Moore, Marianne (Craig)

Moore, Marianne [Craig] (1887–1972),born in St. Louis, graduated from Bryn Mawr (1909), and lived mainly in New York City, where she edited The Dial (1925–29). She did not publish a book until she was in her mid‐thirties, with the issuance of the neutrally titled Poems (1921), followed by the more aptly named Observations (1924). A long hiatus was followed by Selected Poems (1935), which T.S. Eliot in his Introduction declared to be “descriptive rather than lyrical or dramatic.” She herself said in the early poem titled “Poetry” that despite “contempt for …all this fiddle …one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine,” and the “genuine” she defined as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Succeeding collections of poetry appeared in The Pangolin, and Other Verse (1936), What Are Years (1941), Nevertheless (1944), Collected Poems (1951, Pulitzer Prize), Like a Bulwark (1956), and O To Be a Dragon (1959). In keeping with her conception of the genuine in poetry, these were marked by piquant but precise observation serving as surprising metaphors that often alluded to exotic creatures (e.g. pangolin) based on her knowledge of biology and interest in zoos, as great and enthusiastic as that which she had for her hometown baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. The poems were marked by a disciplined though unconventional use of metrics (“I tend to write in a patterned arrangement, with rhymes …to secure an effect of flowing continuity”), and an angular witty, cerebral, ironic attitude. Her so‐called Complete Poems (1967) gathers all she wished to preserve. Her other works include The Fables of La Fontaine (1954), a verse translation; Predilections (1955), essays on favorite writers; and Tell Me, Tell Me (1966), poems and prose pieces.