Modernist Portraits Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

• Moore’s poetry is a good place for students to start thinking about the different ways in which poems can be organized. For example, poems may be structured around a description, story, meditation, or argument. Choose a poem by Moore that has a more straightforward narrative, such as “A Grave” or “Baseball and Writing,” and divide it into three to five parts that you feel correspond to the structural divisions of the poem. The more advanced students are, the more parts you can divide the poem into. Break students into groups and give each group one segment of the poem and ask them to determine where in the order of the poem the passage falls. Ask them to support their claim by hypothesizing about why they believe it is a particular section of the poem and what beginnings, middles, or ends usually look like. After having made their own claims, groups should talk with one another to compare passages and to determine the relationship between the various sections. This can be followed by a full class discussion of the poem and an analysis of one of Moore’s more difficult structures, such as “Poetry” or “The Paper Nautilus.”
• The absence of specifically female experience in Moore’s poetry is also worth noting and may become more apparent to students when contrasted to the work of Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton, for example. Students might discuss why Moore felt that her identity as a woman and her identity as a poet were incompatible and then examine how her work takes on experiences that can be generalized to all of human-kind, rather than focusing on the experience of women.

1. Comprehension: After reading “Poetry,” consider what Moore says about why readers should care about poetry. What does she believe makes certain kinds of poetry important? What would she classify as “not poetry”?
2. Comprehension: What is “In Distrust of Merits” about? According to Moore, how does war happen? What does she mean in the last stanza of the poem when she says that “There never was a war that was / not inward”?
3. Context: How does Moore’s poetic form communicate ideas differently than if, for instance, these poems were written as essays? What can “Nevertheless” or “In Distrust of Merits” achieve in poetic form that it could not attain as prose? How do the rhyme and rhythm of the poems influence your reading of them?
4. Context: In “Poetry,” Moore describes how some poetry becomes too far removed from the things that are truly important and useful. Consider some of the other modernist poems you have read (by Eliot or Pound, for example); what do you believe Moore (or the speaker in this poem) would think about poems that rely heavily on literary allusions?
5. Exploration: Moore was a mentor to the poet Elizabeth Bishop, which Bishop acknowledges in her poem “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore.” Both poets are known for their animal poems, some of which are odes, poems that use the subject or occasion for the poem to investigate the potential power of the poet. Compare Bishop’s “The Fish” to Moore’s “To a Snail.” What attracts the speaker of the poem to these animals? To what extent is the animal or the viewer of the animal like a poet? From what source does the power of the poet arise? What are the limitations of this power?

[4011] Carl Van Vechten, Portrait of Marianne Moore (1948), 
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-42513]. 
Moore, wearing bowtie, poses in front of a wall of books. Moore’s poetry emphasized the natural world and, during and after World War II, social themes.

[5365] Frances Benjamin Johnston, Carlisle Indian School (1901), 
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-119133]. 
Photograph of students at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Poet Marianne Moore taught at the school for four years, after graduating from Bryn Mawr College.