Her second book, Observations, won The Dial Award in 1924, and then from 1925 to 1929 she served as editor for The Dial. Her awards include: the Helen Haire Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bollingen Prize. She once said that her favourite poem was the Book of Job.
At the Yankee's 1968 season opener, at age eighty, Marianne Moore threw the opening pitch. In her poem “Baseball and Writing” she expressed:
------Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting
------and baseball is like writing.
------------You can never tell with either
---------------how it will go
---------------or what you will do…
Her Christian faith informed and influenced her poetry significantly. The following poem is identified in a Wendell Berry poem in his book Another Day: Sabbath Poems, 2013—2023.
What Are Years
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,
encourage 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.
So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.
*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Marianne Moore: first post, second post.
Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.