Skip to content

Poetry is: a classifying, a botanizing, a voracity of contemplation, a pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation in which the actual is a deft benficence.

— Marianne Moore

Another quote →

Topics

Poetry

More quotes by Marianne Moore

You are not male nor female, but a plan
deep-set within the heart of man.

A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.

Beauty is everlasting
and dust is for a time.

The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)

Maine should be pleased that its animal
is not a waverer, and rather
than fight, lets the primed quill fall.
Shallow oppressor, intruder,
insister, you have found a resister.

The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)

Staff and effigy of the animal
which by shedding its skin
is a sign of renewal —
the symbol of medicine.

The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)

All Marianne Moore quotes →

You may also like

There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Marianne Moore (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.