Marianne Moore was a giant of modern American poetry. Despite writing
notoriously difficult poems, Moore became famous — famous enough to
throw out the first pitch at a Yankees game at age 80, in 1968.
Along with baseball, Moore was also a big nature buff. She read
natural history and went to biology lectures. And she especially loved
the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where she would
study the habitat dioramas, talk with the museum’s experts, and chat
with kids visiting the museum.
In a series of poems from the 1930s, she wrote about some of the
exotic animals she encountered in her research: the arctic ox, the
armored pangolin, and the jerboa, a long-legged, big-eared rodent. In
her poem “Rigorists,” about reindeer, she writes:
> …they are adapted
>
> to scant reino
> or pasture, yet they can run eleven
> miles in fifty minutes; the feet spread when
>
> the snow is soft,
> and act as snow-shoes.
Moore packed in the scientific detail until her poems read almost like
encyclopedia articles in verse. And that was partly the point. Since
Aesop’s fables, people have projected human characteristics onto
animals — the brave lion, the cunning fox, the wise owl. But Moore
was more interested in what animals were really like, and she thought
science could be the stuff of poetry, too. When she drew a moral
lesson in her animal poems, it came out of the animal’s actual
behavior. Rather than making her poems less relatable, Moore’s
studious approach introduced a startling new depth to poetry about
animals.
At the time, Moore was unusual in depicting animals in scientifically
accurate ways, according to her biographer, Linda Leavell
[http://lindaleavell.com/]. “I’m not aware of any poet in her
generation who uses the language of science as Moore does,” Leavell
told Studio 360. And it’s still an avant-garde move: our culture’s
most popular representations of animals come from animated movies
where animals go on quests and teach life lessons to children —
Aesop all over again.
