The Poems of Marianne Moore

Résumé du livre

Her poetry shines with accuracy and wit; her portraits of animals and her passionate conversations reveal the truth of such moral principles as courage, freedom, love, the will to see clearly, the power to feel deeply. When Viking published Moore's Complete Poems in 1967, John Ashbery wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "I am tempted simply to call her our greatest modern poet. This despite the obvious grandeur of her competitors, including Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams ... Her work will, I think, continue to be read as poetry when much of the major poetry of our time has become part of the history of literature." Now, a generation after her death, John Ashbery's words hold fast: Moore's poems have prevailed. Her place on Parnassus, alongside her contemporaries Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams, remains secure, her eminence a certainty. Yet no other major American poet is cherished more and known less than Moore is. Most of her readers are familiar with only part of what she wrote, for Moore herself excluded nearly half of her work when she prepared her so-called Complete Poems. That book (the only volume of Moore's poetry that has been available for the last two decades) omits such major poems as "Old Tiger," "Roses Only," "Radical," and "Half Deity" -- not to mention the early poems, some of them never collected, others never before published. Indeed, her earlier Collected Poems, which won formidable prizes, lacked many beauties as well. This long-needed volume, lovingly edited by Grace Schulman, will bring back those poems at last. Organized chronologically to allow readers to follow Moore's development, this book includes more than one hundred previously uncollected and unpublished versions, along with useful notes, attributions, and revealing variants. For the many readers who clamor for Moore's poetry, this wonderful new collection will be indispensable; for new poetry-lovers, The Poems of Marianne Moore will be the perfect introduction to the work of one of America's greatest poets.