Marianne Moore's "Poetry"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Arts, Kids & Family, Education For Kids

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2023

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In today’s poem, Marianne Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) gets candid about poetry itself.

One of American literature’s foremost poets, Marianne Moore’s poetry is characterized by linguistic precision, keen and probing descriptions, and acute observations of people, places, animals, and art. Her poems often reflect her preoccupation with the relationships between the common and the uncommon, advocate discipline in both art and life, and espouse restraint, modesty, and humor. She frequently used animals as a central image to emphasize themes of independence, honesty, and the integration of art and nature. Moore’s work is frequently grouped with poets such as H.D., T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and, later, Elizabeth Bishop, to whom she was a friend and mentor. In his introduction to her Selected Poems (1935), Eliot wrote: “Living, the poet is carrying on that struggle for the maintenance of a living language, for the maintenance of its strength, its subtlety, for the preservation of quality of feeling, which must be kept up in every generation … Miss Moore is, I believe, one of those few who have done the language some service in my lifetime.”

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, and welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.6	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, November 15, 2023.
0:10.6	Today's poem is by Marianne Moore, and it's entitled, simply, poetry.
0:17.6	In keeping with the week's theme of poems addressed to their readers, this is a poem
0:24.2	that makes no attempt to disguise that it is talking about poetry.
0:35.2	Moore, or the speaker that Moore creates here wants to have a frank conversation about what in the world we're doing here when the poet writes a poem, when a reader hears or reads a poem, and whether there's any value to it at all. Moore is classified as a modernist poet,
1:00.5	and she tends to be remembered for her ironic wit. And there's a kind of snappy, sardonic tone in this poem.
1:12.6	But when she gets to the heart of the matter, when she says we arrive at the essence of
1:19.7	poetry, what it's really for and what it can really do, it's rather deep and as she says,
1:26.3	rather genuine, which may mark a contrast with
1:30.4	yesterday's poem by Billy Collins, or he seemed to say that though poetry at its best can
1:38.9	capture this common shared experience, that encounter and that shared experience between the reader and the poet is transitory and fleeting.
1:53.1	Moore herself seemed to have lost patience with this poem and maybe its popularity.
2:00.5	She wrote it originally in 1924. She published an anthology of her poems
2:06.5	in 1967, in which she edited this poem down to the first three lines. I, too, dislike it.
2:16.1	There are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
2:19.2	Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,
2:22.0	one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.
2:29.4	There was an outcry from her fans and friends,
2:33.4	and so she also deigned to include or restore the
2:39.9	original version along with her truncated version, but that might tell you something about
2:45.4	her feelings on the matter. Probably the best known and most quoted line from this poem is from the last stanza when she says that one of the ultimate goals of poetry is to present imaginary gardens with real toads in them.
	...

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