Product Description
This definitive edition contains sixty years of Marianne Moore's poems, incorporating her text revisions and her own entertaining notes that reveal the inspiration for complete poems and individual lines. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Even scarier...
...that a big house like Penguin would put out such a poor quality translation.Among other formatting failures, there is absolutely no indentation to the lines.Ms. Moore plays with her structures as much as her words.As a result, much is lost in rhythm and resonance.I for one hope this costly title is updated because only then might it be worth $12.In the meantime, check out her first edition of "Poems," converted to Kindle by (yes, yours truly) Perscribo Publishing.While the poems therein had been revised many times until this publication, it still parlays a better impression of her incisive and ultra-modern wit.

Boo!
Ms. Moore: unfailingly brilliant. Penguin's editors? Not so much. This edition has only the first three lines of Moore's excellent poem "Poetry," and those three are printed inaccurately -- at least in my copy. So much for complete.

Building her own net
I believe that it was Robert Frost who commented with regards to modern poetry, that it was like playing tennis without a net.Marianne Moore created her own net - her poetry is built upon strict syllabic counts sheimposed upon herself.The result is finely crafted poetry that is neverself-indulgent.

I have found her syllabic count to be a good way tointroduce structure into student's poetry.I have found it to be a goodwriting exercise.And in using the structure in these ways, I have becomeever more impressed with the quality of work she achieved.But more thanthe technical quality, I enjoy the humor and just plain fun of her animalpoems.

perceptive and unassuming
Marianne Moore's poetry is perceptive and unassuming. She often writes with a dry sense of humor. Her interest in sports, especially baseball, is also expressed in her poetry. She enjoys odd behavior in animals and writesabout them just as they are. "An Octopus" is one of her longerpoems and needs several readings to be appreciated. Moore creates poemsthat are filled with intuitive insight and beauty. ... Read more

Product Description
Marianne Moore's first edition of poetry published in 1921 by The Egoist Press. Includes active table of contents, correct spacing/breaks, and automatic (poetic) indentation for any size frame or font.It is recommended this title be read in the widest possible (i.e., landscape) horizontal frame to accommodate longer lines and to truly appreciate the syllabic structure and pattern of these poems.

For more exceptionally-formatted ePoetry titles search "Perscribo Publishing" in the Kindle Store. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Master of the "hairy toed" metaphor
Ms. Moore; one of the first to abandon the rigid, 19th century forms; goes full bore (or, shall we say, "Boar") in a brilliant slashing and re-positioning of poetry standards; not dissimilar to the 'Chicago Style' pioneered by jazz musicians of the same era. ... Read more

Product Description
This complete collection of Moore’s poetry, lovingly edited by prize-winning poet Grace Schulman, for the first time gathers together all of Moore’s poems, including more than a hundred that were previously uncollected and unpublished. This long-awaited volume will reveal to Moore’s admirers the scope of her poetic voice and will introduce new generations of readers to her extraordinary achievement. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

The paperback corrects errors of transcription in the hardcover but beware of the editor's "conscientious inconsistency"
I have found Moore's poetry difficult to read in her Collected/Selected/Complete volumes because I could never grow beyond the perception of her poetry that magazine readers must have had--her poetry always appeared in isolated poetic moments and not a continuity of development."The Poems of Marianne Moore" allows us to see her grow as a poet--as others state in the reviews for this book.However, Heather Cass White in "A Quiver of Significance: Marianne Moore 1932-36" warns of two problems in "The Poems of Marianne Moore".The editor reprints poems with "conscientious inconsistency"--meaning she sometimes chooses the 1967 version of the poem, Moore's last revision before her death, and sometimes chooses to reprint an earlier version of a poem.We never know, as Heather Cass White says, "what stage of thinking is reflected in any given poem".A further problem arises because the hardcover contains "frequent errors of transcription", again I quote White.I have not personally traced all those errors and those errors have been corrected in the paperback edition, however, be aware of the limitations of this praiseworthy effort.

The paperback corrects errors of transcription in the hardcover but beware of the editor's "conscientious inconsistency"
I have found Moore's poetry difficult to read in her Collected/Selected/Complete volumes because I could never grow beyond the perception of her poetry that magazine readers must have had--her poetry always appeared in isolated poetic moments and not a continuity of development."The Poems of Marianne Moore" allows us to see her grow as a poet--as others state in the reviews for this book.However, Heather Cass White in "A Quiver of Significance: Marianne Moore 1932-36" warns of two problems in "The Poems of Marianne Moore".The editor reprints poems with "conscientious inconsistency"--meaning she sometimes chooses the 1967 version of the poem, Moore's last revision before her death, and sometimes chooses to reprint an earlier version of a poem.We never know, as Heather Cass White says, "what stage of thinking is reflected in any given poem".A further problem arises because the hardcover contains "frequent errors of transcription", again I quote White.I have not personally traced all those errors and those errors have been corrected in the paperback edition, however, be aware of the limitations of this praiseworthy effort.

flawed but valuable
This book is a must for students of Moore as it is the only one that contains all poems from her long career.Grace Shulman is a loving and conscientious editor, but the careful reader suffers much frustration because of the arrangement of the notes.Moore annotated herself extensively and also requires editorial notes because she wrote so many versions of her poems. Shulman rightly includes both sets of notes on every poem, but this edition makes it difficult to find them in the back of the book.They are arranged chronologically, so one has to know the date of each poem in order to look up the note.If there is a future edition, I hope simple page headings can be added, such as "Notes to pages 100-115."

More of Moore
Every Marianne Moore fan needs this book, and even the casual reader will benefit from all the uncollected poems Grace Schulman includes in this volume, nearly twice as big as the standard Complete Poems Moore published in her lifetime.

Moore was a savage editor of her work, and insisted on collecting only what she considered the very best of her poems, often significantly revised over the years. Schulman pulls back the curtain to let you see the earlier versions, in the chronological order in which they were written, along with many very fine poems that didn't pass muster with Moore. You get four versions of the famous "Poetry," for instance ("I, too, dislike it")-the 1919 original included in the body of the text and the three variants Moore wrote over the next 40 years tucked helpfully in the Notes at the back.

The upshot is that you get a much clearer sense of Moore's development and characteristic concerns. Every bit as formidable, she also becomes just a little more human when you see the full range of her writing. Some of the false starts and minor pieces can often be more revealing than the Greatest Hits (though sometimes what Moore considered minor can be scary.) Now that Schulman's book is available as a paperback, I wonder how many of these lesser-known poems will eventually find their way into the anthologies.

Schulman also won me over by including Moore's earliest poem, written for Christmas in 1895 when she was 8:

Dear St. Nicklus:

This Christmas morn
You do adorn
Bring Warner a horn
And me a doll
That is all. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Less is Moore
Because he didn't get permission to quote from Marianne Moore's family correspondence, and because she led an outwardly uneventful life, Charles Molesworth falls into the trap of more or less paraphrasing from Moore's letters to tell her story, leaving some of the big questions about this unlikely Modernist nearly untouched. He doesn't seem to see anything unusual in Moore's relationship with her mother, who she lived with for the first 60 years of her life and whose letters and sayings became such a rich source for her poems. He doesn't examine why Moore chose to be a lifelong spinster, or attracted so much interest among Greenwich Village's hard-living bohemians. Even her religious convictions are taken for granted, without much consideration of how her faith shaped her distinctive views of life and art.

I wish Molesworth had looked for more creative, less literary sources on Moore: maybe parishioners from her church, or her nieces, or people who worked with her adored older brother, Warner. A more inspired reading of the poems might have helped round out the picture, too: you kind of wonder what all those aloof and armored animals that walk through her poems say about her life. This book's a little too content to take Moore and her family at their own valuation, where I hoped to see beyond the careful surface and learn more about the sources of her poetry. Helpful for sketching the outlines of Moore's life, but it left me looking for another book to add depth and texture.

Very good information
This book is quite informative -- the author has clearly done solid and serious research for many years to write such a book.However, the book is incredibly boring -- it has no through-line, no plot, just chronological plodding through year after year without any sense of how to tell a story, much less write one.The style is extremely uneven and at times just pure aggravation.He actually uses words like "ignorable," a word that is not in my Webster's Unabridged but that obviously means easily ignored, but after the fiftieth such term it does become difficult to ignore such awkward neologisms.

Still, if you are interested in Moore, this book is the best place to start.He is right about everything where her critics are just a pack of psychotic feminist goofballs for the most part -- one book uses the term "anti-bourgeois" 123 times in 120 pages.Moore was for the Vietnam War, voted for Nixon and went to church twice a week.She spent her entire life in devotion to Christ.You won't find that out from reading her critics, who instead draft her into the feminist war on men.While Moore did think women should have the right to vote, she was also against any kind of self-righteousness and was very conservative, and long before Nixon had supported Taft and Hoover.She is also anti-feminist in many ways: Molesworth quotes her:

"If there is any advantage in dress, it is on the side of woman; ... women are no longer debarred from professions that are open to men, and if one cares to be femininely lazy, traditions of the past still afford shelter" (162).

Molesworth gets his facts straight and is right about the major themes of Moore's life, and this part of his book is pure pleasure.This is a great biography in terms of research and details, but very poor in terms of plot line, and readability.I've read about ten books on Moore, and this is far and away the best one.You get a good picture of her, while in most of the criticism you get willfully and woefully inaccurate depictions of her in which the authors simply don't care at all to present the truth.Molesworth really does care to present the truth as he sees it, and he has struggled hard to get to it.Thank heavens there is one useful book to get at this difficult, charming, incredibly ingenious poet.Set aside 60 hours to read it, it's about as difficult to read as anything I've read since Hegel, but he hews close to the facts, and has a very strong mind for understanding Moore's philosophy, religion, and temperament.He just has so many facts, and they don't seem to be well-organized, and sometimes you have to reread a paragraph three times to figure out what he was trying to say, as he can move from talking about her brother, to a poem, to a check she got, to her interest in the Presbyterian religion all in one sentence.Check out this sentence, literally chosen at random (there are some that I could find that are much worse):

"The poem [The Plumet Basilisk], by treating his enemies as Iscariot-like, implicitly compares Hoover to Christ; this may well be the result of Mrs. Moore's influence, though Moore's own political views in this period are strongly conservative" (259).

The author is extremely familiar with all the vast currents of modernism and intimately familiar with the work of Williams, Eliot, Stevens, H.D., and not only with their poetics, but with where their money came from, and who they were sleeping with.This is a really useful book that I took one star away from for its awkward prose, but I am so grateful that it exists that I gave it 4 stars and would advise anybody interested in Moore to skip the lit-crit and just go straight to this book.The lit-crit is not only terribly written but is just entirely wrong-headed and for the most unable to deal with this paradoxically avant-garde conservative Christian. ... Read more

Product Description

Not confessional or autobiographical, not openly political or gender-conscious: all that Marianne Moore's poetry is not has masked what it actually is. Cristanne Miller's aim is to lift this mask and reveal the radically oppositional, aesthetic, and political nature of the poet's work. A new Moore emerges from Miller's persuasive book--one whose political engagement and artistic experiments, though not cut to the fashion of her time, point the way to an ambitious new poetic.

Miller locates Moore within the historical, literary, and family environments that shaped her life and work, particularly her sense and deployment of poetic authority. She shows how feminist notions of gender prevalent during Moore's youth are reflected in her early poetry, and tracks a shift in later poems when Moore becomes more openly didactic, more personal, and more willing to experiment with language typically regarded as feminine. Distinguishing the lack of explicit focus on gender from a lack of gender-consciousness, Miller identifies Moore as distinctly feminist in her own conception of her work, and as significantly expanding the possibilities for indirect political discourse in the lyric poem. Miller's readings also reveal Moore's frequent and pointed critiques of culturally determined power relationships, those involving race and nationality as well as gender.

Making new use of unpublished correspondence and employing close interpretive readings of important poems, Miller revises and expands our understanding of Marianne Moore. And her work links Moore--in her radically innovative reactions to dominant constructions of authority--with a surprisingly wide range of late twentieth-century women poets.

Product Description
A collection of critical essays on the poetry of Marianne Moore. Also includes a chronology of events in her life. ... Read more

Product Description
This book traces the development of Marianne Moore's poetry throughout her sixty-year career as one of America's finest poets. Margaret Holley examines changes in Moore's approach to moral and artistic values, and discusses how language and form were distinctive in each of the poet's major phases. The study shows how the solitary, satirical voice of Moore's early verses matured into the wise observer of the later, major poems. Holley demonstrates how the virtuoso work of the middle years, infused with compassion and a sense of community, relaxed into the playful meditations of Moore's old age, when fame had brought her wide readership and acclaim. In exploring how shifts in Moore's poetic voice reflected important stages of her overall poetic growth, Holley provides detailed readings of the poems. The poetic strategies examined include: Moore's deployment of emblems and mottoes, her blend of overt and covert quotation, changes in her metaphoric language, her use of model stanzas in syllabic verse, her preferences for rhyme and closure, and her distinct spatial imagination. ... Read more

Product Description
Becoming a Poet traces the evolution of Elizabeth Bishop's poetic career through her friendships with other poets, notably Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Published in 1989 following critic David Kalstone's death, with the help of a number of his friends and colleagues, it was greeted with uniformly enthusiastic praise. Hailed at that time as "one of the most sensitive appreciations of Elizabeth Bishop's genius ever composed" and "a first-rate piece of criticism" and "a masterpiece of understanding about friendship and about poetry," it has been largely unavailable in recent years.
... Read more

Product Description
Marianne Moore graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1909. She was acting editor of The Dial from 1925 until its last issue in 1929. Her Collected Poems, published in 1951, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Award. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A sage for the ages
"We dare not let ourselves be snared into hating hatefulness," wrote Marianne Moore in one of her essays. "To do so is to take our own lives."

What can be said about this Presbyterian sage in the tri-cornered hat, Brooklyn's Confucius (by way of Kirkwood, Missouri and Bryn Mawr)? She had one of the most enchanting minds in a century filled with enchanting minds. She had a knack for proverbs and distinctions. "Satisfaction is a lowly thing, how pure a thing is joy." And somewhat primly, she would insist on the difference between liberty and license. But she knew that "ethical sins are not poetic sins" and placed great importance -- rebuking herself slightly? -- on becoming "liberalized in your judgment."

She wrote on politics, finding it "impossible to reprehend" President Eisenhower. She wrote on fashion, producing the wonderful sentence, "A narrow sheath or pant (if I may use the word) does not set a hippomoid figure off to advantage." And of course, she wrote on poetry and literature in a tone of resolute positiveness that was not blind to faults but merciful to them. One thinks that a "bad" review from Miss Moore would be more thoughtful, and therefore worth more, than a good review from any number of her contemporaries. About the now-largely-forgotten figure Maxwell Bodenheim (or was it Vachel Lindsay?), she wrote that one "must deplore his lack of esthetic rigor." She placed great importance on "governance of the emotions," yet knew that poetry "is not a thing of tunes, but of heightened consciousness."

She was the supreme mistress of litotes, using double negatives to make a tentative positive. "Not unaware" instead of "aware" -- and she humbly poked fun at herself for this tendency, quoting George Orwell against herself: "the not ungreen grass." But she would take the tendency of double, or multiple, negatives to a comic extreme, as when she wrote of Cummings and Williams that they "do not balk at anything like unprudishness."

She was the furthest thing from a cynic that one could possibly find. "How discuss verity with cynics," she lamented once, "cynicism being a plant with no fruit or interesting seed?" Miss Moore gave us hundreds of these gentle incontrovertibilities. ... Read more

Product Description
"Are you a scientist?" I ask.

Marianne stops writing and looks up. "No, I’m not a scientist — I’m a poet."

"Oh," I reply. I’ve never met a poet before. "What, exactly, does a poet do?" I ask her.

"For me, being a poet begins with watching."

On a trip to the zoo, young Jonathan returns a lost hat to Marianne, a woman who wears all black and scribbles notes in a little book. When Marianne invites him to tour the zoo with her, Jonathan makes a new friend and learns that he too can write poetry.

With lighthearted illustrations and a poetically told story, this picture book about poet Marianne Moore offers readers a glimpse of the writing process and encourages them to become writers too. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Not interesting
This picture book is about a little boy meeting poet Marianne Moore at at a zoo. I found it less interesting than most picture books. It just seemed a little boring. The boy meets Marianne after she loses her hat. She then walks with him through the zoo and tells him about being a poet. But there was nothing fun about that, except maybe that they were at a zoo. Even that seemed tedious, though. One of Jen Bryant's better book is Abe's Fish, about Abraham Lincoln, which I reviewed also.

... Read more

Product Description
14 b/w photographs, 243 line illustrationsThroughout her lifetime, Marianne Moore was an avid editor of her own verse. The bulk of her poems appear in numerous, at times vastly different published versions.For Moore, no text was ever stable or finished; each opportunity to publish offered an opportunity to revise. Becoming Marianne Moore gives scholars and readers access to the multiple variant versions of Moore's poems published between 1907 and 1924. An innovative, deeply contextualized facsimile edition of the poet's published early verse, it brilliantly demonstrates that modernist textuality is not a fixed, static product but an ongoing, fluid process.Becoming Marianne Moore offers readers a full facsimile reprint of the first edition of Observations (1924), the book that garnered Moore the Dial Award for Literature and solidified her reputation as a modernist poet of note. The reprint is followed by a collection of facsimiles that presents each of Moore's poems published between 1907 and 1924 as it first appeared in a modernist little magazine. Each facsimile is accompanied by a variorum table that gives scholars quick access to all of the published changes that Moore made to each poem and a series of brief bibliographical notes that supply information about the immediate publication contexts of all of the presentations of the poem. These notes, in turn, point readers to narrative accounts of Moore's associations with her early publishers that offer a range of historical, contextual, biographical, and bibliographic information about the publication events of Moore's poems and explore her attempts to shape her literary career in concert with some of her most famous modernist peers--Richard Aldington, H.D., Harriet Monroe, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.A wonderful fusion of historical research and critical sensitivity, Becoming Marianne Moore will change the way people think about Moore's verse and modernist textuality in general. A powerful intervention into Moore studies, it gives readers a broader sense of the poet's complex and brilliant career. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Reader's Reaction
I have submitted a more formal review elsewhere, but wanted to encourage readers who study modernist poetry to consult this book. You do not have to be a specialist in the poetry of Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, or Else Lasker-Schüler in order to find this book useful. Whereas we have heard something about Moore and Loy, learning about Else Lasker-Schüler's alternate identity, the Jewish, male Prince Jussuf, was really entertaining, and an example of how travestism is not necessarily based on sexuality.Miller has done a great job of blending cultural studies with poetic analysis. I especially appreciated her comments on the cultural settings particular to women in New York and Berlin. The three main chapters deal with the naming acts of the poets, the ways in which they construct their poetic bodies, and how Judaic traditions have had an influence on the poetry of all three.This volume can be read cover to cover, or in isolated sections. Miller has taken examples from numerous unpublished manuscripts, so Cultures of Modernism is a find for those working specifically on these poets as well. Happy reading! ... Read more