Complete Poems

Description

“Teems with sharp observation, profound moral insight, high satiric wit, and all manner of aesthetic delight.” –The New York Times Book Review

A Penguin Classic

This definitive edition brings together all the works that Pulitzer Prize-winning Marianne Moore wished to preserve, covering more than sixty years of writing, and incorporating the final revisions she made to the texts. The poems demonstrate Moore’s wide range of interests, moving from witty images of animals, sporting events, and social institutions, to thoughtful meditations on human nature. In entertaining informative notes, Moore reveals the inspiration for complete poems and individual lines within them.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.Complete PoemsAuthor’s Note
A Note on the Text
I. COLLECTED POEMS (1951)

Selected Poems (1935)
The Steeple-Jack
The Hero
The Jerboa
Camellia Sabina
No Swan So Fine
The Plumet Basilisk
The Frigate Pelican
The Buffalo
Nine Nectarines
To a Prize Bird
The Fish
In This Age of Hard Trying, Nonchalance Is Good and
To Statecraft Embalmed
Poetry
Pedantic Literalist
Critics and Connoisseurs
The Monkeys
In the Days of Prismatic Color
Peter
Picking and Choosing
England
When I Buy Pictures
A Grave
Those Various Scalpels
The Labors of Hercules
New York
People’s Surroundings
Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers, and the Like
Bowls
Novices
Marriage
An Octopus
Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns
The Monkey Puzzle
Injudicious Gardening
To Military Progress
An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish
To a Steam Roller
To a Snail
“Nothing Will Cure the Sick Lion but to Eat an Ape”
To the Peacock of France
The Past Is the Present
“He Wrote the History Book”
Sojourn in the Whale
Silence

What Are Years (1941)
What Are Years?
Rigorists
Light Is Speech
He “Digesteth Harde Yron”
The Student
Smooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle
Bird-Witted
Virginia Brittania
Spenser’s Ireland
Four Quartz Crystal Clocks
The Pangolin
The Paper Nautilus

Nevertheless (1944)
Nevertheless
The Wood-Weasel
Elephants
A Carriage from Sweden
The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing
In Distrust of Merits

Collected Later (1951)
A Face
By Disposition of Angels
The Icosasphere
His Shield
“Keeping Their World Large”
Efforts of Affection
Voracities and Verities Sometimes Are Interacting
Propriety
Armor’s Undermining Modesty

II. LATER POEMS

Like a Bulwark (1956)
Like a Bulwark
Apparition of Splendor
Then the Ermine
Tom Fool at Jamaica
The Web One Weaves of Italy
The Staff of Aesculapius
The Sycamore
Rosemary
Style
Logic and “The Magic Flute”
Blessed Is the Man

O To Be a Dragon
O to Be a Dragon
I May, I Might, I Must
To a Chameleon
A Jelly-Fish
Values in Use
Hometown Piece for Messrs. Alston and Reese
Enough: Jamestown, 1607-1957
Melchior Vulpius
No Better Than a “Withered Daffodil”
In the Public Garden
The Arctic Ox (or Goat)
Saint Nicholas
For February 14th
Combat Cultural
Leonardo da Vinci’s

Tell Me, Tell Me (1966)
Granite and Steel
In Lieu of the Lyre
The Mind, Intractable Thing
Dream
Old Amusement Park
An Expedient – Leonardo da Vinci’s – and a Query
W. S. Landor
To a Giraffe
Charity Overcoming Envy
Blue Bug
Arthur Mitchell
Baseball and Writing
To Victor Hugo of My Crow Pluto
Rescue with Yul Brynner
Carnegie Hall: Rescued
Tell Me, Tell Me
Saint Valentine
Sun

Hitherto Uncollected
“Avec Ardeur”
Love in America –
Tippoo’s Tiger
The Camperdown Elm
Mercifully
“Reminiscent of a Wave at the Curl”
Enough: 1969
The Magician’s Retreat
Prevalent at One Time

Selections from The Fables of La Fontaine (1954)
The Fox and the Grapes
The Lion in Love
The Animals Sick of the Plague
The Bear and the Garden-Lover
The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid

A Note on the Notes
Notes
Index of Titles and Opening Lines

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (alternate volume)
Winner of the National Book Award (alternate volume)Marianne Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, on November 1, 1887, and spent much of her youth in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. After graduation from Bryn Mawr College in 1909 she taught for four years at the Carlisle Indian School. Her poetry first appeared professionally in The Egoist and Poetry magazines in 1915 and she moved to New York City in 1918. Her first book, Poems, was issued in England by the Egoist Press in 1921. Observations, published three years later in America, received the Dial Award. From 1925 to 1929 she served as acting editor of The Dial, the preeminent American literary periodical. She moved to Brooklyn in 1929, where she lived for the next thirty-six years. In 1935 Selected Poems, with an Introduction by T.S. Eliot, brought her work to the attention of a wider public.

Three additional books of poetry were followed, in 1951, by her Collected Poems, which won the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. She went on to publish a verse translation of the complete Fables of La Fontaine, a collection of critical essays, and three more volumes of poems.

Among the many awards Marianne Moore received are the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for poetry, the Poetry Scoiety of America’s Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement, and the National Medal for Literature, America’s highest literary honor. A member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters since 1947, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955. In 1967 she was made Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic, and in 1969 she received an honorary doctorate in literature from Harvard University, her sixteenth honorary degree. Marianne Moore died in New York City, in her eighty-fifth year, on February 5, 1972.

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