52 quotes
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.
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)
Love, ah Love, when your slipknot's drawn,
One can but say, "Farewell, good sense."
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)
He fights and he writes. Is there something I have missed? He is a smiling pugilist.
Whatever it is.. poem.. play, story..it must hold attention.
I tend to write in patterned arrangement with rhymes.. I try to secure an effect of flowing continuity and the correspondence between verse and music.
Music should be directed by the ear, poetry by the imagination
that which is impossible to force, it is impossible
to hinder.
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)
Poetry is a magic of pauses ... not a thing of tunes, but of heightened consciousness.
There is hate's crown beneath which all is
death; there's love without which none
is king.
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.
For me, a poem starts when a felicitious phrase springs to mind.
We Call Them the Brave
who likely were reluctant to be brave.
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)
What of it? We call them brave
perhaps? Yes; what if the time should come
when no one will fight for anything
and there's nothing of worth to save.
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)
Yes, I believe in prayer, as a mystery which can endow one with more power perhaps than any other spiritual mystery, yet a mystery that cannot be exposited to a point where it is not a mystery.
So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear
but never caught,
the unicorn has been preserved
by an unmatched device
wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths ...
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)
One may be pardoned, yes I know
one may, for love for love, undying (Ephesians 6:24)
I never plan a stanza, words cluster like chromosomes determining the procedure, later, I may influence or thin it.
Blessed the man whose faith is different
from possessiveness - of a kind not framed by 'things which do appear' ( Hebrews 11:3)
If you demand on the other hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
Collected Poems (1951)
Poetry I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle,
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it
one discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Collected Poems (1951)