Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907-1924

by Marianne Moore, Robin G. Schulze (Editor)

Overview

Throughout her lifetime, Marianne Moore was an avid editor of her own verse. The bulk of her poems appear in numerous, at times vastly different published versions. For Moore, no text was ever stable or finished; each opportunity to publish offered an opportunity to revise. Becoming Marianne Moore gives scholars and readers access to the multiple variant versions of Moore's poems published between 1907 and 1924. An innovative, deeply contextualized facsimile edition of the poet's published early verse, it brilliantly demonstrates that modernist textuality is not a fixed, static product but an ongoing, fluid process.

Becoming Marianne Moore offers readers a full facsimile reprint of the first edition of Observations (1924), the book that garnered Moore the Dial Award for Literature and solidified her reputation as a modernist poet of note. The reprint is followed by a collection of facsimiles that presents each of Moore's poems published between 1907 and 1924 as it first appeared in a modernist little magazine. Each facsimile is accompanied by a variorum table that gives scholars quick access to all of the published changes that Moore made to each poem and a series of brief bibliographical notes that supply information about the immediate publication contexts of all of the presentations of the poem. These notes, in turn, point readers to narrative accounts of Moore's associations with her early publishers that offer a range of historical, contextual, biographical, and bibliographic information about the publication events of Moore's poems and explore her attempts to shape her literary career in concert with some of her most famous modernist peers—Richard Aldington, H.D., Harriet Monroe, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.

A wonderful fusion of historical research and critical sensitivity, Becoming Marianne Moore will change the way people think about Moore's verse and modernist textuality in general. A powerful intervention into Moore studies, it gives readers a broader sense of the poet's complex and brilliant career.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520221390
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	12/23/2002
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	520
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Robin G. Schulze is an Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of The Web of Friendship: Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens (1995).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Editor's Note: How to Use This Edition
Abbreviations and Textual Practices
Introduction
Moore's Early Volumes: From Poems (1921) to Observations (1924)

OBSERVATIONS (1924)
Front Material
"To an Intra-Mural Rat".
"Reticence and Volubility"
"To a Chameleon"
"A Talisman"
"To a Prize Bird"
"Injudicious Gardening"
"Fear Is Hope"
"To a Strategist"
"Is Your Town Nineveh?"
"A Fool, a Foul Thing, a Distressful Lunatic"
"To Military Progress"
"An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish
"To a Steam Roller"
"Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight"
"To a Snail"
"'The Bricks Are Fallen Down, We Will Build with Hewn Stones. The
Sycamores Are Cut Down, We Will Change to Cedars.'"
"George Moore"
"'Nothing Will Cure the Sick Lion but to Eat an Ape'"
"To the Peacock of France"
"In This Age of Hard Trying, Nonchalance Is Good and"
"To Statecraft Embalmed"
"Poetry"
"The Past Is the Present"
"Pedantic Literalist"
"'He Wrote the History Book'"
"Critics and Connoisseurs"
"To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity"
"Like a Bulrush"
"Sojourn in the Whale"
"My Apish Cousins"
"Roses Only"
"Reinforcements"
"The Fish"
"Black Earth"
"Radical"
"In the Days of Prismatic Color"
"Peter"
"Dock Rats"
"Picking and Choosing"
"England"
"When I Buy Pictures"
"A Grave"
"Those Various Scalpels"
"The Labors of Hercules"
"New York"
"People's Surroundings"
"Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers, and the Like"
"Bowls"
"Novices"
"Marriage"
"Silence"
"An Octopus"
"Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns"
Moore's Notes
Moore's Index

FIRST PRESENTATIONS OF MOORE’S POEMS PUBLISHED BETWEEN 1907 AND 1924 THAT APPEAR IN
OBSERVATIONS
Poems listed here appear in the order in which they appear in Observations
"To an Intra-Mural Rat"
"The Wizard in Words"
"You are Like the Realistic Product of an Idealistic Search for Gold at the Foot of the Rainbow"
"A Talisman"
"To Bernard Shaw: A Prize Bird"
"To Browning"
"Sun!"
"To Disraeli on Conservatism"
"Is Your Town Nineveh?"
"Masks"
"To the Soul of ‘Progress’"
"To a Steam Roller"
"Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight"
"George Moore"
"French Peacock"
" In This Age of Hard Trying Nonchalance Is Good, and"
"To Statecraft Embalmed"
"Poetry"
So Far as the future is concerned, "Shall not one say, with the Russian philosopher, ‘How is one to know what one doesn’t know?’" So far as the present is concerned,
"Pedantic Literalist"
"‘ He Wrote the History Book,’ It Said"
"Critics and Connoisseurs"
"To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity"
"Like a Bulrush"
"Sojourn in the Whale"
"My Apish Cousins"
"Roses Only"
"Reinforcements"
"The Fish"
"Black Earth"
"Radical"
"In the Days of Prismatic Colour"
"Dock Rats"
"Picking and Choosing"
"England"
"When I Buy Pictures"
"A Graveyard"
"Those Various Scalpels"
"The Labours of Hercules"
"New York"
"People's Surroundings"
"Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers and the Like."
"Bowls"
"Novices"
"Marriage"
"Silence"
"An Octopus"
"Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns"

FIRST PRESENTATIONS OF MOORE’S POEMS PUBLISHED BETWEEN 1907 AND 1924 THAT DO NOT APPEAR IN OBSERVATIONS
"Under a Patched Sail"
"To Come After a Sonnet"
"To My Cup-Bearer"
"The Sentimentalist"
"To a Screen-Maker"
"Ennui"
"A Red Flower"
"A Jelly-Fish"
"Progress"
"My Lantern"
"Tunica Pallio Proprior"
"My Senses Do Not Deceive Me"
"Qui S'Excuse, S'Accuse"
"Leaves of a Magazine"
"The Beast of Burden"
"Councell to a Bachelor"
"Things Are What They Seem"
"To a Man Working His Way Through the Crowd"
"That Harp You Play So Well"
"Appellate Jurisdiction"
"To William Butler Yeats on Tagore"
"The North Wind to a Dutiful Beast Midway Between the Dial
and the Foot of a Garden Clock"
"Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel"
"To a Friend in the Making"
"Blake"
"Diogenes"
"You Are Fire Eaters"
"Feed Me, Also, River God"
"Holes Bored in a Workbag by the Scissors"
"Apropos of Mice"
"The Just Man and"
"In 'Designing a Cloak to Cloak His Designs,' You Wrested
from Oblivion, a Coat of Immortality for Your Own Use"
"The Past Is the Present"
"An Ardent Platonist"
"You Say You Said"

MOORE’S POEMS IN THEIR PUBLICATION CONTEXTS: A PUBLICATION BIOGRAPHY
Broom
Bruno's Weekly
The Chimaera
Contact
Contemporary Verse
The Dial
The Egoist
The Little Review
Manikin
Others
Poetry
Secession

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST oF THE FIRST PRESENTATIONS OF MOORE'S POEMS BETWEEN THE YEARS 1907 AND 1924 WITH CORRESPONDING PAGE NUMBERS TO THIS EDITION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS OF PERMISSIONS
ALPHABETICAL INDEX TO ALL POEMS IN THIS EDITION.