Born in Kirkwood, Missouri, on November 15, 1887, Moore was raised solely by her mother in an interesting, albeit not unique, world. Her father, John Milton Moore, was victimized by a psychotic episode that would dissever his marriage to Mary Warner Moore, Marianne’s mother, before their daughter was born. Her early life would solidify her strong Presbyterian faith and formulate the bedrock themes of much of her future poetry.

When her grandfather, Presbyterian pastor John Riddle Warner, died in 1894, while Marianne was only six years old, her family moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania before eventually settling in the town of Carlisle two years later. This move would set the stage for her future renown as it placed her within the proximity of Bryn Mawr College, which she would attend in 1905. Graduating four years later with degrees in history, economics, and political science, Moore would also write her first poems here alongside her classmate, poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle).

Later, Moore would live with her mother in Brooklyn, working as a librarian before eventually holding a four-year tenure as editor of the literary journal The Dial. Her time spent in the city would make her an avid Dodgers fan, to such a degree that she would even compose an ode to the 1955 World Champions. During this time, she also networked with, and received no small degree of praise from, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. Moore would return the favor by later mentoring and encouraging promising young poets Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbury, and James Merrill.

Moore’s habit of using quotations “not as illustrations, but as a means to extend and complete a poem’s original intentions” would prove to be a major innovation in the modern American style. She also pushed the limits of minimalism in some of her work by revising previously published poems and reducing them to their core, famously saying “omissions are not accidents.”

She lived her life holding true to the idea that strength came from adversity, becoming a staunch supporter of the women’s suffrage movement and opposing Pound’s anti-Semitic beliefs. Moore would die on February 5, 1972, having received the National Book Award (1951), Pulitzer Prize (1951), Bollingen Prize (1951), Edward MacDowell Medal (1967), and National Medal for Literature (1968) in her lifetime.

(Brief biography sourced from The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006 edition), Poets.org, and Wikipedia)

Silence

My father used to say,
“Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow’s grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat —
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth —
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.”
Nor was he insincere in saying, “Make my house your inn.”
Inns are not residences.

— Marianne Moore