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 poet. Her metric structure utilizes length as much as accent to create units that both stand alone and fit together into a prosodic whole, and reading her poetry demands careful consideration of the various elements she brings together and shapes to her own sense of meaning and imagery.
Marianne Moore's metrical and linguistic complexity is evident in her poem "Spenser's Ireland." The title of the poem bleeds directly into the first line to create an opening sentence: "Spenser's Ireland has not altered" (1), and then evidence that it has not altered is offered. Left alone, the first line has four syllables, followed by two lines of eight syllables each. With the inclusion of the title, the first line also has eight syllables.
The opening of the poem stands as a statement of her view of her subject, that Ireland has not changed since the time of Spenser. She links her poetry with Spenser's by making this reference, and what is more important, she links her Ireland with his.
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