Marianne Moore

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
Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair t...

Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this, with eight stranded whales to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish
One by one in tw...

If external action is effeteand rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as when in a Bible classthe teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse
He said - and I think I repeat his exact words - "Hebrew poetry is prosewith...

you've seen a strawberrythat's had a struggle; yetwas, where the fragments met,a hedgehog or a star-fish for the multitudeof seeds
What better foodthan apple seeds - the fruitwithin the fruit - locked inlike counter-curved twinhazelnuts
...

not of silver nor of coral, but of weatherbeaten laurel
here, he introduced a sea uniform like tapestry; here, a fig-tree; there, a face; there, a dragon circling space — designating here, a bower; there, a pointed passion-flower

You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather thanan asset - that in view of the fact that spirit creates form we are justified in supposing that you must have brains
For you, a symbol of the unit, stiff and sharp,conscious of ...

Strong and slippery, built for the midnight grass-party confronted by four cats, he sleeps his time away — the detached first claw on his foreleg which corresponds to the thumb, retracted to its tip; the small tuft of fronds or katydid legs above ...