National Poetry Month: Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore (1887 – 1972), a Modernist poet known for her irony and wit (so says Wikipedia), was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. Her first poems were published in 1915, and she came to the attention of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. She became editor of The Dial literary journal, and helped launch the careers of poets Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashberry and James Merrill.

Her Collected Poems (1951) won the Pulizer Prize, the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize. She died in 1972 in New York City.

Her most famous poem is “Poetry” (1919), which is included in the Colelcted Poems.

Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important
                  beyond all this fiddle.
    Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,
                  one discovers that there is in
    it after all, a place for the genuine.
        Hands that can grasp, eyes
        that can dilate, hair that can rise
             if it must, these things are important not be-
                    cause a

high sounding interpretation can be put upon them
                 but because they are
   useful; when they become so derivative as to
                  become unintelligible, the
   same thing may be said for all of us – that we
       do not admire what
      we cannot understand. The bat,
           holding on upside down or in quest of some-
                    thing to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll,
                 a tireless wolf under
    a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a
                horse that feels a flea, the base-
    ball fan, the statistician – case after case
         could be cited did
         one wish it; nor is it valid
             to discriminate against “business documents
                      and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important.
                   One must make a distinction
    however: when dragged into prominence by half
                       poets,
             the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
     “literalists of
     the imagination” – above
          insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads
                   in them, shall we have
   it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand,
                 in defiance of their opinion –
       the raw material of poetry in
   all its rawness, and
   that which is on the other hand,
       genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

For National Poetry Month, we’re giving away a copy of Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems by Maureen Doallas. Leave a comment by April 20 and your name is automatically entered for the random drawing.