Topic Page: Moore, Marianne Craig (1887 - 1972)
1887-1972
US poet
Born in St Louis, Missouri, she was educated at Bryn Mawr College, and Carlisle Commercial College in Pennsylvania. She taught commercial studies at Carlisle, tutored privately, and was a branch librarian in New York (1921-25). She contributed to the Imagist magazine, The Egoist, from 1915, and edited The Dial from 1926 until its demise in 1929. She was acquainted with seminal modernists like Ezra Pound and T S Eliot, but New York was her milieu, not Paris, and she associated with the Greenwich Village group including William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. She has supplied a much-quoted definition of the creative ideal as "imaginary gardens with real toads in them". Her first book, Poems, was published by friends in London in 1921. Idiosyncratic, a consummate stylist and unmistakably modern, she ranks high among the US poets of the 20th century. Other volumes include Collected Poems (1951, Pulitzer Prize) and The Complete Poems (1967). She also published Predilections, a collection of essays, in 1955.
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