The first book-length exploration of Marianne Moore's prose focuses on her private and public critical exchanges with Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T.S. Eliot. Drawing on previously unpublished material from the Moore Archive鈥攃orrespondence, notebooks, manuscript notes, and books鈥擟eleste Goodridge establishes Moore's central role as both poet-critic and prose stylist, providing a new perspective for considering Moore in relation to her contemporaries.
With clarity and elegance, Goodridge shows that Moore's most compelling critical judgments can best be recovered by examining the relationship between her private disclosures and her public pronouncements; her aesthetic of "hints and disguises" reveals a tension between what she felt free to voice and what she chose to veil.
In writing about these four poets, Moore made her greatest contribution to modernist criticism. With unusual perspicacity, she anticipated and defined many of the critical debates which still surround these writers' projects. Furthermore, Moore's critical exchanges indicated that her deepest alliances were with Stevens and Pound and not, as most have argued, with Williams and Eliot.
"Celeste Goodridge's useful study of Marianne Moore's considerations of the achievements of her contemporaries 鈥is] valuable to historians of American letters, particularly those interested in subtle variations on critical commonplaces not only about Moore, but about Stevens, Pound, Williams, and Eliot. Through painstakingly and meticulously assessing Moore's critical essays and her private correspondence, Goodridge proposes a new evaluation of Moore's opinions, which she demonstrates have been misread, and implicitly suggests that Moore's perspectives provide alternative ways of reading the programs and alliances of the four greatest moderns. We also discover how carefully Moore protected the poets she chose to support, by masking her reservations in print."鈥American Literature
"Well-written and assured, but without ever being overly polemical, this book should mean that future readers will give the reviews and correspondences of Moore the close attention they demand. It certainly gives valuable weight to the arguments for a more elastic canon."鈥Journal of American Studies
"鈥his is a valuable and often illuminating study, a welcome addition to our understanding of High Modernism."鈥擝onnie Costello
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Text
1. 鈥淏reasting the mode鈥: Moore鈥檚 Place in High Modernism
2. 鈥淎ristocratic cipher鈥: Moore鈥檚 Reviews of Stevens
3. 鈥淔irm piloting of rebellious fluency鈥: Moore鈥檚 Reviews of Pound鈥檚 Cantos
4. 鈥淧oets are never of the world in which they live鈥: Moore鈥檚 Quarrel with Williams
5. 鈥淐ombative sincerity鈥 and 鈥淪tudious constraint鈥: The Literary Exchanges of Moore and Eliot
Afterword
Permissions
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
