Honored poet Marianne Craig Moore (1887–1972) was born on this day in Kirkwood, Missouri. The daughter of a schoolteacher, she began writing poems as a child and never lost her playful exactness.

“Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination,” she said. After college she moved to New York, worked as a librarian, and gathered with friends like William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens to talk poems and possibilities. In 1924 she received the Dial Award for her book Observations.

Her wit could be both tender and precise. In Marriage she wrote: “Psychology, which explains everything, / Explains nothing, / And we are still in doubt.”

With carefully chosen words, Moore worked through single images, celebrating the power of close attention. She often tucked a quiet moral thread into her poems, inviting heroism and grace. Her Collected Poems earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1951.

She prized exactness yet welcomed surprise, gathering quotations like small treasures, each one a spark saved for the right moment.

Unpigeonholed and spirited, she said, “I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.” A fan of Muhammad Ali and baseball, Moore in her cape and brimmed hat threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium in 1968 at age 80.