A Marianne Moore Reader

by Marianne Moore

Poems and essays. * Foreword* from Collected Poems (1951): 23 Poems, including "The Steeple-Jack", "The Fish", "Marriage", "What Are Years?", "He Dygesteth Harde Yron", "Virginia Britannia", "Spenser's Ireland", "The Pangolin", "Nevertheless", "In Distrust of Merits"* Like a Bulwark (complete): including "Tom Fool at Jamaica"* O to Be a Dragon (complete): including "Hometown Piece for Messrs. Alston and Reese"* Other Poems (uncollected): including "Carnegie Rescued"* from The Fables of La 24 fables, including "The Grasshopper and the Ant", "The Fox and the Grapes", "The Lion in Love", "The Hen That Laid the Golden Eggs", "The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid"* from "Humility, Concentration, and Gusto" and 3 other essays* Other Prose (uncollected): including "Idiosyncrasy and Technique", "Brooklyn from Clinton Hill", "My Crow", "Pluto -- A Fantasy", "If I Were Sixteen Today", "Abraham Lincoln and the Art of the Word", essays on Paul Rosenfeld, Edith Sitwell, Kenneth Burke, others, and "The Ford Correspondence"* The Paris Review Interview with Donald Hall* Notes

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published November 28, 1961

About the author

Marianne Craig Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was an American Modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit.

Reviews

[J. Alfred · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marianne Moore is one of our National Treasures, not least because of the following:

https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2016/s...
(By the way, if someone knows how to produce or procure a poster of that picture, please get it to me. It will go in my office forever.)

But also because she is totally charming, utterly humble, and completely impossible to understand in a nonthreatening way. She says occasional memorable things that make you feel wise and good and on the right team. She writes poems about animals that you didn't know existed, like the pangolin and the jerboa. She was asked to help name a car by the Ford Motor Company.
Read her. Love her. Name children after her.

[Jack Heller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I consider a book finished when I have read from it the writing I bought it for. I bought this for the poetry, and I went ahead and read the Paris Review interview too. I may go back and read Moore's correspondence with the Ford Motor Company, something I hadn't known about but which sounds interesting and is short.

Moore has been a presence, but I have never had to read her, and I am not sure people do read her much any more. My favorite poems are those that meditate upon some animal, usually one a person wouldn't think of as cuddly, and her baseball poems. I also enjoyed the poetic translations of LaFontaine's fables. If a reader finds Moore too modernist in style, the Paris Review essay might help. It's interesting on its own if a reader is somewhat familiar with the major modernist poets of the early 20th Century.