Marianne Moore Quotes

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe.

Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man.

'Hebrew poetry is, prose with a sort of heightened consciousness' Ecstasy affords the occasion expediency, determines the form

Yule — Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner — of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.

TO A GIRAFFE
If it is unpermissible, in fact fatal
to be personal and undesirable
to be literal — detrimental as well
if the eye is not innocent-does it mean that
one can live only on top leaves that are small
reachable only by a beast that is tall? — of which the giraffe is the best example — the unconversational animal.
When plagued by the psychological,
a creature can be unbearable
that could have been irresistible;
or to be exact, exceptional
since less conversational
than some emotionally-tied-in-knots animal.
After all
consolations of the metaphysical
can be profound. In Homer, existence
is flawed; transcendence, conditional;
“the journey from sin to redemption, perpetual.

EDITOR’S NOTES Poetry Diary of Tolstoy; Dutton, p. 84: “Where the boundary between prose and poetry lies, I shall never be able to understand. The question is raised in manuals of style, yet the answer to it lies beyond me. Poetry is verse: prose is not verse. Or else poetry is everything with the exception of business documents and school books.

It has memory's ear
that can hear without
having to hear.
Like the gyroscope's fall,
truly unequivocal
because trued by regnant certainty,

it is a power of
strong enchantment. It
is like the dove-
neck animated by
sun; it is memory's eye;
it's conscientious inconsistency.

He's not out
seeing a sight but the rock
crystal thing to see — the startling El Greco
brimming with inner light — that
covets nothing that it has let go. This then you may know
as the hero.

You're not free until you've been made captive by / supreme belief.

A willingness to satisfy contradictory objections to one's manner of writing might turn one's work into the donkey that finally found itself being carried by its masters, since some readers suggest that quotation marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. But since in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest. Perhaps those who are annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts could be persuaded to take probity on faith and disregard the notes.

Psychology which explains everything, explains nothing.

I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.

Like strangler figs choking
a banyan, not an explorer, no imperialist,
not one of us, in taking what we
pleased — in colonizing as the
saying is — has been a synonym for mercy.

War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.

You are not male or female, but a plan
deep-set within the heart of man.