... an animal with claws wants to have to use
them; that eel-like extension of trunk into tail is not an accident. To
leap, to lengthen out, divide the air -- to purloin, to pursue.
to tell the hen: fly over the fence, go in the wrong way -- in your perturba­
tion -- this is life; to do less would be nothing but dishonesty.
        (Peter)

1. Marriage
2. Peter
3. Poetry
4. Silence
5. To an Intra-mural Rat

Notes on Life and Works

Marianne Moore was born November 15, 1887, in Kirkwood, Missouri, raised largely by her mother, a schoolteacher at the Metzger Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Marianne Moore entered Bryn Mawr in 1905. After graduation in 1909, she learned shorthand and typewriting at Carlisle Commercial College and joined the work force and by 1911 was teaching business at the United States Indian School in Carlisle. Moore moved with her mother to Greenwich Village in New York (St. Luke's Place) in 1914 and began to publish poetry, to which craft she had been devoted since childhood, in Harriet Monroe's Poetry (Chicago), The Egoist (London), Others (New York), and The Dial. Her first book was issued by the Egoist Press without her knowledge in 1921, but Observations, which was fully hers, came out with her notes in 1924. It won The Dial award. Moore and her mother moved in 1929 to 260 Cumberland Street, Brooklyn, where she stayed until 1966, in which year she returned to Greenwich Village. Her subsequent books of poetry included Selected Poems, introduced by T. S. Eliot (1935), The Pangolin and Other Verse (1936), What Are Years (1941), Nevertheless (1944), Collected Poems (1951), which she dedicated to her late mother, Like a Bulwark (1956), O To Be a Dragon (1959), The Arctic Ox (1964), Tell Me, Tell Me (1966), and Complete Poems (1967). Moore had also translated La Fontaine's Fables (1954). She received many honours during her lifetime: election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Bollingen Prize, a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Gold Medal for Poetry from the National Institute. She died on February 5, 1972, 84 years old.

Moore's manuscripts are at the Philip H. and A. S. W. Rosenbach Foundation in Philadelphia. See also

• Abbott, Craig S., Marianne Moore: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977; Z 8592.65 A23).
• Abbott, Craig S., Marianne Moore, a Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978; Z 8592.65 A24 Robarts Library)
• Marianne Moore, Woman and Poet, ed. Patricia C. Willis (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1990; PS 3525 O5616 Z6968 Robarts Library)
• Molesworth, Charles, Marianne Moore: A Literary Life (New York: Atheneum, 1990; PS 3525 O5616 Z697 Robarts Library)

Biographical information

Given name: Marianne Craig
Family name: Moore
Birth date: 15 November 1887
Death date: 5 February 1972
Nationality: American
Education: Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania: 1905 to 1909
Honours
          Bollingen Prize
          Gold Medal for Poetry from the National Institute
          Member, National Institute of Arts and Letters
          National Book Award
          Pulitzer Prize
          Helen Haire Levinson Prize from Poetry: 1933
Literary period: Modern
Occupations
          writer
          School-teacher
Residences
          Carlisle, Pennsylvania
          Kirkwood, Missouri: 1887
          Greenwich Village, New York: 1914
          260 Cumberland Street, Brooklyn, New York: 1929 to 1966
          35 West 9th Street, Manhattan: 1966 to 1972
Cause of death: Stroke
Buried at: Evergreen Cemetery, Gettysburg, Adams County, Pennsylvania