1919’s Others, and it was published again until at least four distinct copies of it were printed and distributed. In the end, Moore simplified the poem by reducing it to three lines and included the lengthier, five-stanza version as an endnote. 

About the poet

Marianne Craig Moore was an American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor who lived from November 15, 1887, to February 5, 1972. She is known for her poetry’s stylistic originality, exact diction, sarcasm, and humor.

Poetry is described in the poem’s opening line as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” This opening line establishes the tone of the poem and makes the point that poetry has the ability to conjure up something fantastic and lovely while being rooted in reality. Art emphasizes poetry’s capacity to capture reality and authenticity, challenging the idea that art serves just as an escape from the actual world.

The poem’s following section discusses the challenge of defining poetry and emphasizes how elusive and always evolving it is. Moore refers to poetry as a “place for the genuine,” implying that it offers a forum for sincere expression and real-life experiences. She rejects artificiality and meaningless jargon in favor of honesty and sincerity in poetry.

Later, the poem switches to a discussion of the connection between poetry and its listener. Moore contends that poetry is not intended to conform to accepted norms or appeal to general tastes. Instead, it ought to make the reader think critically and connect with the intricacies of life by challenging and provoking them. She urges the reader to approach poetry with an open mind and a willingness to be curious and attentive.

Moore discusses the function of poets as artisans and craftspeople in the section that follows. She emphasizes how critical accuracy and focus on detail are while writing poetry. She compares the poet to a competent craftsman who painstakingly chooses and organizes words to produce an important and memorable work of art.

The poem’s concluding section comments on the power of poetry to transcend time and make a lasting impression. According to Moore, poetry has the power to transcend time and endure, striking a chord with readers of all ages. She says poetry has the capacity to encapsulate the essence of human experience and provide comfort through moments of ambiguity and disorientation.

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by Marianne Moore

Poetry quotes and analysis.

"Hands that can grasp, eyes / that can dilate, hair that can rise / if it must" Speaker

These things are genuine, instinctive actions and things that may not be inspiring to many poets interested in manipulating and piquing their readers with "fiddle." There is no "high-sounding interpretation" to be had here. Harold Bloom notes, "The actions suggest response and engagement, signals of the genuine at work. They are useful because they are real and active, regardless of whatever high-minded explication someone wants to give them." There is nothing abstract or manipulated here, nor is there anything particularly beautiful or inspiring.

"imaginary gardens with real toads in them" Speaker

This is a fascinating phrase that seems to be the work of Moore's mind alone. It may mean several things. First, the frog is an ugly creature so it may be that the more "genuine" and "raw" material of poetry is what appeals to her. Second, as critic Elizabeth Joyce says, the line "explains the force of imagination necessary for poets to avoid uselessness. They must, in order to be able to write authentic poetry, create a world in their minds that appears to be real. The toads, then, are the fabrications of the artist and are so highly refined by the artist's imagination that they have become tangible; the toads are the result of the artist's attempt to render the abstract into the concrete..." The garden is poetry, the toads its "raw" and "genuine" material of it.

"I, too, dislike it" Speaker

This is arguably one of the most famous lines in modernist poetry. It drips with irony, though with a light touch. This is a poem and Moore is a poet, so why is she denigrating the art form? Her casual and insouciant opening line is her way to first surprise us, then follow up with why she believes what she believes. The reader can tell she has a sense of humor but she is also quite serious. Furthermore, she almost contradicts this line because as the poem continues it is clear that she does not dislike all poetry but rather the work of hackneyed "half poets" and those "autocrats" who are bogged down in "triviality."

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Poetry Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Poetry is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

explore how blake present the abuse of power in the poem london and one other poem

EXPLORE HOW BLAKE PRESENT THE ABUSE OF POWER IN THE POEM LONDON AND ONE OTHER POEM

INTRODUCTION

William Blake's poem "London" is a poignant exploration of the social and political landscape in 18th-century England. Written during the Romantic...

School task in Poetry

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What does the speaker mean the the word narrowing int he poem tales of an island

Who writes this poem?

Study Guide for Poetry

Poetry study guide contains a biography of Marianne Moore, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

  • About Poetry
  • Poetry Summary
  • Character List

Essays for Poetry

Poetry essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Poetry by Marianne Moore.

  • "Drowning" Versus "The Trap": Perspectives on Similar Events in Poetry and Prose
  • Who Suffers the Most in "Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil": Isabella or Lorenzo?

marianne moore poetry analysis essay

IMAGES

  1. Poetry by Marianne Moore

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  2. Poetry Marianne Moore Notes

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  3. A Valentine for Marianne Moore by Elder James Olson

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  4. Poetry by Marianne Moore poem explanation, American Literature

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  5. The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore

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  6. 💐 Poetry moore analysis. Poem of the week: To a Snail by Marianne Moore

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COMMENTS

  1. Poetry Poem Summary and Analysis

    Get LitCharts A +. "Poetry," by the American modernist poet Marianne Moore, grapples with what makes a poem important or worthwhile—or even a poem at all. Its speaker urges poets to take their craft seriously and not just try to show off or imitate other writers. Only when poets become "literalists of the imagination"—use their imaginative ...

  2. Poetry by Marianne Moore (Poem + Analysis)

    Summary of Poetry. ' Poetry' by Marianne Moore is a three-line poem in which the speaker, who is likely Moore herself, discusses her feelings about poetry. In the first line, she states quite bluntly that she "too" dislikes poetry. Readers must make the leap, connecting "it" in this line to the title, 'Poetry'.

  3. Marianne Moore Poetry: American Poets Analysis

    Marianne Moore Poetry: American Poets Analysis. In Marianne Moore's best work the imagined and the perceived are interdependent; she merges the two to create her usefully idiosyncratic reality ...

  4. Poetry Analysis

    In 1965, Audio-Forum released an audiocassete of Moore reading her poems, Marianne Moore Reads Her Poetry. Audio-Forum is part of Jeffrey Norton Publishers, 96 Broad St., Guilford, Connecticut 06437.

  5. Poetry "Poetry" Summary and Analysis

    Essays for Poetry. Poetry essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Poetry by Marianne Moore. "Drowning" Versus "The Trap": Perspectives on Similar Events in Poetry and Prose; Who Suffers the Most in "Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil": Isabella or Lorenzo?

  6. Poetry Full Text and Analysis

    Marianne Moore. Marianne Moore's "Poetry" is an investigation into the mysterious art of poetry. At times ironic and serious, Moore considers the opposing methods by which poets convey the world: intellection and imagination. Moore explores the ways poetry appeals to our conscious thoughts and our unconscious feelings.

  7. The Fish by Marianne Moore (Poem + Analysis)

    The feelings we associate with grief and death can be challenging to articulate in words alone, but in the case of 'The Fish' by Marianne Moore, poetry can capture meaning, images, colors, and emotions beyond plain language. 'The Fish' by Marianne Moore is a masterpiece of imagery, form, and meaning.This poem, published in 1918, hangs on to the conventions of the imagist movement but ...

  8. Marianne Moore

    One of American literature's foremost poets, Marianne Moore's poetry is characterized by linguistic precision, keen and probing descriptions, and acute observations of people, places, animals, and art. Her poems often reflect her preoccupation with the relationships between the common and the uncommon, advocate discipline in both art and life, and espouse restraint, modesty, and humor.

  9. In Praise of the Difficult: On Marianne Moore, Defiant Poet of

    In "Feeling and Precision," a contemplative essay by the Modernist poet Marianne Moore from 1944, she argued—in a sense—against the claims that her famously difficult and opaque poems were lacking in emotion. Emotion itself, she suggested, was something simple, clear language could not always capture. For Moore, "feeling" itself ...

  10. Marianne Moore

    Marianne Moore. Born in Kirkwood, Missouri, and raised in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Moore was educated at Bryn Mawr College and Carlisle Commercial College. She shared a house with her mother all her life, much of it working on a series of jobs in the New York area, but always focusing on writing. Notably, her use of quotation in her poems is as ...

  11. Complete Poems of Marianne Moore Study Guide: Analysis

    The narrator is amazed by the beauty of the swan and describes the gold with which the swan was built and also the other creatures surrounding it. The poem ends with the line "The King is dead'', drawing a parallel between the swan and the dead King. Just like the beautiful swan was just a sculpture, without any life in it, the King was ...

  12. Marianne Moore's Poetry, the Way She Intended It

    By Marianne Moore. Edited by Heather Cass White 480 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35. Modern poets who agreed on nothing else agreed on Marianne Moore. T. S. Eliot called her work "part of the ...

  13. The Fish Poem Summary and Analysis

    American poet Marianne Moore's "The Fish" appeared in her first collection, Poems, which was published—without her permission—in 1921. (Some of her friends decided that the world needed to see this collection whether Moore liked it or not.) In "The Fish," an anonymous speaker paints a vivid underwater scene.

  14. Marianne Moore's five-decade struggle with "Poetry."

    The most famous (and most widely lamented) version of "Poetry" is the one Moore published in her 1967 The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore.Many readers, including numbers of Moore's fellow poets ...

  15. On Marianne Moore's "Poetry"

    We begin with a poem that acknowledges the difficulty many people have with the medium: Marianne Moore 's "Poetry," first published in Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse, and subsequently revised by Moore several times until only the first three lines of the poem remained. I quote and discuss the version in her 1924 collection ...

  16. "Passion for the Particular": Marianne Moore, Henry ...

    In this essay Finch contributes to the growing wave of scholarly interest in the late work of Marianne Moore by performing a close reading of the underexamined poem "Tell me, tell me." By situating this poem within the context of Moore's increasing...

  17. The Yale Review

    Moore had typed a transcript of the poem, omitting a few lines, and kept it among her early papers, leading archivists to assume, wrongly, that she had written it herself. The five poems TYR published that autumn comprised a short selection from The Poems of Marianne Moore , edited by the poet Grace Schulman and released later the same month ...

  18. Poetry Poem by Marianne Moore Summary, Notes and Line by Line

    One of Marianne Moore's most well-known literary works is "Poetry." She kept editing the poem over the years of her life because she was never satisfied with it. This analysis just looks at the first three lines of the version. However, there are a few further variations.

  19. Marianne Moore Moore, Marianne (Vol. 10)

    Moore, Marianne 1887-1972. Moore was an American poet, translator, essayist, and editor. Her poetry is characterized by the technical and linguistic precision with which are revealed her acute ...

  20. Poetry Quotes and Analysis

    Essays for Poetry. Poetry essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Poetry by Marianne Moore. "Drowning" Versus "The Trap": Perspectives on Similar Events in Poetry and Prose; Who Suffers the Most in "Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil": Isabella or Lorenzo?

  21. Marianne Moore Moore, Marianne (Poetry Criticism)

    Marianne Moore 1887-1972 (Full name Marianne Craig Moore) American poet, essayist, translator, short story writer, editor, and playwright. The following entry provides an overview of Moore's life ...