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Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity.

Marianne Moore

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Marianne Moore
Age: 84 †
Born: 1887
Born: November 15
Died: 1972
Died: February 5
Essayist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Kirkwood
Missouri
Marianne Moore
Marianne Craig Moore
Primal
Poetic
Necessity
Poetry

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Concurring hands divide flax for damask that when bleached by Irish weather has the silvered chamois-leather water-tightness of a skin.
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The prey of fear, he, always curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly done, says to the alternating blaze, Again the sun! anew each day and new and new and new, that comes into and steadies my soul.
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Excess is the common substitute for energy.
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There never was a war that was not inward.
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Poetry ... ... a place for the genuine, Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise
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Psychology, which explains everything, Explains nothing, And we are still in doubt.
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I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time.
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Victory won't come to me unless I go to it a grape tendril ties a knot in knots till knotted thirty times
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They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene.
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Honesty - however dangerous - should be as valuable as radium it seems to me.
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The mind is an enchanting thing is an enchanted thing, like the glaze on a katydid-wing subdivided by sun till the nettings are legion.
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If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try.
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Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man.
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Camels are snobbish and sheep, unintelligent water buffaloes, neurasthenic-- even murderous. Reindeer seem over-serious.
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As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one's attending upon you but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.
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It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.
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The Irish say your trouble is their trouble and your joy their joy? I wish I could believe it I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.
Marianne Moore
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Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.
Marianne Moore
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... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ... ... if you demand on one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
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The power of the visible is the invisible.
Marianne Moore