The first collection of essays about Marianne Moore to appear in fifteen years, this book brings together the work of well established Moore scholars such as Patricia C. Willis, Elizabeth Gregory, Cristanne Miller, Linda Leavell, and Robin G. Schulze, with that of new contributors to the field. The essays in this volume, written from a variety of international perspectives, range across the most pressing concerns of contemporary literary study and reassert Moore's centrality to a critical and poetic field in which she has been surprisingly marginalized. This book also includes poems written by contemporary poets, many of them significant contributors to scholarship on Moore, as a way of acknowledging the importance of Moore's verse to living writers. The poems compliment the scholarly essays by demonstrating in verse the important ways in which Moore's artistic achievements have stimulated her successors.

A landmark definitive edition of one of our most innovative and beloved poets The landmark oeuvre of Marianne Moore, one of the major inventors of poetic modernism, has had no straight path from beginning to end; until now, there has been no good vantage point from which to see the body of her remarkable work as a whole. Throughout her life Moore arranged and rearranged, visited and revisited, a large majority of her existing poetry, always adding new work interspersed among revised poems. This makes sorting out the complex textual history that she left behind a pressing task if we mean to represent her work as a poet in a way that gives us a complete picture. New Collected Poems offers an answer to the question of how to represent the work of a poet so skillful and singular, giving a portrait of the range of her voice and of the modernist culture she helped create. William Carlos Williams, remarking on the impeccable precision of Moore’s poems, praised “the aesthetic pleasure engendered when pure craftsmanship joins hard surfaces skillfully.” It is only in New Collected Poems that we can understand her later achievements, see how she refashioned her earlier work, and get a more complete understanding of her consummate craftsmanship, innovation, and attention to detail. Presented and collected by Heather Cass White, the foremost scholar of Moore’s work, this new collection at last allows readers to experience the untamed force of these dazzling poems as the author first envisioned them.

A celebrated study of Elizabeth Bishop's genius, as revealed through her literary friendships

More than thirty years after her death, Marianne Moore continues to be one of America's best-loved poets, and is now regarded as one of the most significant and influential voices of the twentieth century. However, her inaccurately titled Complete Poems (Faber and Faber, 1968), from which the poet decided to omit nearly half of her published poetry - 'omissions are not accidents' - gave readers only a partial view of her work. The Poems of Marianne Moore, scrupulously edited by the poet Grace Schulman, for the first time includes all of Moore's poems, among them more than one hundred previously uncollected and unpublished versions. Organized chronologically, to allow readers to follow Moore's development as a poet, the volume includes an introduction and all of Moore's original notes to the poems, together with Schulman's editorial notes, attributions and the most significant variants. This long-awaited volume will reveal the true scope of Marianne Moore's poetry, particularly her increasingly admired early verse, and introduces her work to a new generation of readers in what will become the definitive edition. 'I am tempted simply to call her our greatest modern poet.' John Ashbery 'Moore's poems form part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time.' T. S. Eliot 'For sureness of execution, for originality of technical accomplishment, her poetry is unsurpassed in our time.' Randall Jarrell

While the later work of the great Modernist poet Marianne Moore was hugely popular during her final two decades, since her death critics have condemned it as trivial. This book challenges that assessment: with fresh readings of many of the late poems and of the iconic, cross-dressing public persona Moore developed to deliver them, Apparition of Splendor demonstrates that Moore used her late-life celebrity in daring and innovative ways to activate egalitarian principles that had long animated her poetry. Dressed as George Washington in cape and tricorn and writing about accessible topics like sports, TV shows, holidays, love, activism, mortality and celebrity itself, she reached a wide cross-section of Americans, encouraging them to consider what democracy means in their daily lives, particularly around issues of gender, sexuality, racial integration, class, age, and immigration. Moore actively sought out publication in popular venues (like Vogue, The New Yorker, and the Saturday Evening Post, etc.) and wrote on material chosen to directly appeal to the audiences there, influencing younger contemporaries, including poets like Ashbery, O’Hara, and Bishop, and artists like Warhol, Yoko Ono, and Ray Johnson. "Apparition of Splendor is brilliant and necessary. It provides an extended look at Marianne Moore’s late poetry that no other book-length study has taken on.... Gregory’s deep expertise is evident throughout. Her discussions make visible startling networks of connections between poems, and – while maintaining keen focus on the late poems – briskly but sensitively draw upon the earlier poems to clarify continuities and suggest transformations. Her archival and extra-literary research, in Moore’s papers and in regard to general cultural contexts, is wonderfully on display with every page. The subject of Moore’s late poetry is woefully understudied, and this book will conduct an important intervention in critical tendencies to dismiss this body of work. Apparition of Splendor is a major contribution to Moore studies and to studies of 20th-century American poetry.” - Linda Kinnahan, Duquesne University, author of Feminist Modernism, Poetics, and the New Economy: Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Marianne Moore (1887-1972) has been heralded as America's greatest poet of the modernist movement. Her volume Collected Poems won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1952 and the Bollingen Prize in 1953. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Moore eventually found her way to New York with her mother whom she continued to live with until her mother passed, a familial devotion so intense that William Carlos Williams complained that it was 'pathological' and prevented her from marrying any 'literary guys'. Moore never married. Linda Leavall is the first biographer to be granted access and freedom to quote from Moore's archives. More than just a standard biography, Leavall re-examines Moore's body of work to complement and enlighten the biography. Through Moore's poems and letters from T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and many others, Leavall has written what is sure to be the definitive biography of Moore.

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."--BOOK JACKET.

"The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--