Marianne Moore Quotes

I don't consider In Distrust of Merits a poem. It's just a burst of feelings. It's emotion recorded, a 'haphazard form ' a protest.

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

Precision, economy of statement, logic employed to ends that are disinterested ... liberate the imagination.

One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.

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

I have no sympathy for people who find unpopularity embittering.

nor are there any
ivory
tusks like those two horns which when a tiger
coughs, are lowered fiercely
and convert the fur
to harmless rubbish.

... 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.

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

In the days of Prismatic Color
not in the days of Adam and Eve, but when Adam
was alone; when there was no smoke and color was
fine, not with the refinement
of early civilization art, but because
of its originality; with nothing to modify it but the
mist that went up, obliqueness was a variation
of the perpendicular, plain to see and
to account for: it is no
longer that; nor did the blue-red-yellow band
of incandescence that was color keep its stripe

The power of the visible
is the invisible; as even where
no tree of freedom grows,
so-called brute courage knows.

One ventures, commits one's self, and if readers are not pleased, one can perhaps please one's self and earn that slender right to persevere.

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.

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.

BY DISPOSITION OF ANGELS
Messengers much like ourselves? Explain it.
Steadfastness the darkness makes explicit?
Something heard most clearly when not near it?
Above particularities,
these unparticularities praise cannot violate.
One has seen, in such steadiness never deflected,
how by darkness a star is perfected.
Star that does not ask me if I see it?
Fir that would not wish me to uproot it?
Speech that does not ask me if I hear it?
Mysteries expound mysteries.
Steadier than steady, star dazzling me, live and elate,
no need to say, how like some we have known; too like her,
too like him, and a-quiver forever.