Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

LIFE

The opening of the 1968 baseball season at Yankee Stadium, New York, was a memorable one. League officials had by-passed the expectant file of politicians for the honor of throwing the first ball and offered it to a lady fan, an 80-year-old spinster, and poet, Marianne Moore. She threw a strike.

The Yankees’ manager, Casey Stengel, a creative user of language in his own right when the occasion arose on the ball field, could hardly have been a reader of Marianne Moore’s poetry. Some spectators who had had college English may have remembered that she had said about poetry:“I, too, dislike. . . all that fiddle,”and defined it as“imaginary gardens with real toads in them,”wondering what she could possibly have meant. But all knew she was hailed as one of America’s highbrow poets and that her symbolic first pitch gave class to the popular sport.

For Marianne Moore it was a moment of purest joy. She had known a few great triumphs after the one tragedy that struck early in her life. When still an infant in St. Louis, Mo., where she was born in 1887, a few months before T.S. Eliot, her mentally deranged father abandoned his wife, son, and little daughter. The three deserted ones became a closely-knit unit for the rest of their lives. In 1896 the mother moved with her children to Carlisle, Pa., where she taught at Mitzger Institute which Marianne attended as a pupil, playing tennis and drawing, full of the ambition of becoming a painter. The girl later attended Bryn Mawr College for Girls, majoring in Social Science, but fascinated by lab work in biology. She contributed poems to the undergraduate magazine. Years later, she explained the relation between scientific observation and her poetry:“Precision, economy of statement, logic employed to ends that are disinterested, drawing and identifying, liberate－at least have some bearing on－the imagination, it seems to me.”She thought of becoming a physician.

But after graduation she returned to Carlisle to take a course in commercial subjects, concentrating on typing with a view of becoming a journalist. Yet, after her course in 1911 and a summer trip with her mother in Europe where she spent much of her time in Paris museums, she came back to Carlisle to teach commercial subjects at the Indian School, also coaching Indian boys in field sports. The 24-year-old girl coach’s love of watching boys on the baseball field would stay with her the rest of her life, bringing her the climactic moment of 1968, at age 80. She stayed at the Indian School until 1915,sending poems to various magazines, which rejected them. But from 1915, small experimental magazines－the Greenwich Village’s Others, Harriet Munro’s Chicago-based Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, the London imagist The Egoist－began publishing her work.

After a few years with her brother in New Jersey where he was assigned as Presbyterian minister, Marianne Moore moved to New York with her mother where she taught school and worked for four years at the Hudson Park Branch of the New York library. Although she claimed she spent most of her time reviewing novels for the library, critics have suspected that she reveled in ferreting into all kinds of publication, old newspapers, picture books of animals and birds, and accumulated a store of unrelated facts and figures which she tried to unify and give integrated meaning to in her poetry. One critic wrote that her mind was a card catalogue for-getting the imaginative power that could relate the most disparate knowledge in the best metaphysical way. She had a more lifelike view of herself. When she began writing, she said, words would“cluster like chromosomes.”Her poems were a delight for those who enjoyed skipping from one object to another and yet feeling that all the digressions led to a single meaning. More deeply, Marianne Moore’s mind was a typical modern mind, full of information, of fragments of knowledge, and groping for meaning. But while groping she delighted in the spectacle of nature and the work of man upon it; it is hard to decide whether her poems delight more by the interpretation she puts upon vastly disparage facts or by the fascination she communicates in her description of objects found around her and in books.

In 1921, to her great surprise, Hilda Doolittle, the American imagist poet living in England, brought out in London a collection of 24 poems by Marianne Moore entitled Poems. The imagists liked her images. They were clear-cut as Ezra Pound wanted them, and presented the object in itself independently of any possible symbolic meaning; they conformed to T.E. Hulme’s dictum that the purpose of good imagery was“to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you from gliding through an abstract process”; her poems showed a love of life and reality at a time when the greatest living poets were lamenting the decay of the Western world into a waste land.

The Dial, the most prestigious American literary magazine at the time, began to pay attention to her. In 1924 she published her first collection of poems in America, Observations, which won her the 1925 Dial award for distinguished service to American letters and the job of editor of the magazine. In that capacity she encouraged and published young experimental writers. Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, poets who saw plenty of life in the supposed wasteland, were her close friends. She remained editor until the Dial folded up in 1929.

That year she went to live with her mother in Brooklyn to be close to the shipyards where her brother was Navy chaplain. She had more time for her own writing and in 1935 published Selected Poems for which T.S. Eliot wrote an introduction asserting that Marianne Moore’s poems“form part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time.”T.S. Eliot had by this time transcended the waste land and his own poetry consisted of putting fragments of experience together in a way to give them meaning. The first of the Four Quartets was soon to appear. In 1936, she published The Pangolin and Other Verse. She wrote war poems during the war years (What Are Years? And Nevertheless) and in 1951 published her famous Collected Poems which won her the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the National Book Award, all top literary honors in America.

What she wrote best about were animals. It is doubtful whether this lady who hardly traveled directly observed the exotic animals she describes so vividly－she must have simply read about them, her imagination putting life into them, somewhat like the French poet Chateaubriand who had never seen Niagara Falls and yet wrote the most vivid description of them. Marianne Moore saw animals in all their splendor of physical reality and behavior, but also as embodying instincts that man, with all his freedom, should try to imitate. She was a moralist and the purpose of her writing was to preach virtue.

In 1946 she began the long labor of translating the French poet La Fontaine’s fables whose animals could only fascinate her. Yet her translation bears her unmistakable mark. La Fontaine saw in animals only the allegory of man; Marianne Moore describes them for their own sake. The Fables of La Fontaine appeared in 1954. In 1956 she published Predilections, a selection of her reviews and essays. Like Virginia Woolf, she was a penetrating critic, independent of all schools of criticism; she wrote for the common reader, and turned out to be one of the best critics of her age.

In 1967 Complete Poems appeared in which, like Pindar in old Greece who celebrated in the best lyrical poetry of his time the heroes of the Olympics, she inserted some poems on baseball. A lifelong fan, she knew the game inside out like a science; a poet, she saw it as a ritual and celebrated it and its heroes. This work brought her the top honor in her estimation: the first throw of the 1968 baseball season in New York.

She died in New York five years later, aged 84.