Critics and Poets on Marianne Moore: "A Right Good Salvo of Barks"

Front Cover
Linda Leavell, Cristanne Miller, Robin G. Schulze
Bucknell University Press, 2005 - Literary Criticism - 266 pages
The first collection of essays about Marianne Moore to appear in fifteen years, this book brings together the work of well established Moore scholars such as Patricia C. Willis, Elizabeth Gregory, Cristanne Miller, Linda Leavell, and Robin G. Schulze, with that of new contributors to the field. The essays in this volume, written from a variety of international perspectives, range across the most pressing concerns of contemporary literary study and reassert Moore's centrality to a critical and poetic field in which she has been surprisingly marginalized. This book also includes poems written by contemporary poets, many of them significant contributors to scholarship on Moore, as a way of acknowledging the importance of Moore's verse to living writers. The poems compliment the scholarly essays by demonstrating in verse the important ways in which Moore's artistic achievements have stimulated her successors.

From inside the book

Contents

A Modernists Childhood
25
Marianne Moore and the Seventeenth Century
40
What Is War For? Moores Development of an Ethical Poetry
56
Marianne Moore Gender and the Hazards of Domestication
74
In the Country of Urgency There Is a Language
90
American Solitude
92
Eves Unnaming
94
Poems by Cynthia Hogue
95
Poems by Jeredith Merrin
184
Parasailing in Cancun
185
Poems by Joanie Mackowski
188
Wild
190
Necessary Deflection in Marianne Moores For February 14th and Saint Valentine
192
Marianne Moore and the Mixed Brow
208
Marianne Moore Today
222
Poems by Jeanne Heuving
240

Hope Is an Orientation of the Spirit
96
What Matters Today Is the Spirit of the Modern
97
Authorship in Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein
98
Poetry Painting Photography
113
An Octopus and National Character
137
Hybridity and Heroism in the Thirties
150
An Irish Incognita
165
Grays
241
Furrow
242
Poem by Lisa M Steinman
244
Bibliography
246
Notes on Contributors
257
Index
261
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 216 - POETRY I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful.
Page 50 - O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee ? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee ? for your goodness is as a morning cloud, and as the early dew it goeth away.
Page 132 - Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellow's grave or the glass flowers at Harvard. Self-reliant like the cat — that takes its prey to privacy, the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth — they sometimes enjoy solitude, and can be robbed of speech by speech that has delighted them. The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.
Page 43 - Thus there are two Books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of GOD, another of His servant Nature, that universal and publick Manuscript, that lies expans'd unto the Eyes of all : those that never saw Him in the one, have 'discovered Him in the other.
Page 50 - Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming; but rny people know not the judgment of the Lord.
Page 84 - I am a specialist in immoral and heretical plays. My reputation has been gained by my persistent struggle to force the public to reconsider its morals. In particular, I regard much current morality as to economic and sexual relations as disastrously wrong; and I regard certain doctrines of the Christian religion as understood in England to-day with abhorrence. I write plays with the deliberate object of converting the nation to my opinions in these matters.
Page 138 - An Octopus of ice. Deceptively reserved and flat, it lies 'in grandeur and in mass' beneath a sea of shifting snow-dunes; dots of cyclamen-red and maroon on its clearly defined pseudo-podia made of glass that will bend — a much needed invention — comprising twenty-eight ice-fields from fifty to five hundred feet thick, of unimagined delicacy. 'Picking' periwinkles from the cracks...
Page 175 - Ireland they play the harp backward at need, and gather at midday the seed of the fern, eluding their 'giants all covered with iron," might there be fern seed for unlearning obduracy and for reinstating the enchantment? Hindered characters seldom have mothers— in Irish stories— but they all have grandmothers. It was Irish; a match not a marriage was made when my great great grandmother'd said with native genius for disunion, "although your suitor be perfection, one objection is enough; he is...
Page 108 - ... hung to filter, not to intercept the sunlight" — met by tightly wattled spruce twigs "conformed to an edge like clipped cypress as if no branch could penetrate the cold beyond its company"; and dumps of gold and silver ore enclosing The Goat's Mirror — that ladyfinger-like depression in the shape of the left human foot, which prejudices you in favor of itself before you have had time to see the others...

Bibliographic information