Publisher's Synopsis
T.S.Eliot, an early admirer of her poems and her work at The Dial, once wrote that 'one of the books which obviously must in the fullness of time be published . . .will be the Letters of Marianne Moore'. Forty years later this has been accomplished by Professor Costello and her colleagues, drawing on one of the largest and most broadly significant archives of any modern poet. Her correspondence documents the first two thirds of the twentieth century, reflecting shifts from Victorian to modern culture, the experience of two world wars, and the changing face of the arts, high and low, in America and Europe. It is Miss Moore's idiosyncratic, witty and unmistakable poems that draw us to her letters, which illuminate them, but the editors have also aimed to present the life and mind and values of a greatly gifted woman whose omnivorous curiosity extended to everything - literature, painting, religion, natural science, animals and plants, psychology, fashion, dance and sport (especially baseball). Her main corrrespondents include Pound, Stevens, Williams, Eliot, Cummings, H.D., Bryher, Monroe Wheeler, Auden and, famously, Elizabeth Bishop. There are also many wonderful letters to her family and friends, along with important people in the world of the arts, all of which contribute to a memorable self-portrait.
