"Modern American Poetry: Marianne Moore"

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

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

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

“I don't consider In Distrust of Merits a poem. It's just a burst of feelings. It's emotion recorded, a 'haphazard form ' a protest.”

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

“Yes, I believe in prayer, as a mystery which can endow one with more power perhaps than any other spiritual mystery, yet a mystery that cannot be exposited to a point where it is not a mystery.”