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| MARIANNE MOORE c 1918 |
My father used to say,
'Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat–
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth–
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint'.
Nor was he insincere in saying, 'Make my house your inn'.
Inns are not residences.
Marianne Moore was born in Missouri on 15 November 1887, attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and worked briefly as a teacher in that state before relocating to New York where she became –– along with her friends Ezra Pound, HD (the pseudonym of Hilda Doolittle) and Wallace Stevens –– one of the most striking and talked about of the 'new' North American poets. She was also an avid baseball fan and was once invited by the Ford Motor Company to contribute potential names for a new model it was planning to produce, none of which –– Mongoose Civique, Varsity Stroke, Utopian Turtletop –– it chose to use. (I can't imagine why. Is 'the Edsel' really a better name for a car than 'the Utopian Turtletop'?) She won the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and wrote the liner notes for I Am The Greatest!, a 1964 poetry album by Muhammad Ali (when he was still known as Cassius Clay), before dying of a brain aneurysm on 5 February 1972.
Use the link below to read more about the life and work of MARIANNE MOORE (plus a few more of her poems):
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/marianne-moore
You might also enjoy:
The Write Advice 051: MARIANNE MOORE
Poet of the Month 035: EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY
Think About It 012: RUMER GODDEN
Last updated 18 March 2021
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