The Poet's Craft

While in her style of life Marianne Moore seemed more like a nineteenth-century woman than one of the modern era, in her poetry she was a radically inventive modernist admired by other poets of her generation. Like her forerunner Emily Dickinson, she made the traditional and constraining "woman's place" into a protected space to do her own work; yet unlike Dickinson, she was a deliberate professional, publishing her poems regularly and keeping in touch with the movements and artists of her time.

As a critic of poetry Moore wrote numerous essays- her collected prose makes a larger book than her collected poetry. She believed that poets usually undervalued prose; that its "precision, economy of statement, logic" could "liberate" the imagination. Moore experimented with this prose-influenced poetry by utilizing the methods of scientific and historical description. Writing poetry in this way allowed her poems to break with tradition and connect with the world in a new way. Her poems became an amalgam of her own observations and readings, which she acknowledged by quotation marks and often by footnotes as well.

Moore's early work is distinguished by great precision of observation and language, ornate diction, and complex stanza and prosodic patterns. Her later work is much less ornate, and in revising her poetry, she tended to simplify and shorten. While her Complete Poems of 1967 represented her poetry as she wanted it remembered, a full understanding of Moore calls for reading all the versions of her changing work.

Against the exactitude and "unbearable accuracy" (as she put it) of her language, Moore counterpointed a complex texture of stanza form and versification. She used the entire stanza as the unit of her syllabic verse. Her stanza is composed of regular lines counted by syllables, instead of by stress, which are connected in an elaborate verse pattern, and in which rhymes often occur at unaccented syllables and even in the middle of a word. The effects she achieves are complex and subtle; she was often called the "poet's poet" of her day because the reader needed expert technical understanding to recognize what she was doing.

Click below to listen to Marianne Moore speaking on style and rhythm. 

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Moore's poetry also had a thematic, declarative edge that other modernists tended to ignore. The outbreak of World War II led her to enhance this aspect of her writing. The sentiments expressed in this later verse are the need for human decency and the desirability of a political and social system in which dignity is accorded to all.