Marianne Moore: Writing

Marianne Moore was American poet and writer. Explore interesting quotes on writing.

Marianne Moore: 118 quotes 2 likes

“What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.”

Marianne Moore

Interview with Donald Hall in November 1960, pub.'Paris Review' The Art of Poetry, no 26 (1961)

“I think books are chiefly responsible for my dogged self determined efforts to write; books & verisimilitude; I like to describe things.”

Marianne Moore

Essay - 1957 Subject, Predicate, Object

Books , Dogs , Thinking , Effort

“I have learned more from Ezra Pound about writing than from anyone else.”

Marianne Moore

Review of Letters of Ezra Pound 1950
Prose

Learning

“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

Music

“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

Faith

“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

Happiness