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".

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".

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.

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.

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.

A Study Guide for Marianne Moore's "Poetry," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

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.

The Plural of Us is the first book to focus on the poet’s use of the first-person plural voice—poetry’s “we.” Closely exploring the work of W. H. Auden, Bonnie Costello uncovers the trove of thought and feeling carried in this small word. While lyric has long been associated with inwardness and a voice saying “I,” “we” has hardly been noticed, even though it has appeared throughout the history of poetry. Reading for this pronoun in its variety and ambiguity, Costello explores the communal function of poetry—the reasons, risks, and rewards of the first-person plural. Costello adopts a taxonomic approach to her subject, considering “we” from its most constricted to its fully unbounded forms. She also takes a historical perspective, following Auden’s interest in the full range of “the human pluralities” in a time of particular pressure for and against the collective. Costello offers new readings as she tracks his changing approach to voice in democracy. Examples from many other poets—including Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens—arise throughout the book, and the final chapter offers a consideration of how contemporary writers find form for what George Oppen called “the meaning of being numerous.” Connecting insights to philosophy of language and to recent work in concepts of community, The Plural of Us shows how poetry raises vital questions—literary and social—about how we speak of our togetherness.

The early twentieth century marked a dramatic shift in the American conception of nature. This book analyzes the ways in which the scientific recasting of American nature as an antidote for degeneration influenced work of important modernist writers Harriet Monroe, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore.