Interviewer: Louise Bogan said that The Dial made clear "the obvious division between American avant-garde and American conventional writing." Do you think this kind of division continues or has continued? Was this in any way a deliberate policy?
Moore: I think that individuality was the great thing. We were not conforming to anything. We certainly didn't have a policy, except I remember hearing the word intensity very often. A thing must have intensity. That seemed to be the criterion.
Marianne Moore, The Art of Poetry No. 4, 1961 interviewed by Donald Hall, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review
Photo taken in the Rhode Island Audubon Nature Center and Aquarium
Moore: I think that individuality was the great thing. We were not conforming to anything. We certainly didn't have a policy, except I remember hearing the word intensity very often. A thing must have intensity. That seemed to be the criterion.
Marianne Moore, The Art of Poetry No. 4, 1961 interviewed by Donald Hall, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review
Photo taken in the Rhode Island Audubon Nature Center and Aquarium
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