by Gale Thompson

Created on: May 29, 2009

With an immense accumulation of precision and imagery, the poetry of Marianne Moore seems to create a universe of its own, yet is never fully able to be categorized. Over the years her poetry has been both read and misread in varying opinions; however, the one common characteristic of her poetry is its apparent instability. Like her poem "The Mind is an Enchanted Thing," Moore's imagination through poetry became "like the glaze on a / katydid-wing" (Moore 2-3) and "truly unequivocal / because trued by regnant certainty," existing almost wholly on minute detail (17-18). Although vastly different from the Modernists before her, Marianne Moore entered the movement by challenging and advancing it, using an entirely different new style of prosody.

Born in Kirkwood, Missouri on November 15, 1887, Marianne Moore entered the world of the Presbyterian Church, where her maternal grandfather was the pastor. The religious environment that Moore's family created became a huge influence on her poetry in years to come. Just one year later another famous Modern poet-T.S. Eliot-would be born in the nearby city of St. Louis, also into a household run by a pastor. Years later, the two poets would become "mutual admirers" (Molesworth 3). What is interesting about Moore's early life is that her mother was forced to raise her and her brother alone, for she and her husband separated due to his nervous breakdown after a "loss of fortune in a scheme to build a smokeless furnace"(1). Her grandfather died when she was very young, so her mother took the family to Pittsburgh, then shortly after, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where they were to reside until after Moore graduated from Bryn Mawr. Moore's mother began a job teaching at the Metzger Institute, and settled quickly into life with the Presbyterian church in the town. The strength and intimacy of a maternal presence stayed with Marianne, and after her undergraduate education she lived with her mother until Mrs. Moore's death in 1947. The sheer will and determination of her mother must have influenced Marianne in her poetry, and the importance she placed on education was to shape Marianne for a vibrant life of learning.

Charles Molesworth, in his biography Marianne Moore: A Literary Life, says that even in Moore's youth she already was making puns, wordplays, and cracking jokes, as well as grooming an extensive vocabulary even before Bryn Mawr. The beginnings of a certain "clash of dignity

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