“She
herself described her artistic development as jerky.”
Marianne Craig Moore, an American woman, born on November
15th,
1887 in Kirkwood, Missouri was a poet known for writing poems on a wide
variety of topics ranging from the love of her animals
to hatred. Moore never
knew her father because he had a mental breakdown from being a smoker and had
to be hospitalized in Massachusetts where he died. Therefore, Moore lived with
her mother and her grandfather, who was a Presbyterian minister, until he
passed away in 1864. There, Moore remained unmarried and continued to write
her winning poems.
Moore’s interest in writing poems started when she entered Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Her first published poem was called “A Jelly-Fish”. This was the first poem out of the nine that she had published. Before becoming a poet, Marianne Moore wanted to become an expert in medicine as was later evident by her love for animals. Because she didn’t follow through with this goal, she showed her love for animals by writing most of her poems about them.
Throughout her life, Moore went from being a poet to being teachers in schools. Because she was an excellent writer, schools thought her to be an excellent teacher due to her familiarity with writing different styles.
There weren’t many other poets that influenced Moore. Once she
came up with a new idea for a poem, she remained on that topic and wrote
descriptive phrases, which later turned into a famous poem known all over the
United States. She won many, many awards. Her most famous book of poems was
called Collected Poems of 1951,and won the Pulitzer Prize, and the
National Book award in 1952, and the Bollingen Prize in
1953, which sold more 5,000 copies in 1952.
During the rest of her life, Moore published many more poems about animals and the conditions of her
life. On February 5th, of 1972, Marianne Moore died at the age of 84 in New York City. She was successful
throughout most of her life due to her wonderfully touching poems that were read all over the world.