The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Marianne Moore
- First Published: 1997
- Type of Work: Letters
- Time of Work: 1905-1969
- Setting: Carlisle and Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania; and New York City
- Principal Characters: Marianne Moore, John Warner Moore, Mary Warner Moore, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Ezra Pound, Winifred Ellerman, Hilda Doolittle, Alfred Kreymborg, Elizabeth Bishop
- Genres: Nonfiction, Letters
- Subjects: New York, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, Mothers, Parents and children, New York City, Poetry or poets, Animals, Heart attack or disease, Poetics, Periodicals
- Locales: New York, NY, Pennsylvania
In the biographies of fellow poets, Marianne Moore often comes across as a semi-recluse, living with her mother, herself an eccentric and oddly formidable character everyone is afraid to offend. Venerable yet, at the same time, fond of the circus and the Dodgers, Moore wears the aura of the past in these accounts, a revenant of an earlier time when “spinsterhood” could be liberating. This old-fashioned sensibility, however, produced one of the defining voices of modernist verse.
In a letter written late in life, she encapsulates her aesthetic with the words of the German...
[The entire page is 2035 words long]

