36 Facts About Marianne Moore

Marianne Craig Moore was an American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor.

Marianne Moore's poetry is noted for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit.

Marianne Moore's father, John Milton Moore, a mechanical engineer and inventor, suffered a psychotic episode, as a consequence of which her parents separated before she was born; Moore never met him.

Marianne Moore thought "it was not possible to live without religious faith".

Marianne Moore lived in the St Louis area until she was six.

At Bryn Mawr, Marianne Moore started writing short stories and poems for Tipyn O'Bob, the campus literary magazine, and decided to become a writer.

In 1916, Marianne Moore moved with her mother to Chatham, New Jersey, a community with commuting transportation to Manhattan.

Two years later, the two moved to New York City's Greenwich Village, where Marianne Moore socialized with many avant-garde artists, especially those associated with Others magazine.

Marianne Moore worked part-time as a librarian during these years; then from 1925 to 1929, she edited The Dial magazine, a literary and cultural journal.

Marianne Moore continued to write while caring for her ailing mother, who died in 1947.

For nine years before and after her mother's death, Marianne Moore translated the Fables of La Fontaine.

In 1933, Marianne Moore was awarded the Helen Haire Levinson Prize by Poetry magazine.

Marianne Moore became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955.

Marianne Moore was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1962 and in 1967 she was awarded The Edward MacDowell Medal by The MacDowell Colony for outstanding contributions to American culture.

Marianne Moore continued to publish poems in various magazines, including, The Nation, The New Republic, Partisan Review, and The New Yorker, as well as publishing various books and collections of her poetry and criticism.

Marianne Moore moved to 35 West Ninth Street in Manhattan in 1965.

Marianne Moore became known as a baseball fan, first of the Brooklyn Dodgers and then of the New York Yankees.

Marianne Moore threw out the ball to open the season at Yankee Stadium in 1968.

At the age of 81, Marianne Moore received the 1968 National Medal for Literature.

Marianne Moore suffered a series of strokes in her last years.

Marianne Moore corresponded with Ezra Pound from 1918 and visited him regularly during his incarceration at St Elizabeth's.

Marianne Moore opposed Benito Mussolini and Fascism from the start and objected to Pound's antisemitism.

Marianne Moore was a Republican and supported Herbert Hoover in 1928 and 1932.

Marianne Moore was a lifelong ally and friend of the American poet Wallace Stevens, as demonstrated in her review of Stevens's first collection, Harmonium, and, in particular, by her comment about the influence of Henri Rousseau on the poem "Floral Decorations for Bananas".

Marianne Moore corresponded, from 1943 to 1961, with the reclusive collage artist Joseph Cornell, whose methods of collecting and appropriation were much like her own.

In 1955, Marianne Moore was invited informally by David Wallace, manager of marketing research for Ford's "E-car" project, and his co-worker Bob Young, to suggest a name for the car.

Marianne Moore's living room has been preserved in its original layout in the collections of the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia.

Marianne Moore's meter was radically separate from the English tradition; writing her syllabic poems after the advent of free verse, she was encouraged thereby to try previously unused meters.

Marianne Moore credited the poetry of Edith Sitwell as "intensifying her interest in rhythm and encouraging her rhythmic eccentricities".

Marianne Moore often composed her poetry in syllabics; she used stanzas with a predetermined number of syllables as her "unit of sense", with indentation underlining the parallels, the shape of the stanza indicating the syllabic disposition, and her reading voice conveying the syntactical line.

Marianne Moore was involved in the American suffrage movement starting in her university years at Bryn Mawr, from 1905 to 1909.

Marianne Moore's combined major in history, politics, and economics and the suffrage involvement of professors and other students at Bryn Mawr exposed her to the women's suffrage movement, especially because it was a "unique period in the history of women's college, as the values of progressivism, women's education, and the ideology of separate spheres came together in a kind of perfect storm that created a climate for cultural change".

Marianne Moore was involved in a "suffrage society", a chapter of the National College Equal Suffrage League, and she was present at most of their events.

Notably, Marianne Moore wrote in her personal letters to her family that she attended lectures at Bryn Mawr by the well-known feminist Jane Addams and the British suffragette Anne Cobden-Sanderson.

Marianne Moore was never as public about her involvement in the suffrage movement after that parade in 1913, because afterward she began participating anonymously, mostly through writing, using a pseudonym.

Marianne Moore established herself on the surface as a modernist poet, and the common practice within the modernist circle of poets was to not engage with the politics of the time; but her writings displayed a "sophisticated political subtext".