玛丽安·穆尔

Marianne Craig Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was an American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for its formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit. Her Collected Poems (1951) won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Early life

Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. Her father, John Milton Moore, a mechanical engineer and inventor, suffered a psychotic episode, as a consequence of which her parents separated before she was born; Moore never met him. She and her elder brother, John Warner Moore, were reared by their mother, Mary Warner Moore. The family wrote voluminous letters to one another throughout their lives, often addressing each other by playful nicknames based on characters from The Wind in the Willows and using a private language.

Like her mother and her brother, Moore remained a devoted Presbyterian, strongly influenced by her grandfather, approaching her Christian faith as a lesson in strength vindicated through trials and temptations; her poems often deal with the themes of strength and adversity. She thought "it was not possible to live without religious faith". Moore lived in the St. Louis area until she was six. After her grandfather died in 1894, the three stayed with relatives near Pittsburgh for two years, then moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where her mother found employment teaching English in a private girls school.

Moore entered Bryn Mawr College in 1905. She graduated four years later with an A.B., having majored in history, economics, and political science. The poet H.D. was among her classmates during their freshman year. At Bryn Mawr, Moore started writing short stories and poems for Tipyn O'Bob, the campus literary magazine, and decided to become a writer. After graduation, she worked briefly at Melvil Dewey's Lake Placid Club, then taught business subjects at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School from 1911 to 1914. One of her students was Jim Thorpe. She recalled, "He had a kind of ease in his gait that is hard to describe. Equilibrium with no stricture, but couched in the lineup of football he was the epitome of concentration, wary, with an effect of plenty in reserve."

Poetic career

Moore's first professionally published poems appeared in The Egoist and Poetry in the spring of 1915. Harriet Monroe, the editor of the latter, would describe them in her biography as possessing "an elliptically musical profundity".

In 1916, Moore moved with her mother to Chatham, New Jersey, a community with commuting transportation to Manhattan. Two years later, the two moved to New York City's Greenwich Village, where Moore socialized with many avant-garde artists, especially those associated with Others magazine. The poems she was writing at that time received high praise from Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D., T. S. Eliot, and later, Wallace Stevens.

Moore's first book, Poems, was published without her permission in 1921 by the Imagist poet H.D. and H.D.'s partner, the British novelist Bryher. Moore's later poetry shows some influence from the Imagists' principles.

Her second book, Observations, won the Dial Award in 1924. She worked part-time as a librarian; from 1925 to 1929, she edited The Dial, a literary and cultural journal. This position in the literary and arts community extended her influence as an arbiter of modernist taste; much later, she encouraged promising young poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, and James Merrill. When The Dial ceased publication in 1929, she moved to 260 Cumberland Street in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, where she remained for thirty-six years. She continued to write while caring for her ailing mother, who died in 1947.

Poetry magazine awarded Moore the Helen Haire Levinson Prize in 1933 and the Ernest Hartsock Memorial Prize two years later. In 1951, her Collected Poems won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bollingen Prize. In the book's introduction, T. S. Eliot wrote, "My conviction has remained unchanged for the last 14 years that Miss Moore's poems form part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time." After years of seclusion, she emerged as a celebrity, speaking at college campuses across the country and appearing in photographic essays in Life and Look magazines. Moore became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1962 and in 1967 she was awarded The Edward MacDowell Medal by The MacDowell Colony for outstanding contributions to American culture. Moore continued to publish poems in various magazines, including, The Nation, The New Republic, Partisan Review, and The New Yorker, as well as publishing various books and collections of her poetry and criticism.

She moved to 35 West Ninth Street in Manhattan in 1965. After moving back to Greenwich Village, she was widely recognized around town for her tricorn hat and black cape. She liked athletics and was a great admirer of Muhammad Ali, writing the liner notes for his spoken-word album I Am the Greatest!. She became known as a baseball fan, first of the Brooklyn Dodgers and then of the New York Yankees. She threw out the ball to open the season at Yankee Stadium in 1968.

At the age of 81, Moore received the 1968 National Medal for Literature. The committee overseeing the award stated: "One of the few true inventors of poetry in our time, Marianne Moore, the first lady of poetry, gives us intimations of exquisite perfection."