American poet whose work, alongside Stevens, Williams, Eliot, and Pound, constitutes the first generation of American modernism in English. Moore lived almost her entire adult life with her mother, first in Greenwich Village and then in Brooklyn; she edited The Dial from 1925 to 1929, where she published most of the major modernists; and she became, late in life, an unlikely public figure, throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium in a tricorn hat and cape.
The poems are built from an austere syllabic prosody (lines counted by syllables rather than stressed feet), relentlessly revised, packed with quotation from sources as varied as natural-history magazines, business reports, and the Bible. The characteristic Moore poem moves through close observation of an animal — pangolin, jerboa, octopus, snake — toward moral generalization that is earned by the precision of the looking. Her most famous poem, "Poetry," begins "I, too, dislike it" and proceeds to propose what poetry might earn: "imaginary gardens with real toads in them."
Moore's relationship with Elizabeth Bishop, who came to her as a college student in 1934 and remained a lifelong friend, is one of the great mentorships in American poetry. Her late, drastic revisions of her own work — cutting "Poetry" from twenty-nine lines to three in the Complete Poems (1967) — divide her readers; the standard editions now restore the longer versions.