On this day, November 15, in 1887, poet Marianne Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri. A “modernist” poet (along with the likes of William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound) her Collected Poems, published in 1951, won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She championed “delight in language” and expression over poetic form, often writing in syllabics. She became well known in New York (where she moved in 1918) for her irony and wit as well as her signature tri-cornered hat and black cape, and her love of boxing and baseball. She died in 1972 after a series of strokes, at age 84.
