Marianne Moore

’s Life And Career Essay, Research Paper

Elaine Oswald and Robert L. Gale

She

was born Marianne Craig Moore in Kirkland, Missouri, the daughter of John Milton Moore, a

construction engineer and inventor, and Mary Warner. Moore had an older brother, John

Warner Moore. She never met her father; before her birth his invention of a smokeless

furnace failed, and he had a nervous and mental breakdown and was hospitalized in

Massachusetts. Moore’s mother became a housekeeper for John Riddle Warner, her father, an,

affectionate, well-read Presbyterian pastor in Kirkwood, until his death in 1894. Moore’s

mother, always overly protective, moved with her children briefly to Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania, and then to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where Moore attended the Metzger

Institute (now part of Dickinson College) through high school. In 1905 she entered Bryn

Mawr College, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; published nine poems, including "A

Jelly-Fish," in its literary magazines Tipyn O’Bob and the Lantern; and

majored in history, law, and politics, graduating with a B.A. in 1909. Much–perhaps too

much–has been made of Moore’s later casual assertion that laboratory studies in biology

and histology caused her to consider studying medicine; at any rate, one result of such

work was her love of intricately shaped animals and also a lifelong respect for precision

in description. She also expressed a desire to become a painter. After taking secretarial

courses at Carlisle Commercial College (1910-1911), she taught bookkeeping, stenography,

and typing and commercial English and law at the U.S. Industrial Indian School at Carlisle

with admirable success until 1915. One of her students was Jim Thorpe, the famous Native

American athlete.

In the summer of 1911 Moore and her mother traveled in England, Scotland, and France,

and while abroad they visited art museums in Glasgow, Oxford, London, and Paris. In 1915

Moore began to publish poems professionally. Seven poems (including "To the Soul of

‘Progress,’" displaying her early habit of rhyming single-syllable lines,

sometimes spaced apart) appeared in the Egoist, a London bimonthly edited by Hilda

Doolittle (H.D.) and featuring modern imagist poets, whose delicacy and compression she

admired. Four (including "That Harp You Play So Well" about David the psalmist,

and two about Robert Browning and George Bernard Shaw) appeared in Poetry: A Magazine

of Verse (Chicago), which featured innovative writers quickly admired and influential.

And five (including two on William Blake and George Moore) were published in Others, a

magazine Alfred Kreymborg coedited. During these years Moore was reading much avant-garde

poetry and criticism and was beginning to publish subjective reviews and critical essays.

In 1916 Moore moved with her mother from Carlisle to Chatham, New Jersey, to help keep

house for her brother, by then a Yale University graduate and a Presbyterian minister.

When in 1918 he joined the U.S. Navy as a chaplain, Moore and her mother moved to

Manhattan. By this time she was friendly with Kreymborg, photographer Alfred Stieglitz,

and poets Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams and was also esteemed by H.D., T. S.

Eliot, and Ezra Pound. H.D., with the help of her patron Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), who

was then H.D.’s lover, selected twenty-four of Moore’s poems, many of which had appeared

in the Egoist, and published them in a small book titled Poems (1921)

without her knowledge. From 1921 until 1925 Moore worked part-time in the Hudson Park

branch of the New York City library. Her London book was expanded to include fifty-three

poems and was published in the United States as Observations (1924). In 1924 she

won an award of $2,000 for achievement in poetry given by the Dial, the

distinguished monthly pro-modernist magazine edited and partly financed by wealthy

Scofield Thayer, whom Moore had met in 1918 and who was regularly publishing her verse.

Especially significant in winning the award were three poems. "A Graveyard"

(later called "A Grave") is a Melvillean picture of the ocean, seemingly

inviting but in reality rapacious and devouring. It was Moore’s first poem to be

translated into a foreign language and appeared in Anthologie de la nouvelle po.sie (1928).

Her "New York" criticizes the city for general viciousness (synecdochized as a

fur-trade center) but also praises it as a center for experience-seekers. And "An

Octopus," one of Moore’s most splendid long poems, is a scientifically accurate,

highly colored word picture, with annotated quotations, of Mount Rainier, in Washington

State, which she had climbed in 1920 with a group including her brother.

In 1925 Moore took over from Thayer as editor of the Dial, remaining there until

1929, at which time the journal was discontinued. After this, never marrying, Moore

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