Marianne Moore

Poetry is a magic of pauses ... not a thing of tunes, but of heightened consciousness.

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

Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people.

ROSEMARY
Beauty and Beauty’s son and rosemary — Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly — born of the sea supposedly, at Christmas each, in company,
braids a garland of festivity.
Not always rosemary — since the flight to Egypt, blooming differently.
With lancelike leaf, green but silver underneath,
its flowers — white originally — turned blue. The herb of memory,
imitating the blue robe of Mary,
is not too legendary
to flower both as symbol and as pungency.
Springing from stones beside the sea,
the height of Christ when thirty-three — it feeds on dew and to the bee
“hath a dumb language”; is in reality
a kind of Christmas-tree.

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

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.

I never plan a stanza, words cluster like chromosomes determining the procedure, later, I may influence or thin it.