Marianne Craig Moore, a notable figure who liked to dress in a black tricorn hat and cape, became one of mid-twentieth-century America’s most recognized poets. Readers identified with her rigorous portrayal of ordinary themes, which included baseball, street scenes, common animals, and public issues, notably in “Carnegie Hall: Rescued.” Her friendships with poets made her a force in directing modern poetry away from the rigid verse forms of the Victorian era. For her generous mentoring, William Carlos Williams referred to Moore as a female stele supporting the efforts of her peers.
Moore was born November 15, 1887, in Kirkwood, Missouri, near St. Louis to Mary Warner, a teacher, and John Milton Moore, who died in 1894. Moore and her brother, John, grew up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Her mother taught English at the Metzger Institute to support the trio. In 1909, Moore completed her education in biology and history at Bryn Mawr, where she edited and published fiction and verse in the college literary journal, Tipyn o’Bob.
A tour of England and France provided Moore with inspiration from art and architecture she found at museums and Victor Hugo’s residence. To support a publishing career, she completed a year’s business training at Carlisle Commercial College. She taught math, typing, commercial law, and shorthand at Carlisle’s U.S. Industrial Indian School for four and a half years while publishing “Pouters and Fantails” in Poetry, “To a Man Working His Way Through the Crowd” and “Poetry” in Others, and “To the Soul of Progress” in The Egoist. Her tentative literary beginnings earned the support of poets H. D., Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.
After moving with her mother to Chatham, New Jersey, then to Greenwich Village, New York, Moore tutored privately while working part-time as assistant librarian at the Hudson Park Public Library from 1918 to 1925. During this era, she established literary friendships with Robert McAlmon and Winifred Ellerman, who published a Moore collection, Poems (1921), in London without her knowledge. A well-received beginning, Poems was issued in the United States as Observations (1924), winning an award from The Dial, which Moore edited from 1925 to 1929. Additional submissions to The Egoist established her reputation for imagist modern poetry. She ceased writing for three years, then earned the 1932 Helen Haire Levinson Prize and the 1935 Ernest Hartsock Memorial Prize for Selected Poems (1935).
Moore’s friendships with poets Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens placed her at the heart of the era’s literary achievement, which color her essays later collected in Pedilections (1955), an examination of the artistry of poets Ezra Pound and Louise Bogan and dancer Anna Pavlova. In the introduction to Selected Poems, T. S. Eliot epitomized Moore’s writing as durable and continued to laud and promote her verse for thirty years. She maintained a steady output with The Pangolin and Other Verse (1936), What Are Years (1941), and Nevertheless (1944), her most emotionally charged anthology.
Following the death of her mother in 1947, Moore worked for seven years translating the fables of Jean de La Fontaine. A significant addition in her canon, Collected Poems (1951), won a National Book award, Bollingen Prize, and Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She issued five more volumes—Like a Bulwark (1956), O To Be a Dragon (1959), The Arctic Ox (1964), Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite Steel, and Other Topics (1966), and A Marianne Moore Reader (1961), a compendium of poetry, prose, and an interview—and concluded her verse contributions at age 81 with The Complete Poems (1967). In addition, in 1962, she produced a stage version of Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee and revised Charles Perrault’s fairy tales (1963).
Moore died on February 5, 1972, at her Brooklyn home, and was memorialized at the nearby Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church.
