The Fish (Marianne Moore)

Modern and Moving

Moore can be considered the poster child for "modern" poetry, the sort of style poets were experimenting with after World War I. The aesthetics of her poems meant a lot to the overall appreciation of what she was actually saying. In other words, the actual appearance of the words on paper largely contributes to how we interpret the poem.

So, what we often get in her work is a lot of playing with language both contextually and aesthetically. Her titles are very important too, since they often play a big part in the introduction of ideas and subjects. And of course she was an expert at maintaining movement in her work, whether through patterns in rhyme or simply the ways in which one word or idea leads us to the next.

Check out some of these gems (like this or this) that really define what Moore was all about.