The selected letters of Marianne Moore Book

If I can't write home when I want to very much I will have to let college go for one can't live by books alone and intercourse with strangers. (to family, 11/2/1905)

I'm more and more convinced that good writing depends on simple, sensitive depiction of the small things of life with an attitude on the part of the writer which never changes unless it changes unconsciously. (to family, 3/17/1907)

My work is not up to the scratch--that is, I get all over the ground and then want to jump overboard and exclaim, "the fates refuse to favor." (to Marcet Haldeman, 1/26/1908)

I often think I have such a terrific grasp of things that everything looks small--a great part of the time in fact; then accompanied by thunder and lightning I find myself an idiot with such a wormlike point of view and so little spunk--(when people make themselves salt in a wound--unconsciously of course--that I fairly curse the day I was born." (to MH, 2/9/1908)

Writing is all I care for, or for what I care most, and writing is such a puling profession, if it is not a great one, that I occasionally give up. You ought I think to be didactic like Ibsen, or poetic like "Sheats" [Shelley/Keats?], or pathetic like [J.M.] Barrie or witty like Meredith to justify your embarking as selfconfidently as the concentrated young egoist who is a writer, must. Writing is moreover a selfish profession and a wearing (on the investigator himself). (to family, 5/5/1908)

The pressure upon you is constant and I do not wonder that you come to ask yourself if dreams good and bad are not the whole stuff hope is made of. I know the feeling--the patient-impatience the vague sense of mocking disgust, the whole thing. There is nothing fundamental, the matter with aspiration; a man has to have at least one silver hope to hang by, to live. It is a superstitious hatred of failing in the trivial that tends to hurt one's underlying mettle. IT does not do. Self-possession and a spirit of forgiveness are the things to hold to, if you want really, to be master of your fate. By self-possession, I mean courage and patience. By the other, a real Christ-like desire to aid, tolerate and endure,--without any desire to dazzle. It is weakness, to want to "do it in a day" or to want to show poor jesting Pilate the enormousness and hideousness of his folly. I am considering here the problem of satisfying your highest individual desire--not taking into account the glory accidentally accruing. (to MH, 2/28/1908)

Dr. de Laguna then proceeded to explain, (having assured me numerous times that I must be afraid of the language) that I must regard the language as if it were spoken. He said, "it's much easier than German, and much easier than Latin, but you must regard every sentence as spoken, even if you don't read it aloud." And eh said "I'll give you two rules and if you stick to them they'll save you any amount of trouble. Never translate a Greek sentence into written English. Never write a sentence out and always write an English sentence out in Greek." He says he learned in 17 weeks in his Junior vacation, at college, and that nothing was more possible. He said of course it was in the summer and he gave four hours a day to it but h e said "you can do it--and you can teach yourself." As to remembering, he said, after you have passed out of childhood, you are in the best condition possible, to remember. "It's a popular myth," he said "that children remember better than grown people. You think it's wonderful when a baby 2 or 3 years old remembers you took it on the train, the other day, and you don't think it's wonderful when you remember that you took a journey 8 years ago." (to family, 12/12/1908)

Art is long, but life is so fast I wonder it does not catch up to it. (to family, 2/1/1909)

What you say about studying medicine does not disturb me at all; for interesting as medicine is, I feel you would not be able to give up writing, with the ability for it that you have; but it does disturb me that you should have the feeling that it might be well to give it up. To have produced what you have--either verse or prose is enviable, and you certainly could not suppose that such method as goes with a precise and proportioning ear is "contemporary" or usual. (to EB, 8/28/1936)

How thank you for knowing how to put things and for your brave way of suffering [Margaret Miller had just lost the lower part of her arm in a car accident; Louise Crane drove]. In such distress, even to think toward consolation is embittering; love is all that can help; but human love being what it is, I think Heaven can not but be aware of and pity such sorrow. Your thinking to mention the good surgeon and the insurance and the fact that Mrs. Miller came immediately shows that you know what the mind is and what anxiety about each of those things rushed upon us. Since receiving your letter I have hardly known what I was doing, in a vice, resisting the fact that the good and magical car that has so blessed you each should have taken from Margaret Miller so much--that anything should touch her beauty--and that you should each have had the pain of these weeks. But that is wrong. One starts from today. If Louise Crane were not the person she is, your lives might each have been lost. What mercy in her quickness; how well you know to go on a step at a time toward what would be best; and what a coward one is to feel anything but the helpful greatness of such courage as you speak of, in Margaret MILLER. (to EB, late Aug 1937)

As music is best described by performing it, poetry is best defined by writing it. And since so few do write it, what an experience to see someone put life and resonance into the distasteful thing, as you have done in your Man with the Blue Guitar. (to Wallace Stevens, 10/20/1937)

P.S. I attacked William Carlos W. for having said (Time last week) that he practiced medicine and so in his writing could "do as he damn pleased." He begged me to believe that he deplored it too, had impulsively said it offhand when Ki>Time was nearby, and that it entirely falsified his feeling about the Award. (to Hildegarde Watson, 1/25/1957)

I am interested in John Napier's letter and thank you for lending it to me. (Am enclosing it.) Have transcribed some of it since it expresses what I think. (The rhythm is the person.) (to WCW, 7/7/1957)