Oltre il canone modernista: Marianne Moore e lo sport

Marianne Moore is considered as one of the main protagonists of American High Modernism. Her complex, extremely precise, and unconventional texts have been appreciated by intellectuals and scholars who have almost unanimously noted a decline in the quality and value of her oeuvre starting from the ‘50s when her poetry became more popular and accessible to an increasing number of readers. Her interest in sports has always been associated with the later part of her career, and the texts dealing with baseball have been read as evidence of a change in the standard and quality of her poetry. Taking the cue from the new and recent trend in Marianne Moore’s criticism, the goal of this essay is to illustrate how sports have always been present in her life and her poetry, even in her highly appreciated modernist texts, and how the later compositions containing references to athletes and physical activities have still many elements in common with the highly appreciated modernist poems.