Marianne Moore's Poetry

Marianne Moore's poetry is seductive in the way she arranges the syllables of each word, shapes lines in unusual ways, separates some words from the flow in order to emphasize their importance, and generally takes a very personal and unique approach to her material. It is especially interesting to see how she uses capitalization--or the lack of it--as a device that creates a very different structure and a different sense of meaning.

Other poets have tried to create a different sort of poetic structure using words and spelling in different ways. The largely uncapitalized poems of e.e. cummings serve as an example, and he also shapes his meaning by careful arrangement of syllables. Moore tends to be more prose-like than cummings, though, and she finds a particular means of communicating by creating a link between prose and poetry reminiscent of some Walt Whitman while standing alone as a unique offering from a powerful poe

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Category: Literature - M