Marianne Moore (1887–1972) was an American modernist poet born in Kirkwood, Missouri. After graduating from Pennsylvania’s Bryn Mawr College in 1909, she eventually moved to New York City, where she took a job at the New York Public Library in 1921 and befriended fellow poets such as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Moore’s poems appeared in prestigious literary magazines such as the Egoist and the Dial, where she served as editor from 1925 to 1929. In 1921, Moore’s first book, Poems, was published by fellow poet and Bryn Mawr classmate Hilda Doolittle. Among Moore’s many honors were the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize, all for her 1951 work, Collected Poems.

Poetry

One of Moore’s most well-known poems, “Poetry” is famous for having been revised and republished many times, changing from a five-stanza to a one-stanza poem and back again. The version here is from 1919 and was published in the collection Others.

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important

beyond all this fiddle.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,

one discovers that there is in

5

it after all, a place for the genuine.

Hands that can grasp, eyes

that can dilate, hair that can rise

if it must, these things are important not because a

high sounding interpretation can be put upon them

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but because they are

useful; when they become so derivative as to

become unintelligible, the

same thing may be said for all of us—that we

do not admire what

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we cannot understand. The bat,

holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll,

a tireless wolf under

a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a

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horse that feels a flea, the base-

ball fan, the statistician—case after case

could be cited did

one wish it; nor it is valid

to discriminate against “business documents and

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school-books”; all these phenomena are important.

One must make a distinction

however: when dragged into prominence by half poets,

the result is not poetry,

nor till the autocrats among us can be

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“literalists of

the imagination”—above

insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads

in them,” shall we have

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it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand,

in defiance of their opinion—

the raw material of poetry in

all its rawness and

that which is on the other hand,

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genuine then you are interested in poetry.

(1919)