A baseball flies through the air while a pen glides across the paper. Baseball and writing may seem like two completely different things but according to Marianne Moore, they are quite similar. In Moore’s poem, “Baseball and Writing,” she uses literary devices and figurative language to convey the idea that baseball and writing are equally exciting, and that the things we do, no matter how different, can be just as thrilling as each other. Through these devices, Moore shows the excitement of baseball and writing and how they can unite people.
To begin, Moore uses caesuras all throughout the poem to illustrate the quickness of a baseball game. For example, on lines thirty-nine through forty-one Moore writes, “Fouled back. A blur. It’s gone. You would infer that the bat had eyes.” These lines all end very abruptly representing the speed of a baseball game and the voice of a broadcaster recording a game. It can be inferred from this that she had the intention of creating such short lines to show the comparison between baseball and writing. When writing you are either typing and moving your finger very quickly, or you are writing on paper and your hand is moving
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She alludes to different players from the New York Yankees during the time she wrote this. In the fourth stanza on lines ten and eleven, Moore writes, “All business, each, and modesty. Blanchard, Richardson, Kubek, Boyer.” This adds context to the poem as it represents how Moore could be talking about a real baseball game that happened or she witnessed. She saw how exciting it was and decided to write about it to show that. Then, there is alliteration in the poem to express the thrilling feeling of the game because of how the words flow so quickly. Moore writes on stanza five lines three through six, “Whitey's three kinds of pitch and pre-diagnosis with pick-off psychosis. Pitching is a large