By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Marianne Moore (1887-1972) was one of the most distinctive and accomplished modernist poets of the twentieth century. Along with William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, she stands as the greatest American modernist – of those poets who remained in America (others, such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H. D., left the States for Britain).
Indeed, Eliot himself called her work ‘part of the body of durable poetry written in our time’ and praises her ‘original sensibility’, ‘alert intelligence’, and ‘deep feeling’. Below, we introduce ten of Marianne Moore’s best poems.