The mad, mum-fixated maiden aunt of modernism

Marianne Moore’s poems are notoriously ‘difficult’ but her personality and the circumstances of her life are as fascinating today as they were to the avant-garde writers and artists of 1920s New York. Much of the fascination lies in the contrast between what Linda Leavell calls Moore’s ‘maiden-aunt persona’ and her position as a ground-breaking modernist, whose highly idiosyncratic verse and technical experimentation dazzled and baffled her contemporaries.

She was fragile, nervous, shy and had difficulty eating; an invitation to tea might ‘knock her up’ for days, but as editor of The Dial from 1925-1929, with ‘a paradoxical combination of self-assertion and self-effacement’ she was a powerful figure at the centre of modernism, and in her life, as in her poems, she embraced modern American culture, high or low, with ‘gusto’ — a quality she regarded as essential in art.

Her wit, ‘the unpredictability of her views and her diamond hard … observations’ brought her many admirers, Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot — the first promoters of her poetry — William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens among them. And as another poet Randall Jarrell observed ,‘in spite of a restraint unparalleled in our time, [Miss Moore] is a natural, excessive and magnificent eccentric.’

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She never married, ‘apparently never fell in love’, but lived with her mother for 40 years in conditions of appalling intimacy and apparently quite unnecessary frugality (sharing not merely a bedroom but a bed). Mother and daughter are described by one observer as ‘an anachronism … characters out of a Victorian novel misplaced in the modern frenzy of New York’. For five years these punctiliously formal, genteel and high-minded ladies ate their meals sitting on the edge of the bath. (And what meals: onions and prunes; for a guest, ‘cooked apples, canned corn, salad dressing and cocoa’).