Marianne Moore - Life

Life

Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor John Milton Moore and his wife, Mary Warner. Before Moore was born, her father suffered a nervous breakdown and Moore never got to meet her father. She grew up in her grandfather's household until 1894 when John Riddle Warner passed away. In 1905, Moore entered Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and graduated four years later with a B.A. and majored in history, law, and politics. She taught at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, until 1915, when Moore began to publish poetry professionally.

Read more about this topic:  Marianne Moore

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    The life of a good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the observance, and our lives are sustained by a nearly equal expense of virtue of some kind. The decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands sun, wind, and rain no less than the green one. It secretes sap and performs the functions of health. If we choose, we may study the alburnum only. The gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    A moment that gave not only itself, but
    Also the means of keeping it, of not turning to dust
    Or gestures somewhere up ahead
    But of becoming complicated like the torrent
    In new dark passages, tears and laughter which
    Are a sign of life, of distant life in this case.
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)

    The Heavens. Once an object of superstition, awe and fear. Now a vast region for growing knowledge. The distance of Venus, the atmosphere of Mars, the size of Jupiter, and the speed of Mercury. All this and more we know. But their greatest mystery the heavens have kept a secret. What sort of life, if any, inhabits these other planets? Human life, like ours? Or life extremely lower in the scale. Or dangerously higher.
    Richard Blake, and William Cameron Menzies. Narrator, Invaders from Mars, at the opening of the movie (1953)