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.
Her introduction gives a brief, humorous, yet enlightening account of her poetic career. She calls on poets to resist bullying by critics, and ends by quoting Marianne Moore
's famous remark about poetry as an...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Taylor
Again the story unfolds in a small country village. It centres on the friendship of three women: Frances, a painter who was formerly a governess, and the younger Liz and Camilla, who come to stay...
Godden, Rumer. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. Macmillan.
218 and n
Literary responses
T. S. Eliot
In the month this volume was published, Pound
printed in The Egoist a rollicking article about the outrage Eliot's poetry was producing. Only genius, he wrote, not mere talent, infallibly evokes a torrent of elderly...
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
Literary responses
T. S. Eliot
Marianne Moore
admired here TSE
's unhoodwinked self-control.
Grant, Michael, editor. T.S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Marianne Moore
discerned in it a mental chronology of evolvement and deepening technique, and two over-riding tendencies: the instinct for order and certitude, and contempt for sham.
Grant, Michael, editor. T.S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
1: 350
Literary responses
Elizabeth Bishop
Early reviews of North & South were not enthusiastic, until the tide was turned following warm praise by Marianne Moore
, Randall Jarrell
, and then Robert Lowell
,
Astley, Neil. “Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography; Elizabeth Bishop: Chronology”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, pp. 175-00.
195-6
who was dismissive of some...
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...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Bishop
Sylvia Plath
, who began with negative comments about EB
, later developed admiration for her fine originality, always surprising, never rigid, flowing, juicier than Marianne Moore
who is her godmother.
Rees-Jones, Deryn. “Writing ELIZABETH”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, pp. 42-62.
Unlike Development, which received much initial critical attention, Two Selves was reviewed in only one journal, the Manchester Guardian. Marianne Moore
wrote privately to Bryher, telling her that she thought the novel a...
