The Critical Response to Marianne Moore

Gregory documents for the first time, the critical reception history of the great modernist poet Marianne Moore. This collection of 71 of the most important and provocative reviews and essays from across Moore’s long career (1915-1972) includes pivotal articles by H. D., T. S. Eliot, Mark Van Doren, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, Edith Sitwell, Harriet Monroe, Alfred Kreymborg, William Carlos Williams, Scofield Thayer, Wallace Stevens, F. R. Leavis, Morton Zabel, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, W.H. Auden, Muriel Rukeyser, Glenway Wescott, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Hilton Kramer and many others. The individual reviews are themselves of considerable literary note. And together they chart the development of a major contributor to the American modernist scene, whose work actively critiques the structures of literary authority.

The critical reviews also move beyond the modernist period, to track the evolution of her career in the 1950s and 1960s, when she crossed the line from the elite little magazines into popular culture. The editor’s introduction analyses the ways in which the two stages of Moore’s career converge. In addition to the historical texts, which cover the period from 1916 to 1999, this volume includes two new essays that offer fresh approaches to reading Moore.