The Complete Prose Of Marianne Moore

Brings together nearly three hundred essays and reviews, ten short stories, and more than one hundred short book reviews, notices, and highly crafted one-sentence "blurbs."

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 Making new use of unpublished correspondence and employing close interpretive readings of important poems, Miller revises and expands our understanding of Marianne Moore.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 definitive collected edition of one of our most innovative and beloved poets, Marianne Moore"--

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

“Teems with sharp observation, profound moral insight, high satiric wit, and all manner of aesthetic delight.” –The New York Times Book Review A Penguin Classic This definitive edition brings together all the works that Pulitzer Prize-winning Marianne Moore wished to preserve, covering more than sixty years of writing, and incorporating the final revisions she made to the texts. The poems demonstrate Moore’s wide range of interests, moving from witty images of animals, sporting events, and social institutions, to thoughtful meditations on human nature. In entertaining informative notes, Moore reveals the inspiration for complete poems and individual lines within them. 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.

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"--

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.