| Home | Menu | Poems | Poets | Reading | Theme | Biography | Articles | Photo | Dictionary | Chat | Video | Shop | Extra | Jokes | Games | Science | Bio | বাংলা

USA Poet Marianne Moore 1887 - 1972

Marianne Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.

Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor John Milton Moore and his wife, Mary Warner. She grew up in her grandfather's household, her father having left the family before her birth. In 1905, Moore entered Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and graduated four years later. She taught at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, until 1915, when Moore began to publish poetry professionally.

Moore came to the attention of poets as diverse as Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, H.D., T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound beginning with her first publication in 1915. From 1925 until 1929, Moore served as editor of the literary and cultural journal The Dial. This continued her role, similar to that of Pound, as a patron of poetry; much later, she encouraged promising young poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery and James Merrill.

In 1933, Moore was awarded the Helen Haire Levinson Prize from Poetry. Her Collected Poems of 1951 is perhaps her most rewarded work; it earned the poet the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize. Moore became a minor celebrity in New York literary circles. She attended boxing matches, baseball games and other public events, dressed in what became her signature garb, a tricorn hat and a black cape. She particularly liked athletics and athletes and was a great admirer of Muhammad Ali, for whose spoken-word album, I Am the Greatest!, she wrote liner notes. Moore continued to publish poems in various journals, including The Nation, The New Republic, and Partisan Review, as well as publishing various books and collections of her poetry and criticism.

Moore corresponded with Ezra Pound from 1919, even during his incarceration. She opposed Benito Mussolini and Fascism from the start and objected to Pound's antisemitism. Moore herself was a conservative Republican and supported Herbert Hoover in 1928 and 1932. She was a life-long ally and friend of the American poet Wallace Stevens. See for instance her review of Stevens's first anthology, Harmonium, and in particular her comment about the influence of Henri Rousseau on the poem "Floral Decorations for Bananas'".

Her most famous poem is perhaps the one entitled, appropriately, "Poetry", in which she hopes for poets who can produce "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." It also expressed her idea that meter, or anything else that claims the exclusive title "poetry", is not as important as delight in language and precise, heartfelt expression in any form. She often composed her own poetry in syllabics. These syllabic lines from "Poetry" illustrate her position: poetry is a matter of skill and honesty in any form whatsoever, while anything written poorly, although in perfect form, cannot be poetry:

nor is it valid
to discriminate against "business documents and
school-books": all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry

Later years

In 1955, Moore was informally invited by David Wallace, manager of marketing research for Ford's "E-car" project, and his co-worker Bob Young to provide input with regard to the naming of the car. Wallace's rationale was "Who better to understand the nature of words than a poet?" On October 1955, Moore was approached to submit "inspirational names" for the E-car, and on November 7, she offered her list of names, which included such notables as "Resilient Bullet", "Ford Silver Sword", "Mongoose Civique", "Varsity Stroke", "Pastelogram" and "Andante con Moto." On December 8, she submitted her last and most famous name, "Utopian Turtletop." The E-car was finally christened by Ford as the Edsel.

Moore moved to 35 West 9th Street in Manhattan in 1966, after 37 years at 260 Cumberland Street in Brooklyn. Not long after throwing the first pitch for the 1968 season in Yankee Stadium, Moore suffered a stroke. She suffered a series of strokes thereafter, and died in 1972. She was interred in Gettysburg's Evergreen Cemetery. The New York Times devoted an entire page to an account of her life and death.

Moore never married. Her living room has been preserved in its original layout in the collections of the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia. Her entire library, knick-knacks (including a baseball signed by Mickey Mantle), all of her correspondence, photographs, and poetry drafts are available for public viewing.

Like Robert Lowell, Moore revised a great many of her early poems (including "Poetry") in later life. These appeared in The Complete Poems of 1967, after which critics tended to accept as canonical the "elderly Moore's revisions of the exuberant texts of her own poetic youth." Facsimile editions of the theretofore out-of-print 1924 Observations became available in 2002. Since that time there has been no critical consensus about which versions are authoritative.

In 1996, she was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

Selected works


  • Poems, 1921. Published in London by H.D. and Bryher. Moore disapproved of the timing, editing, selections, and format of this collection. See The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, ed. Bonnie Costello et al., NY: Knopf, 1997, p. 164. In a letter to Bryher, Moore notes ". . . I wouldn't have the poems appear now if I could help it and would not have some of them ever appear and would make certain changes . . . ."
  • Observations, 1924.
  • Selected Poems, 1935. Introduction by T. S. Eliot.
  • The Pangolin and Other Verse, 1936.
  • What Are Years, 1941.
  • Nevertheless, 1944.
  • A Face, 1949.
  • Collected Poems, 1951.
  • Fables of La Fontaine, 1954. Verse translations of La Fontaine's fables.
  • Predilections: Literary Essays, 1955.
  • Idiosyncrasy and Technique, 1966.
  • Like a Bulwark, 1956.
  • O To Be a Dragon, 1959.
  • Idiosyncrasy and Technique, 1959.
  • The Marianne Moore Reader, 1961.
  • Eight Poems, 1962, with illustrations by Robert Andrew Parker.
  • The Absentee: A Comedy in Four Acts, 1962. A dramatization of Maria Edgeworth's novel.
  • Puss in Boots, The Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, 1963. Adaptations from Perrault.
  • Dress and Kindred Subjects, 1965.
  • Poetry and Criticism, 1965.
  • Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel and Other Topics, 1966.
  • The Complete Poems, 1967.
  • The Accented Syllable, 1969.
  • Homage to Henry James, 1971. Essays by Moore, Edmund Wilson, etc.
  • The Complete Poems, 1981.
  • The Complete Prose, 1986, edited by Patricia C. Willis.
  • The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, edited by Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodridge, Cristanne Miller. Knopf, 1997.

German Poet Gerhart Hauptmann 1862 - 1946

Gerhart Hauptmann (15 November 1862 – 6 June 1946) was a German dramatist and novelist who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1912.

Hauptmann was born in Obersalzbrunn, a small town of Silesia, now known as Szczawno-Zdrój and a part of Poland. He was the son of a hotel-keeper. After attending the village school he went to the Realschule in Breslau, after which he was sent to learn agriculture on his uncle's farm at Jauer. Having no taste for country life, Hauptmann soon returned to Breslau and entered the art school with the intention of becoming a sculptor. There he met his life-long friend Josef Block. He later studied at the University of Jena and spent the greater part of 1883 and 1884 in Italy. In May 1885, Hauptmann married and settled in Berlin and, devoting himself entirely to literary work, soon attained a reputation as one of the chief representatives of the modern drama.

In 1891 he moved to Schreiberhau in Silesia. Hauptmann's first drama, Before Dawn (1889) inaugurated the naturalistic movement in modern German literature. It was followed by The Reconciliation (1890), Lonely People (1891) and The Weavers (1892), a powerful drama depicting the rising of the Silesian weavers in 1844 for which he is best known outside of Germany.

Hauptmann's subsequent work includes the comedies Colleague Crampton (1892), The Beaver Coat (1893), and The Conflagration (1901), the symbolist dream play The Assumption of Hannele (1893), and an historical drama Florian Geyer (1895). He also wrote two tragedies of Silesian peasant life, Drayman Henschel (1898) and Rose Bernd (1903), and the dramatic fairy-tales The Sunken Bell (1896) and And Pippa Dances (1906).

Hauptmann's marital life was difficult and in 1904 he divorced his wife. That same year he married the actress Margarete Marschalk, who had borne him a son four years earlier. The following year he had an affair with the 17-year-old Austrian actress Ida Orloff, whom he met in Berlin when she performed in his play The Assumption of Hannele. Orloff inspired characters in several of Hauptmann's works and he later referred to her as his muse.

In 1911 he wrote The Rats. In 1912, Hauptmann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "primarily in recognition of his fruitful, varied and outstanding production in the realm of dramatic art."

During the First World War Hauptmann was a pacifist. In this period of his career he wrote several gloomy historical-allegorical plays, such as The Bow of Odysseus (1914), The White Saviour (1912–17), and Winter Ballade (1917). After the war, his dramatic abilities appeared to diminish. He wrote two full-length plays that are similar to the early successes: Dorothea Angermann (1926) and Before Sunset (1932). He remained in Germany after Hitler's Machtergreifung and survived the bombing of Dresden. His last work was the Atriden-Tetralogie (1942–46). His works in German were published by S. Fischer Verlag.

Hauptmann died at the age of 83 at his home in Agnetendorf (now Jagniątków, Poland) in 1946. Since the Polish communist administration did not allow Hauptmann's relatives to bury him in Agnetendorf (although even the Soviet military government had recommended this), his body was transported in an old cattle wagon to occupied Germany more than a month after his death. He was buried near his cottage on Hiddensee.

Works

Poster for a Federal Theatre Project presentation of The Weavers in the 1930s.

Novels

  • Der Narr in Christo Emanuel Quint (1910)
  • Atlantis (1912)
  • Phantom (1923)
  • Wanda, der Dämon (1926)
  • Die Insel der grossen Mutter (1928)
  • Um Volk und Geist (1932)
  • Im Wirbel der Berufung (1936)
  • Der Abenteuer meiner Jugend (1937)

Short novels

  • Bahnwärter Thiel (1888)
  • Die Ketzer von Soana (1924)
  • Marginalien (selected works, reports: 1887–1927)
  • Sonnen (1938)
  • Der Schuss im Park (1939)

Verse novels

  • Romethidenlos (1885)
  • Anna (1921)
  • Die blaue Blume (1924)
  • Till Eulenspiegel (1927)
  • Das Meerwunder (1934)
  • Der grosse Traum (1912–42)

Plays

  • Before Dawn (Vor Sonnenaufgang, 1889)
  • The Reconciliation (Das Friedensfest, 1890)
  • Lonely People (Einsame Menschen, 1891)
  • The Weavers (play) (Die Weber, 1892)
  • Colleague Crampton (College Cramption, 1892)
  • The Beaver Coat (Der Biberpelz, 1893)
  • The Assumption of Hannele (Hanneles Himmelfahrt, 1893)
  • Florian Geyer (1896)
  • Elga (1896)
  • Helios (1896) fragment
  • The Sunken Bell (Die versunkene Glocke, 1896)
  • Pastoral (Das Hirtenlied, 1898) fragment
  • Drayman Henschel (Fuhrmann Henschel, 1898)
  • Schluck and Jau (Schluck und Jau, 1900)
  • Michael Kramer (1900)
  • The Conflagration (Der rote Hahn, 1901)
  • Henry of Auë (Der arme Heinrich, 1902)
  • Rose Bernd (1903)
  • And Pippa Dances (Und Pippa Tanzt!, 1906)
  • The Maidens of the Mount (Die Jungfern von Bischofsberg, 1907)
  • Charlemagne's Hostage (Kaiser Karls Geisel, 1908)
  • Griselda (1909)
  • The Rats (play) (Die Ratten, 1911)
  • Gabriel Schilling's Flight (Gabriel Schillings Flucht, 1912)
  • Peter Brauer (1912)
  • Commemoration Masque (Festspiel in deutschen Reimen, 1913)
  • The Bow of Odysseus (Der Bogen des Odysseus, 1914)
  • Magnus Garbe (1914, second version: 1942)
  • Indipohdi (1920)
  • Veland (1925)
  • Herbert Engelmann (1921–26)
  • Spuk (two plays: Die schwarze Maske and Hexenritt, 1928)
  • Die goldene Harfe (1933)
  • Hamlet in Wittenberg (Hamlet im Wittenberg, 1935)
  • Die Finsternisse (1937)
  • Ulrich von Lichtenstein (1936–37)
  • Die Tochter der Kathedrale (1935–38)