Marianne Moore

Moore remains one of the most under-read of modernist poets even though she was, arguably, one of the most influential. T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and H.D. all valued and learned from her verse. This chapter addresses Moore's work from the beginning of her career to the American entrance into World War II. Moore was famous, or rather notorious, for revising her own work. In many of Moore's early poems her dislike of inflexible and systematic thinking extends beyond the subjects she critiques to her speakers. Her principal poetic subjects for the 1930s constituted an array of animals and plants, ranging from the seemingly exotic, such as the heavily armored pangolin, to the seemingly mundane, such as the pigeon.