Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Marianne Moore
-
Standard Name: Moore, Marianne
Birth Name: Marianne Craig Moore
MM
was a pivotal figure in US poetry of the twentieth century. A recent editor has written that no major poet is cherished more and known less from that period in America.
Moore, Marianne. “Introduction”. The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman, Faber, p. xix - xxx.
xix
As well as poetry, MM
wrote translations, essays, criticism, and personal letters. She had an influential period as editor of the modernist journal the Dial. Her poems are characterised by precise, irregular, unrhymed verse forms and minutely detailed observation, often of semi-mythical animals used as ways of talking about the human condition. Always reluctant to let her work go out of her hands, and often self-deprecating about it, she published few books and let much of her poetry remain in periodicals.
In addition to Pound
and her classmate Marianne Moore
, HD's friends from her teenage years in Pennsylvania included another poet, William Carlos Williams
.
Robinson, Janice S. H.D.: The Life and Work of an American Poet. Houghton Mifflin.
10
Literary responses
Jennifer Johnston
This quotation was used to head an enthusiastic notice by US critic Julia Epstein
in the Washington Post Book World. Johnston, wrote Epstein, coils her language so tightly that she achieves the compression we...
Author summary
Medbh McGuckian
MMG
, who lives in Northern Ireland, is well-regarded among contemporary poets writing in English. She began by writing a very private and reserved poetry. Using images from the home and from nature, she explored...
Literary responses
Charlotte Mew
Marianne Moore
was quoted on the dust-jacket: This collection is to me extraordinary—unforced, and masterly in a technical way, almost without exception. There are in the style traces of W. B. Yeats
and Thomas Hardy
RP
knew T. S. Eliot
well enough to enjoy a courtly encounter with him at a bus stop, but she felt his great innovations had not necessarily been a good thing for English poetry, and...
Richardson, Dorothy. Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson. Editor Fromm, Gloria G., University of Georgia Press.
39, 107, 138, 141, 170, 284
Textual Production
Dorothy Richardson
Having begun writing poetry in mid-1923, Richardson was initially reluctant to share her poems with even her intimates: for instance with Bryher, who was a close friend and sometimes a creative confidante to H. D.
Literary responses
Dorothy Richardson
Reviewers, one of whom was American poet Marianne Moore
, considered the book very handsome. Its publisher, Jackson
, took an increased interest in Richardson as a novelist even before this text came out, and...
Textual Production
Carol Rumens
Since this year, 2007, CR
has been picking a Poem of the Week for the Guardian newspaper, which prints the poem along with her commentary and analysis. Rumens like to pay attention to context and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Penelope Shuttle
PSwrites five mornings per week and, when a fragment hits, always has a notebook to hand. She always leaves first drafts to settle for a few weeks. Influences on her writing, she says, include...
ES
praises Marianne Moore
as one of the very few women who have written poetry of worth.
British Book News. British Council.
(1951): 446
(She also, however, accords H. D.
the highest praise.)
Textual Features
Edith Sitwell
The English edition appeared the following year. Her choice for inclusion is, as usual, idiosyncratic. She begins well before Chaucer
, with anonymous early religious poems in which may be heard, she writes, the creaking...
