Marianne Moore

You know I don't really understand much of my poetry myself. Of course, I was convinced I understood it when I wrote it !

When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand.

"Truth is no Apollo
Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes.
Know that it will be there when it says,
"I shall be there when the wave has gone by.

Blessed the geniuses who know
that egomania is not a duty.

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

Do the poet and scientist not work analogously? Both are willing to waste effort. To be hard on himself is one ...of the main strengths of each. Each is attentive to clues, each must narrow the choice, must strive for precision. As George Grosz says, “In art there is no place for gossip and but a small place for the satirist.” The objective is fertile procedure. Is it not? Jacob Bronowski says in The Saturday Evening Post that science is not a mere collection of discoveries, but that science is the process of discovering. In any case it’s not established once and for all; it’s evolving.

Psychology which explains everything, explains nothing.

My father used to say "Superior people never make long visits."

... The world's an orphan's home. Shall
we never have peace without sorrow?
without pleas of the dying for
help that won't come? O
quiet form upon the dust, I cannot
look and yet I must. If these great patient
dyings - all these agonies
and wound bearings and bloodshed-
can teach us how to live, these
dyings were not wasted.

Poetry
...
... a place for the genuine,
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise

He feared snakes, and tamed
Pharaoh's rat, the rust-
backed mongoose. No bust
of it was made, but there
was pleasure for the rat. Its restlessness was
its excellence; it was praised for its wit;
and the jerboa, like it,

a small desert rat,
and not famous, that
lives without water, has
happiness.

... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ...
... if you demand on one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

There never was a war that was
not inward; I must fight till I conquered in myself what
causes war

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.

... we
do not admire what
we cannot understand.