Marianne Moore: Trending quotes

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Marianne Moore: 118 quotes2 likes

“Tell me, Tell me where might there be a refuge for me
from egocentricity
and its propensity to bisect,
mis-state, misunderstand
and obliterate continuity?”

Marianne Moore

Tell Me, Tell Me
Poetry

“I have been influenced by the Bible, Bach's music and contemporarily by Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams and Hopkins.”

Marianne Moore

Letter to Miss Gray in 1936 in response for a biographical sketch. Reproduced in Marianne Moore - A Literary Life by Charles Molesworth, Macmillan, New York 1990

“Some speak of things we know, as new;
And you, of things unknown as things forgot.”

Marianne Moore

"Quoting an Also Private Thought" (this poem is a very slight reworking of an earlier poem "As Has Been Said")
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)

“Love, ah Love, when your slipknot's drawn,
One can but say, "Farewell, good sense."”

Marianne Moore

"The Lion in Love"
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)

“I never plan a stanza, words cluster like chromosomes determining the procedure, later, I may influence or thin it.”

Marianne Moore

“I tend to write in patterned arrangement with rhymes.. I try to secure an effect of flowing continuity and the correspondence between verse and music.”

Marianne Moore

Oxford Anthology of American Literature 1938
Prose

“What of it? We call them brave
perhaps? Yes; what if the time should come
when no one will fight for anything
and there's nothing of worth to save.”

Marianne Moore

"We Call Them the Brave"
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)

“So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear
but never caught,
the unicorn has been preserved
by an unmatched device
wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths …”

Marianne Moore

"Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns"
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)

“Maine should be pleased that its animal
is not a waverer, and rather
than fight, lets the primed quill fall.
Shallow oppressor, intruder,
insister, you have found a resister.”

Marianne Moore

Of the porcupine, in "Apparition of Splendor"
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)

“A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.”

Marianne Moore

Interview in Writers at Work, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (1963)

“Precision, economy of statement, logic employed to ends that are disinterested … liberate the imagination.”

Marianne Moore

Forward to Marianne Moore Reader 1961

“If you demand on the other hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.”

Marianne Moore

Poetry
Collected Poems (1951)

“A willingness to satisfy contradictory objections to one's manner of writing might turn one's work into the donkey that finally found itself being carried by its masters, since some readers suggest that quotation marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. But since in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest. Perhaps those who are annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts could be persuaded to take probity on faith and disregard the notes.”

Marianne Moore

The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1967), "A Note On The Notes", p. 262

“You know I don't really understand much of my poetry myself. Of course, I was convinced I understood it when I wrote it!”

Marianne Moore

Quoted by Malvina Hoffman in her Memoir - Yesterday is Tomorrow 1961

“There is hate's crown beneath which all is
death; there's love without which none
is king.”

Marianne Moore

Poetry

“Poetry is: a classifying, a botanizing, a voracity of contemplation, a pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation in which the actual is a deft benficence.”

Marianne Moore

Moore's Review in Criterion 1936 of Wallace Stevens Ideas of Order

“You are not male nor female, but a plan
deep-set within the heart of man.”

Marianne Moore

"Sun" from Tell Me, Tell Me (1966)
Poetry

“One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.”

Marianne Moore

Idiosyncrasy and Technique 1958