The geographical life-journey of Marianne Moore is from west to east, from a Midwest suburb of St Louis, Missouri, where she was born in 1887, to New York, where she spent most of her active literary life. Unlike her exact contemporaries and fellow modernist poets, Pound and Eliot, she moved no further east than that, and her “modernism” is thus crucially distinct from that of the poets in exile and “men of 1914”. In this respect she is closer to William Carlos Williams. Both are poets whose location determines their quality of American-ness, even though the spirit of specific place is less explicit in Moore than in Williams.

Moore's mentally unstable father left the family home when she was very young: she was never to

This article in full comprises 1706 words but only the first 150 or so words are available to non-members.

All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors. To read about membership, please click here.

First published 08 March 2003

Citation: Wilson, Peter. "Marianne Moore". The Literary Encyclopedia. 8 March 2003.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3180, accessed 9 February 2010.]