In her introduction, Bonnie Costello writes: On July 9, 1959, T. S. Eliot wrote to Marianne Moore: "One of the books which obviously must in the fullness of time be published . . . will be the Letters of Marianne Moore." We are pleased to fulfill his prediction. Marianne Moore's correspondence makes up the largest and most broadly significant collection of any modern poet. It documents the first two-thirds of this century, reflecting shifts from Victorian to modernist culture, the experience of the two world wars, the Depression and postwar prosperity, and the changing face of the arts in America and Europe. Moore wrote letters daily for most of her life--long, intense letters to friends and family; shorter, but always distinctive letters to an ever-widening circle of acquaintances and fans. At the height of her celebrity, she would occasionally write as many as fifty letters a day. Both Moore and her correspondents appreciated the value of their exchange, so that an extraordinary number of letters, approximately thirty thousand, have been preserved . . . It is Moore's poetry that draws us to her letters, of course. But in making this selection we have tried to present the life and mind of a woman whose interests extended to all the arts, to religion, politics, and psychology, to fashion, sports, and the domestic arts, moving freely between high culture and popular culture, and whose family and friendships remained as important as her professional life. Moore's correspondence is unique in the extent of its extraliterary interests and passionate engagement with the world at large. From her college adventures, her travels, and the flurry of her artistic and social activities, there seems to have been no lull. What has struck us most in reading through Moore's letters is the vitality and fullness of the long life they record.

Analyzes the stages in Moore's development from purely imagist style to her preoccupations with the visual arts, with the question of form in relation to message and with the conflict between tension and fluency. Contains readings of individual poems, shedding light on their meaning and tone, under such headings as "Images of Sweetened Combat" and "Images of Luminosity, Iridescence, and Metamorphosis".

Marianne Moore's correspondence makes up the largest and most broadly significant collection of any modern poet. It documents the first two-thirds of this century, reflecting shifts from Victorian to modernist culture, the experience of the two world wars, the Depression and postwar prosperity, and the changing face of the arts in America and Europe. Moore wrote letters daily for most of her life—long, intense letters to friends and family; shorter, but always distinctive letters to an ever-widening circle of acquaintances and fans. At the height of her celebrity, she would occasionally write as many as fifty letters a day. Both Moore and her correspondents appreciated the value of their exchange, so that an extraordinary number of letters, approximately thirty thousand, have been preserved. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Originally published in 1950 under title: The letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941.

Long unavailable, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams is now reissued as a New Directions Paperbook. Spanning fifty-four years, this collection record the creative growth of one of the twentieth century's most influential and versatile writers.

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.

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.

WCW, I Wanted to Write a Poem. Williams discusses the procedure of poetry.

The poet Elizabeth Bishop is said to have a prismatic way of seeing. In this companion to her poetry, making connections between modern art and modern poetry, Bonnie Costello aims to give a sense of the poet and her ways of seeing and writing.