Tuesday, November 29, 2022

Marianne Moore - 320 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Marianne Moore

A poet and then an editor, Marianne Moore is known as a modernist poet. While working as an assistant at the New York Public Library, in 1921, she regularly met poets such as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Here is where she had her earliest impact of writing and prose.

She could convey deep ideas in simple and compact lines making the readers draw meaning and inferences.

What Are Years? -Marianne Moore

What is our innocence,

what is our guilt? All are

naked, none is safe. And whence

is courage: the unanswered question,

the resolute doubt—

dumbly calling, deafly listening—that

in misfortune, even death,

encourages others

and in its defeat, stirs


the soul to be strong? He

sees deep and is glad, who

accedes to mortality

and in his imprisonment, rises

upon himself as

the sea in a chasm, struggling to be

free and unable to be,

in its surrendering

finds its continuing.



The poem seeks to answer questions to the recognition of one’s own reality. The speaker wonders as to the true nature of one’s “soul.”



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