At midcentury, Marianne Moore emerged as a public personage, but not before a painful period of loss. Prefaced by a host of personal disasters—the death of her mother’s onetime partner Mary Norcross, her own hospitalization for digestive problems, her mother’s painful shingles and neuralgia—the decade of the 1940s brought sorrow. Moore had to deal with the rejection of her only attempt at a novel and the news that her Selected Poems had been remaindered at thirty cents a copy. Bouts of bursitis and bronchitis prompted her to hire a succession of nurses and helpers, one of whom—Gladys Berry—would work for Moore into her old age.
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The busy rounds of teaching, conference going, and verse or letter writing were interrupted by her mother’s “battle to eat; or rather to swallow,” Moore explained to Pound: “I cannot write letters or even receive them.” To Bryher, she listed the ingredients—“dehydrated goat-milk, vegetable iron, brewers’ yeast”—she used to nourish her mother. After one visit, Bryher described being “terrified” about the poet: “she could not eat if Mother could not eat, and thus got rashes and kidney trouble and pains.” Caregiving confined Moore to the Brooklyn apartment, where she started juicing vegetables.
Since, as she famously stated in the epigraph to that volume, “omissions are not accidents,” one can search for clues about her motivation in the essays Moore composed.
Money from the Guggenheim Foundation enabled Moore to sign a contract for a translation of all twelve books of Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables (1668-94) without accepting an advance, but her mother’s death intervened and then the publisher reneged on the contract. Biographers uncover very few records revealing Marianne Moore’s personal response to her mother’s death, probably because she and her brother had begun destroying their papers. Was it a wrenching loss of a lifelong intimate or a release from a claustrophobic codependency or some combination of both? In any case, Leavell describes how after the death, Moore “dropped things, lost things, and broke things. Her hair whitened. Her skin sagged. Crying made her eyes puffy. She looked exhausted and beyond her sixty years.”
Completing a work undertaken while her mother was alive may have furnished some solace. She probably found comfort, too, in her collaborative companionship with La Fontaine. Moore credited her translation work to W. H. Auden and Pound, and to her mother’s “verbal decorum” and “impatience with imprecision.” The Fables engaged Moore in capturing the rhythms, rhyme schemes, and whimsical tones of the original French. La Fontaine’s focus on animals and penchant for moral maxims must have immediately attracted her. Some of his wry lines sound like they could be Moore’s mottos: “Animals enact my universal theme”; “I bend and do not break”; “Everyone is self-deceived”; “One’s skin creeps when poets persevere.”
Given the miseries of the 1940s, the start of the ’50s must have seemed miraculous. Moore’s Collected Poems (1951), dedicated to her mother’s memory, won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bollingen Prize, and subsequent honors poured in, along with speaking and writing invitations. In her mid-sixties, Marianne Moore started to become a household name. To the extent that her Collected Poems retained the ordering of her Selected Poems along with a gathering of new verse, it looked quite conventional. But true to the spirit of self-criticism Moore had been pondering, she omitted many of her early poems from Collected Poems. And several celebrated works were reprinted with entire stanzas missing.
Moore did not revise her earlier poems so much as she slashed them, much to the distress of quite a few friends and later scholars. Her self-critical editing generated a great deal of confusion. A text in Collected Poems could look quite different from earlier versions. The question about what might have motivated Moore’s editorial excisions in Collected Poems is worth considering, because she later rigorously expunged work in the misnamed Complete Poems (1967), which appeared on her eightieth birthday. Since, as she famously stated in the epigraph to that volume, “omissions are not accidents,” one can search for clues about her motivation in the essays Moore composed.
In “Feeling and Precision,” Moore argued that the deepest feelings tend “to be inarticulate” or they will “seem overcondensed.” Because we associate intensity with minimalized language, “expanded explanation tends to spoil the lion’s leap.” In “Humility, Concentration, and Gusto,” she admits, “I myself…would rather be told too little than too much.” In another essay, she repeats “a master axiom” from Confucius: “When you have done justice to the meaning, stop.” The discipline of restraint remains an ideal: “It is a commonplace that we are the most eloquent by reason of the not said.” The titles of two essays—“Compactness Compacted” and “Reticent Candor”—express her admiration of “the not said.”
Despite Moore’s tendency to shrink her poems, she reprinted an expansive version of one of her most admired texts, “Poetry” (1919), which anticipates her late-life efforts to widen her audience. She had earlier subtracted the piece down to one stanza, but she reinstated its original five stanzas in Collected Poems. Even readers who object to her long lines and erratic sentences relish the longer “Poetry,” possibly because its conversational opening—“I, too, dislike it”—goes on to provide an unpretentious defense of poetry. By sympathetically addressing those who speak with “a perfect contempt” of poetry as incomprehensible “fiddle,” Moore refuses to preach to the choir.
We need to hunt for the value of poetry, Moore suggests, because bad verse obscures our appreciation. Understanding those who dismiss poetry, the speaker is not defending unintelligible work. Instead, she searches for instances of “the genuine”—“Hands that can grasp, eyes / that can dilate / hair that can rise”—which are important “not because a / / high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are / useful.” Hands grasp, eyes dilate, and hair rises while we are reading what moves us, and each motion involves an emotion related to fear or enchantment or absorption. We are then given a mini-catalogue of phenomena that we admire but may not fully understand.
This list includes a bat hanging upside down, elephants pushing, even an “immovable critic” whose skin is twitching (a nice jab at professional readers), and then the baseball fan and statistician. All these “are important,” Moore declares; “nor is it valid” to dismiss “ ‘business documents and school-books’ ” as prosaic. The subject matter of poetry need not be poetical: it can, does, and should deal with the quotidian. After this assertion, Moore contrasts “half-poets” with true poets who create “ ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them.’ ”
Readers often interpret Moore’s most famous line as a definition of poetry: the synthesis of reality (“real toads”) with imagination (“imaginary gardens”). Given the fairy-tale template, a warty, earth-bound toad is less likely than a frog to turn into a Prince Charming when transplanted into an arcadian garden of verse. A casual phrase, “In the meantime,” concludes “Poetry” with the concession that poetry may not yet have fully attained its goal, but
if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
In a 1951 essay, Moore explained that she felt “estranged from [poetry] by much that passes for virtuosity—that is affectation or exhibitionism—and then talent comes to the rescue, and we forget about what we think and automatically we are helplessly interested.” In such cases “instinct outdoes intellect, for the rhythm is the person.” She went on to praise the “verbal bravura” in Auden’s verse—the same bravura exhibited in the colloquial rhythms of “Poetry.” No wonder he admitted stealing from her.
Throughout late life, Marianne Moore exercised her imagination on a wide range of real activities, institutions, sites, and people—including baseball fans. Why, then, did she exclude this engaging statement of her aesthetic aims from the 1961 Marianne Moore Reader? And why did she cut “Poetry” down to three lines when she reinstated it in the 1967 Complete Poems?
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If “ ‘omissions are not accidents,’ ” Moore’s interpreter Bonnie Costello speculates, “the corollary may be ‘inclusions are intentions.’ ” Although “Poetry” was omitted from A Marianne Moore Reader, the poet did include her 1955 correspondence with representatives of the Ford Motor Company in which they asked her to name a car in production. She floated a series of proposals including The Impeccable, The Resilient Bullet, Mongoose Civique, and Utopian Turtletop. The last of these playful suggestions brought her a bouquet of roses and a eucalyptus. A year later, she must have been surprised on learning that the car would be named after Henry Ford’s son, Edsel.
By 1967, after the dangerous conditions in her Brooklyn neighborhood persuaded the eighty-year-old Marianne Moore to return to Greenwich Village, she was telling Life magazine, “I’m a happy hack as a writer.” Two years later, she appeared in a televised Braniff airlines commercial with the crime novelist Mickey Spillane and recited Braniff’s slogan: “When you got it—flaunt it.” As the Ford request for her services and the television ad indicate, she had become, in the words of the Life headline, the “Leading Lady of U.S. Verse.” From her sixties on, Moore turned her attention to American culture and in particular to the pleasures she had enjoyed for decades in New York City. To use one of her favorite words, Moore lived her last decades with gusto as she celebrated the city’s horse-racing tracks, baseball fields, concert halls, museums, parks, and bridges.
Upon first visiting Manhattan back in 1915, Moore had credited the editors of the little magazines and her experience at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, 291, with instilling in her the desire to move. While she and her mother lived on St. Luke’s Place, the library down the street furnished a home away from home. Later, in Fort Greene, she profited from lectures, readings, concerts, films, and exhibits at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, where she encountered W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Moore kept a bowl of coins for her visitors’ subway rides home. After her mother’s death, she continued to visit the 42nd Street Library, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Pierpont Morgan Library.
Just as she sent off gift-poems in return for material gifts, Moore devoted her creative energies in her final decades to poems thanking New York. One of the first, “Tom Fool at Jamaica,”was her first acceptance by the New Yorker when it appeared in 1953. Like her earlier verse, it is chockablock with quotations, but now from lowbrow sources, for it recounts Moore’s reaction to a particular horse, Tom Fool, racing at the Jamaica Race Course in Queens. Tom Fool is admired by his jockey, Ted Atkinson, and by the sports announcer Frederic Capossela. Awe at physical prowess in large and small creatures opens the poem with its references to Jonah “deterred / by the whale” and a picture of “a mule and jockey / who had pulled up for a snail.” These images are linked by a characteristically cautionary maxim: “Be infallible at your peril, for your system will fail.”
“Tom Fool at Jamaica” fools around with the racehorse’s “left white hind foot—an unconformity; though judging / by results, a kind of cottontail to give him confidence.” That the announcer “keeps his head”—“why shouldn’t I? / I’m relaxed, I’m confident, and I don’t bet”—lets Marianne Moore off the hook, since, she explains in the notes, “I had just received an award from Youth United for a Better Tomorrow” and “I deplore gambling.” The last section of the poem directly addresses the thoroughbred (“You’ve the beat of a dancer …of a porpoise”) and turns into a rhapsodic list of other rhythmic “champions”: the musicians Fats Waller, Ozzie Smith, and Eubie Blake, the jockey Ted Atkinson “cat-loping along,” and “a monkey on a greyhound.” It concludes with an interrupted but animated exclamation suggesting that none can compare with Tom Fool.
Although the association of Black people with animals can surface in troubling discourses used in demeaning ways, here it appears as an homage. Moore believed that animals and athletes of all colors furnish “subjects for art and [are] exemplars of it” by “minding their own business”: they “do not pry or prey—or prolong the conversation; do not make us self-conscious; look their best when caring least.”
Just as she sent off gift-poems in return for material gifts, Moore devoted her creative energies in her final decades to poems thanking New York.
Just as her early poems valued biodiversity, quite a few of Moore’s late poems celebrate racial diversity. Unlike the earlier poems, the late poems are populated by throngs of named human subjects. In “Hometown Piece for Messrs. Alston and Reece,” which appeared on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune on October 3, 1956, Moore catalogues the names of the Dodgers who won the World Series the year before and urges them to go out and do it again. Composed in rhymed couplets suitable to her heroic subject, the opening riffs off a New York Times column declaring that “the millennium and pandemonium arrived at approximately the same time in the Brooklyn Dodgers’ clubhouse.” Roy Campanella opens Moore’s roll call of players and closes it along with his two other Black teammates, Jackie Robinson and Don Newcombe.
A 1960 interviewer in Sports Illustrated emphasized that Moore, on the Jack Paar talk show, attributed her interest in sports to the Indigenous athletes she had known while teaching in the Carlisle Indian School. Perhaps she was attracted by the teamwork at play on the field, a confirmation of her belief that “egomania is not a duty,” as she dryly put it in “Blessed Is the Man.” “Baseball and Writing,” a poem that appeared in the New Yorker in 1961, considers the artful maneuvers of Elston Howard, the first Black player on the Yankees. The only non-Yankee player mentioned is Manny Montejo, a Cuban pitcher for the Detroit Tigers. Luis Arroyo, a Puerto Rican player, and Héctor López, a Panamanian, appear in the last stanza. Clearly, Marianne Moore celebrated the demographics of the baseball games she watched on television with her African American housekeeper, Gladys Berry, and avidly discussed with her brother before she was chosen to throw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium in 1968.
“Rescue with Yul Brynner” (1961), about the Broadway star’s work on behalf of refugee children, and “Arthur Mitchell” (1962), about the first African American dancer in the New York City Ballet, reflect Moore’s ongoing efforts to laud diversity, artistic agility, and courage in civic endeavors. The pleasure she took in Gotham’s cultural treasures is also expressed in her letters, which attest to Moore’s gratification in visiting college campuses, meeting younger poets, and traveling with close friends, but return recurrently to the elation of hearing Billie Holiday sing at one of the “Coffee Concerts” at the Museum of Modern Art, dining in Manhattan with Isak Dinesen or the Sitwells, attending the ballet or theater with Lincoln Kirstein, and going to see a fight at Madison Square Garden with George Plimpton and afterward to a reception at Toots Shor’s, where she recognized Norman Mailer.
After Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) expressed his desire to collaborate with Moore on a sonnet about his upcoming fight with Ernie Terrell, she provided the title: “A Poem on the Annihilation of Ernie Terrell.” On the record jacket of Clay’s I Am the Greatest! Moore calls the fighter “A knight, a king of the ring, a mimic, a satirist” as well as a “master of hyperbole” with “a fondness for antithesis.” She concludes with his sort of rhymes: “He fights and he writes. Is there something I have missed? He is a smiling pugilist.”
A fan addressing other fans, Moore exercised her genius at networking in a sphere larger than the company of poets, a fact italicized by the popular magazines in which she placed her late essays. “Brooklyn from Clinton Hill,” published in Vogue, describes the historic landmarks in her borough. Even closer to home, “My Crow, Pluto—A Fantasy,” which appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, describes her apartment as well as her pet: “I could not induce him to say, ‘Nevermore.’ If I inquired, ‘what was the refrain in Poe’s ‘Raven,’ Pluto?’ he invariably would croak, ‘Evermore.’ ” “Profit Is a Dead Weight,” in Seventeen, reiterates one of her favorite adages from Confucius—“If there be a knife of resentment in the heart, the mind fails to attain precision”—before it goes on to detail how a book by the fighter Floyd Patterson and the playing of the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia “fired my imagination with gratitude.”
When on the brink of her 80th birthday Moore received an award from the Poetry Society of America, Mayor John Lindsay called her “truly the poet laureate of New York City” and a tongue-in-cheek Langston Hughes alluded to her demographic and democratic vistas by praising her as “the most famous Negro woman poet in America.” In the New York Times, she finishes an essay with the bravura of an enthusiast: “I like Santa Barbara, British Columbia; have an incurable fondness for London. But of any cities I have seen, I like New York best.”
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Excerpted from Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists by Susan Gubar. Copyright © 2025 by Susan Gubar. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
