Marianne Moore Zitate

seite 2

„… wir
bewundern nicht was
wir nicht verstehen können.“

“There is an inevitable connection between music and poetry.”

“Poetry I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle,
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it
one discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.”

“I think books are chiefly responsible for my dogged self determined efforts to write; books & verisimilitude; I like to describe things.”

“Music should be directed by the ear, poetry by the imagination”

“I have learned more from Ezra Pound about writing than from anyone else.”

“A symbol from the first, of mastery,
experiments such as Hippocrates made
and substituted for vague
speculation stayed
the ravages of plague.”

“This is a strange fraternity — these sea lions and land lions,
land unicorns and sea unicorns;
the lion civilly rampant,
tame and concessive like the long-tailed bear of Ecuador —
the lion standing up against this screen of woven air
which is the forest:
the unicorn also, on its hind legs in reciprocity.”

“What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe.”

“I look upon verse as an exercise in composition.”

“Tell me, Tell me where might there be a refuge for me
from egocentricity
and its propensity to bisect,
mis-state, misunderstand
and obliterate continuity?”

“I have been influenced by the Bible, Bach's music and contemporarily by Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams and Hopkins.”

“Some speak of things we know, as new;
And you, of things unknown as things forgot.”

“Love, ah Love, when your slipknot's drawn,
One can but say, "Farewell, good sense."”

“I never plan a stanza, words cluster like chromosomes determining the procedure, later, I may influence or thin it.”

“I tend to write in patterned arrangement with rhymes.. I try to secure an effect of flowing continuity and the correspondence between verse and music.”

“What of it? We call them brave
perhaps? Yes; what if the time should come
when no one will fight for anything
and there's nothing of worth to save.”

“So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear
but never caught,
the unicorn has been preserved
by an unmatched device
wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths …”

“Maine should be pleased that its animal
is not a waverer, and rather
than fight, lets the primed quill fall.
Shallow oppressor, intruder,
insister, you have found a resister.”

“A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.”

“Precision, economy of statement, logic employed to ends that are disinterested … liberate the imagination.”

“If you demand on the other hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.”

“A willingness to satisfy contradictory objections to one's manner of writing might turn one's work into the donkey that finally found itself being carried by its masters, since some readers suggest that quotation marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. But since in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest. Perhaps those who are annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts could be persuaded to take probity on faith and disregard the notes.”

“You know I don't really understand much of my poetry myself. Of course, I was convinced I understood it when I wrote it!”

“There is hate's crown beneath which all is
death; there's love without which none
is king.”

“Poetry is: a classifying, a botanizing, a voracity of contemplation, a pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation in which the actual is a deft benficence.”

“You are not male nor female, but a plan
deep-set within the heart of man.”

“One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.”

“For me, a poem starts when a felicitious phrase springs to mind.”