Marianne Moore

Poems covering a wide range of topics, from images of animals to meditations on human nature, are accompanied by the author's notes revealing the inspiration for many of the poems

Complete Poems

A complete posthumous collection of poems includes 120 previously unprinted works that were omitted from earlier definitive publications, as well as original notes, and is organized chronologically to enable readers to follow her development as a poet. 17,500 first printing.

The Poems of Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore's Observations stands with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's early Cantos, and Wallace Stevens's Harmonium as a landmark of modern poetry. But to the chagrin of many admirers, Moore eliminated a third of its contents from her subsequent poetry collections while radically revising some of the poems she retained. This groundbreaking book has been unavailable to the general reader since its original publication in the 1920s. Presented with a new introduction by Linda Leavell, the author of the award-winning biography Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore, this reissue of Observations at last allows readers to experience the untamed force of Moore's most dazzling innovations. Her fellow modernists were thrilled by her originality, her "clear, flawless" language--to them she was "a rafter holding up . . . our uncompleted building." Equally forceful for subsequent generations, Observations was an "eye-opener" to the young Elizabeth Bishop, its poems "miracles of language and construction." John Ashbery has called "An Octopus" the finest poem of "our greatest modern poet." Moore's heroic open-mindedness and prescient views on multiculturalism, biodiversity, and individual liberty make her work uniquely suited to our times. Impeccably precise yet playfully elusive, emotionally complex but stripped of all sentiment, the poems in Observations show us one of America's greatest poets at the height of her powers.

Poems

Observations

A wily cat, a strange romance, detestable daughters: the great American poet Marianne Moore retells three stories originally written by Charles Perrault to amuse the niece of Louis XIV. Modern readers may be surprised to find that the prince does not wake Sleeping Beauty with a kiss - the more he cares, the less willing he is to intrude - and that his mother is descended from ogres. Characterised by vivid imagery, uncluttered prose, inventive alliteration and a sly sceptic's wit, Moore's versions do more than tell a tale: 'Having seen a problem solved,' she writes, each one leaves 'a pattern of order in the mind.'

Fairy Tales

Collected Poems

During her lifetime Marianne Moore was that rarest of combinations, a genuine leader in the art of poetry, as well as a bona fide celebrity. She was an instantly recognisable symbol of Brooklyn, New York, appearing on the cover of Life magazine, asked by the Ford Motor Company to christen their new family sedan, and by the New York Yankees to throw the opening pitch of their baseball season. However, because of Moore's restless, seldom-ceasing, decade-spanning revision of her own poems, creating a 'stable' text of her work has posed editors a challenge ever since. Moore tackled the problem herself: Complete Poems (1967) was her own selection, but she favoured the later work, including less than half of her output up to that point. 'Omissions are not accidents,' she wrote pointedly in that edition, but for some readers the absence of more than one hundred poems constituted a wilful neglect of her startlingly innovative, highly influential early work, and contributed to Moore's undervaluing as a 'modernist' poet. Marianne Moore scholar Heather Cass White has prepared an edition of poems that, for the first time, presents the full range of Moore's work in its published order, while honouring the complex textual lives of the poems. With an inviting introduction and meticulous notes, the New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore is the first definitive text of this most celebrated writer, whose poems form part, as T. S. Eliot declared, of 'the small body of durable poetry written in our time'.

Marianne Moore

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