Marianne Moore Research Paper

Marianne Moore was a modern American poet known for her eclectic writing, love of baseball, and the big hats she fashioned. Infatuated with details and aesthetics, Moore produced poetry that is organic and intriguing. Called “the best woman poet to have written in the United States during this century” by critic M. J. Alexander, Marianne Moore is very highly esteemed in the modern literary world ("Marianne Moore: Overview.”). Her six-decade career is marked by a quiet life and exceptional success in writing in which she created a new image of “the poetess”. Marianne Moore was born on November 15, 1887, in Kirkwood, Missouri near St Louis. She grew up in the care of her grandfather, John Riddle Warner, mother, Mary Warner Moore, and brother

She often said herself, “The only reason I know for calling my work poetry at all is that there is no other category in which to put it.” (“Marianne (Craig) Moore"). Moore’s poetry is an eclectic mixture of prose, images, and quotes. Moore gathered inspiration for her poetry from collected pictures, articles, titles, colors, and facts, sorting them according to how she associated the objects. Nation critic Sandra Hochman calls Marianne Moore “magical”, for from a stack of swatches, magazine clippings, and photographs would come a poem ("Marianne (Craig) Moore.”). The themes and style of Moore’s writing underwent gradual change over the years. She went from writing of discipline and heroic behavior to more spiritual topics such as grace and love. Moore’s earlier poems involved the scrutiny of a single object while her later works moved to compare several objects. Yet from the beginning to the end, all her poems were undoubtably hers (Gale and Oswald; “Marianne Moore in Her Own

In 1952 Moore was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Collected Poems along with the Bollingen Prize in 1953. Despite Moore’s health decline in the 1960s her fame increased dramatically. She became sensational in her tricorn hat and cape. Her final collections,Tell Me, Tell Me (1966) and The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1967), were published during this time. Moore suffered a series of strokes in 1970 before passing away in her New York City home on February 5, 1972 (Gale and Oswald; Holley; Poetry