Marianne Moore (1887-1972), American poet, noted for using the stanza as the basic unit of her poetry. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Moore was educated at Bryn Mawr College. From 1925 to 1929 she edited the literary magazine The Dial. She was associated at first with the imagist movement (see Imagism), but she later developed her own rhyme patterns and verse forms using the arrangement of syllables, rather than conventional stress patterns, as the base for her meter (see Versification). In her poetry Moore embedded crystalline references to a vast array of subjects. She was, for example, an ardent baseball fan, especially of the Brooklyn Dodgers team, and frequently celebrated this interest in her verse. Her work is descriptive and reflective, rather than lyric or dramatic, and it often gives minutely detailed descriptions of landscapes, animals, or objects.

Moore's first collection of verse was Poems (1921). This book was followed by Observations (1924), Selected Poems of Marianne Moore (1935, with an introduction by the poet T. S. Eliot), The Pangolin and Other Verse (1936), What Are Years? (1941), Nevertheless (1944), Collected Poems (1951; Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, 1952), Like a Bulwark (1956), O to Be a Dragon (1959), The Arctic Ox (1964), and Tell Me, Tell Me (1966). Moore's translation of Fables by the French author Jean de la Fontaine appeared in 1954, and Predilections (a book on her favorite writers) appeared in 1955. A Marianne Moore Reader was published in 1961, and The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore was published in 1967.