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Introduction
A Life
Marianne Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri. She was the daughter of construction engineer and inventor John Milton Moore. She grew up in her grandfather's household; her father having been committed to a mental hospital before her birth. In 1905, Ms. Moore entered Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and graduated four years later. She taught at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania until 1915, when Moore began to professionally publish poetry. There was a student at Carlisle the same time Ms. Moore taught there named Jim Thorpe. The establishment offered American Indians the opportunity to gain practical training in over 20 trades, in addition to off-campus employment at local farms, homes or industries. Mr. Thorpe began his athletic career at Carlisle, playing football and running track. He was triumphantly selected as a third-team All-American in 1908, and in 1909 and 1910 he made the first team. Most people feel that Mr. Thorpe was the athlete of the 20th Century. In part because of her extensive European travels before the First World War, Ms. Moore came to the attention of poets such as Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, H.D., T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. From 1925 until 1929, Ms. Moore served as editor of the literary and cultural journal The Dial. This continued her role, similar to that of Pound, as a patron of poetry, encouraging promising young poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, and James Merrill The Dial began as a transcendentalist magazine with Margaret Fuller as its first editor (1840-1842), succeeded by another founder, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In this first form, the magazine remained in publication until 1844. The Dial published remarkably influential artwork, poetry and fiction, including William Butler Yeats' The Second Coming and the first U.S. publication of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The Dial published art as well as poetry and essays, with artists ranging from Vincent van Gogh, Renoir, Henri Matisse, and Georgia O'Keeffe. The magazine also reported on the cultural. Marianne Moore was The Dial's editor from 1925 to 1929 when it ceased publication. The poets and artists that Ms. Moore showcased for America and the world read as a who's who and included but was not limited to:
Contributors were leaders in both art and poetry in the post WWI world. Her work in poetry and publishing reached the world like it had never been accessed before. Poets were not only contributors but they were also the editors, as exemplified by Marianne Moore's tenure as editor of The Dial and William Carlos Williams tenure as editor of Contact. These magazines set the tone and style of literary publishing for the first half of the 20th century. These "small press" magazines often were the only places that poets and writers could see their work in print. As publishing houses grew they had no space or time for either small market audiences or writers who didn't have mass market appeal. Does this all sound familiar? Like maybe the medium you're reading now? Now let me take a bit more of your time and discuss the power of Ms. Moore's poetry (after all this is a column about American poetry). I can't say anything that would have more impact than Ms. Moore's own words: Poetry I, too, dislike it. There is a longer version of this poem that discusses all of the images that lead us away from any true view of the world and the belief that only the honesty of poetry can bring us back to the kernel of the truth of the world. Ms. Moore was a master at using phases from other sources and building images around these phases to show the beauty of a world that has been hidden by harshness of modern existence. Life is hard; but art can show us how to appreciate what we have before us. "It was patience Ms. Moore's poetry is often described as difficult to read. She uses punctuation and line length like an artist's knife strokes on fine canvas. Her poetic arguments are diverse and her images drawn from her classical training. I invite you to read her works. They are ultimately worth the effort and work. The following link is to Marianne Moore reading from her poem, "The Fish":
Selected Bibliography
As I state over and again this is not an academic paper. This is just my introduction to you. I hope that I have opened a window and that you will look out and feel the breeze of greatness. Thanks.
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Cheshire Cat
Hi
all. Welcome to May. May is a wonderful month that starts with
May Day - the wonders and the new beginnings of spring and it's
celebration - and ends, at least in the USA, with Memorial Day
- a day that honors those who gave their lives for freedom and
the unofficial beginning of summer. And, there's Mother's Day
in May as well. This month I would like to honor a woman poet/publisher,
and I'm going to change my format as well.
As with
most poets, they are always more than "just a poet,"
Marianne Moore reached beyond verse. She was a publisher, an
educator, and a visionary. Her path crossed with many of those
who were the greatest of the 20th Century.
