Marianne Moore was among the foremost innovators of poetic form at the beginning of the 20th century. Influenced in part by visual experimentation like Cubism, Moore developed a poetic stanza based on syllabic verse: that is, the first, second, third, and so on lines of each stanza have the same number of syllables as the corresponding lines in every other stanza of a poem but the number of syllables is not determined by accent, syntax, "breath," or any other predictable pattern. In some poems, a line is as short as a single syllable. In other poems, or other lines of the same poem, a line may be over thirty syllables long. Consequently, her stanzaic patterns call attention to the artifice of poetic making; they challenge any notion that a poem is "natural" in its construction or form. At the same time, Moore's syntax eschews all poeticism; it is prosaic, and often colloquial. Her poems, then, foreground two rhythms in exciting and productive tension with each other: the visual pattern of the syllabic stanzas and the aural pattern of her prosaic syntax. Moore's use of rhyme highlights this play of rhythms: she uses line-end rhyme on unaccented syllables, but because the lines are of unpredictable length and typically end mid-sentence (sometimes even mid-word), the sentences are irregularly punctuated by subtle rhymes. The tension of these competing rhythms comes to powerful, even sensual, release in the concluding stanza of Moore's poems, where syntax, rhyme, and line-ends all combine in her concluding cadence.
