Moore, Marianne

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brett C. Millier
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Robert Frost ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
National Geographic ◽  
Book Award ◽  
Long Time

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) is now considered a major Modernist poet, along with her friends Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Winner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bolligen Prize, she was for a time (roughly 1955–1965) the most recognizable American poet (alongside Robert Frost), and her tiny pale face, wrapped by a long braid of white hair, and topped by a black tricorn hat, was known by many more people than knew her poems. The fey charm of her celebrity obscured for a long time her unique contribution to the Modernist poetic enterprise. Moore was an editor, critic, and translator, and edited the modernist journal the Dial from 1925–1929. As a poet, she wrote elaborately structured (she often wrote in syllabics, counting every syllable in every line and stanza) contemplations of the animal world, but with an eye to finding analogies in animal behavior for humanity’s moral struggles. A lifelong resident of New York City, Moore encountered nature in circuses and zoos, and in the pages of the National Geographic magazine, and often made use of lines from that magazine and other prose work in her poems, included in quotation marks. In addition nature and animals, her work is notable for its broad range of somewhat quirky subject matter. The elaborate formal structures of her poems conceal their absolutely correct grammatical construction; Moore claimed that she called them poems because she didn’t know what else to call them. Immune to the influence of literary fashion, she pursued her own goals of “humility, concentration, and gusto” in the composition of rigorously crafted, utterly idiosyncratic art.

Moore, Marianne (1887–1972)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miranda Hickman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Bryn Mawr ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
University Of Texas ◽  
Extensive Body ◽  
The University

Marianne Moore (1887–1972), born in Kirkwood, Missouri, USA, was a major American modernist poet and editor of The Dial from 1925–29. Among other modernist poets with whom Moore sustained significant connections were T. S. Eliot, H. D., Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. Moore attended Bryn Mawr College for women in Pennsylvania between 1905 and 1909; thereafter she moved to New York with her mother, Mary Warner Moore, where they would reside together until Mary Warner Moore died in 1947 and where Moore would remain until the end of her life. Moore’s major publications include Selected Poems (1935), with an introduction by T. S. Eliot; Collected Poems (1951), for which Moore received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Complete Poems (1967), which was re-edited and reissued in 1981. Her extensive body of criticism is available in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore. Moore’s archive, including her library and personal effects, is housed at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia; additional papers are located at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Linda Leavell’s biography of Moore, Holding on Upside Down, appeared in 2013.

Beyond Meaning: Differing Fates of Some Modernist Poets’ Investments of Belief in Sounds

2019 ◽  
pp. 223-246
Author(s):  
Natalie Gerber
Keyword(s):  
Speech Sound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Robert Frost ◽  
Cognitive Studies ◽  
Metrical Pattern ◽  
Intonational Phrases ◽  
American Poets

Modernist American poets Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams insisted on the values of linguistic sound beyond the semantic. Stevens focused on the modulations of the sounds and lexical stresses of individual words within the meter. Frost and Williams focused on the less predictable intonational contours of phrases and sentences (although for Frost, the intonational contours play with and against the metrical pattern, whereas for Williams, lines tend to align with intonational phrases, turning prosodic speech tunes into a prosodic verse measure). Drawing on recent cognitive studies that pertain to the processing of speech sound and birdsong, this article suggests a need to revise critical assessments of the poets’ investments of belief in sound; it also considers why, given this research, Frost’s theory of sentence sounds has, perhaps unfairly, fared a worse critical reception.

Reading and Writing Nature: The Poetry of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop

1991 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Gilbert ◽  
Guy Rotella ◽  
Robert Frost ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Robert Frost ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
Reading And Writing

Berkman, Alexander (1870–1936)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse S. Cohn
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Upton Sinclair ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Man Ray ◽  
Mother Earth ◽  
Emma Goldman

Alexander Berkman (21 November 1870–28 June 1936), while largely remote from literary concerns, was closely connected to a number of key modernist figures, helping to bring radical concerns to American modernism. Upon initial analysis, it might seem odd to include Berkman, editor of Mother Earth (1907–1918) and The Blast (1916–1917), in a reference work on modernism. As a lifelong anarchist militant, jailed for his attempt to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick (1892) and deported for his opposition to the First World War I (1919), he was neither an author nor a critic of modernist works per se. However, his links to key modernist figures, particularly in New York, are numerous. Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912) was reviewed in Margaret Anderson’s Little Review (1914), and lauded by Mabel Dodge Luhan. His ideas were debated in Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver’s Egoist (1915–16), while Lola Ridge dedicated a poem to Berkman and his lover, Emma Goldman, in Reveille (1920). Additionally, the Ferrer Centre, a popular education initiative Berkman and Goldman sponsored in New York in 1911, drew participation from such figures as Eugene O’Neill, Hart Crane, Isadora Duncan, Jack London, Man Ray, Robert Henri, Upton Sinclair, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Berkman committed suicide while in exile in France.

James, William (1842–1910)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Stanley
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Henry James ◽  
William James ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
The United States ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Robert Frost ◽  
Philosophical Orientation ◽  
Du Bois

William James was an American psychologist and philosopher who worked across those fields to investigate the nature of consciousness, experience and free will. A founding figure in the study of modern psychology in the United States, James went on to establish what he described as ‘the method’ of Pragmatism and the philosophical orientation that he called ‘radical Empiricism’. Born in New York, James was the son of Henry James Sr., a Swedenborgian theologian, the godson of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), and the brother of novelist Henry James (1843–1916). James’s writings and lectures on psychology, religion, metaphysics, epistemology and education influenced a range of intellectuals and artists, including Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), Robert Frost (1874–1963), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), Hilary Putnam (1926–2016) and Richard Rorty (1931–2007).

Carter vs. Poets (Round 2)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Schiff
Keyword(s):  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
Middle Years ◽  
Instrumental Works ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideas

Alongside the lucid, transparent instrumental works of his last years, Carter composed seven works for voice and ensemble that set poetry by the founding generation of American literary modernism: William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and e.e. cummings. Though contemporaries, these poets differed widely in their aesthetic and political stances. Carter’s settings connect with each of them in different ways. Some of these works revive the darker, more troubling explorations of Carter’s middle years. Taken as a whole though, they can be heard as a legacy project, a monument to and critique of the aesthetic ideas Carter first encountered in his teens.

Carter

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Schiff
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Aaron Copland ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Elliott Carter ◽  
Complex Relation ◽  
Marc Blitzstein ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
Depression Era

This book surveys the life and work of the great American composer Elliott Carter (1908–2012). It examines his formative, and often ambivalent, engagements with Charles Ives and other “ultra-modernists”, with the classicist ideas he encountered at Harvard and in his three years of study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris; and with the populism developed by his friends Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein in Depression-era New York, and the unique synthesis of modernist idioms that he began to develop in the late 1940s. The book re-groups the central phase of Carter’s career, from the Cello Sonata to Syringa in terms of Carter’s synthesis of European and American modernist idioms, or “neo-modernism,” and his complex relation to the European avant-garde. It devotes particular attention to the large number of instrumental and vocal works of Carter’s last two decades, including his only opera, What Next?, and a final legacy project: seven works for voice and large ensemble to poems by the founding generation of American modern poetry: e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.

Barnard, Mary (1909–2001)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Barnsley
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Translation Research ◽  
Fiction Writing

Born in Vancouver, Washington, Mary Barnard was a writer best known for Sappho: A New Translation (1958) and her correspondence with Ezra Pound, which she initiated in 1933 after reading a range of modernist works in college. Impressed by the economy of her verse (which reminded Pound of H. D.’s Imagism) and her interest in Greek cadences, Pound supervised Barnard’s early exercises in Sapphics. After winning Poetry’s Levinson Prize in 1935, Barnard relocated to New York where she came under the influence of Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. Williams’ tutelage provided a counterpoint to Pound’s, initiating what Barnard called her ‘spare but musical’ style of poems in the American grain, resulting in Cool Country (1940) and A Few Poems (1952). She later translated this style into fiction, writing mysteries and fables, but also into the clarity and measured rhythms of her Sappho translation. Research on Sappho led to an essay volume, The Mythmakers (1966), which anticipated Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth, and Time and the White Tigress (1986), an essay-in-verse exploring time myths. These experiences and creative stages were retold in her memoir Assault on Mount Helicon (1984). Her archive joined the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Library following her death in 2001.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document