Mantis 22 (Summer 2024)
()bservations
Marianne Moore
To Yvor Winters
something of a badger-Diogenes –
we are indebted technically; and
attached personally, those of us who know him;
are proud of his hostility to falsity;
of his verse reduced to essence;
of a tenacity unintimidated by circumstance.
He does not hesitate to call others foolish,
and we do not shrink from imputations
of folly – of annoying a man to whom
compliments may be uncongenial;
– wise to be foolish when a sense of indebtedness
is too strong to suppress.
Note: This is a poem Moore contributed to a special issue of Sequoia: Stanford Literary Magazine, published by the Associated Students of Stanford University in Winter 1961. The issue was dedicated to Yvor Winters, the esteemed poet and critic who taught at Stanford’s English department since he earned his PhD from that same department in 1934 until his retirement in 1966. Moore and Winters had been acquainted since the 1920s, and he was an early and adamant supporter of her work.