683 Marianne Moore (with Cristanne Miller)

Summary

Episode 683: Marianne Moore (with Kristan Miller) – The History of Literature

Release Date: March 3, 2025

In this engaging episode of "The History of Literature," host Jack Wilson explores the life and work of Marianne Moore, one of American literature's most esteemed yet underappreciated poets. Joined by literary expert Kristan Miller, the episode delves into Moore's poetic achievements, her cultural influence, and the innovative Moore Digital Archive.

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Introduction to Marianne Moore

The episode begins with Jack Wilson introducing Marianne Moore as a significant yet not widely recognized figure in American poetry. He highlights her prestigious accolades, noting, “In 1951, her collected poems won both the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the National Book Award” ([01:29]). Despite her achievements, Moore remains less familiar to the general public compared to contemporaries like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Ford Motor Company's Naming Request

A fascinating story unfolds when Jack recounts an attempt by Ford Motor Company in the 1950s to enlist Moore's poetic talent for naming their new series of cars. Ford desired names that conveyed elegance, fleetness, and advanced design. Moore responded with a creative list that included names like “Thunder Blender” and “Ford Faberge.” Jack humorously critiques these suggestions, reflecting on how Ford ultimately chose “Edsel,” a name that became infamous for its commercial failure. He remarks, “This gives you a sense of how famous she was, that a company like Ford would reach out to her” ([19:00]).

Marianne Moore's Poetry and Revisions

The discussion shifts to Moore's meticulous approach to poetry, particularly her revisions. Jack introduces a notable example by comparing the original and revised versions of her poem "Poetry." Kristan Miller explains, “Some say it's the worst revision ever done in history” ([19:58]), highlighting how Moore significantly pared down her work to its essence. This drastic editing showcases her commitment to precision and clarity in her poetic expression.

Interview with Kristan Miller: Life and Work

Kristan Miller shares her deep-rooted admiration for Moore, recounting her initial encounter with Moore's poetry during her college years. “The first time I read her, I loved the sound of her poem, my epic, the syncopation of her rhymes,” she recalls ([22:38]). Miller discusses Moore's unique position among modernists, emphasizing her departure from free verse and her innovative use of syllabic structures. This approach allowed Moore to infuse her poetry with a rhythmic complexity that set her apart from contemporaries.

Miller also explores Moore's relationships with other literary figures, such as Ezra Pound and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Despite ideological differences, Moore maintained strong friendships, demonstrating her ability to separate personal bonds from professional disagreements. Miller notes, “Moore was very clear that she did not agree with his opinions in a lot of ways” ([30:00]).

Marianne Moore Digital Archive

A significant portion of the episode focuses on Kristan Miller's work in creating the Marianne Moore Digital Archive. She describes the archive as a comprehensive repository of Moore's extensive notebooks, which cover a wide range of subjects from literature and art to personal interactions. “The archive was founded to edit and publish the almost 120 notebooks Marianne Moore kept on virtually every subject under the sun,” Miller explains ([52:08]).

The digital archive aims to make Moore's notes accessible to scholars and enthusiasts worldwide, overcoming the limitations of physical access to the original notebooks housed at the Rosenbach Museum and Library. Miller highlights the archive's features, including transcriptions, annotations, and educational resources, which provide valuable insights into Moore's thought processes and creative inspirations.

Her Legacy and Continued Influence

As the conversation draws to a close, Miller reflects on Moore's enduring legacy and the challenges she faced in gaining widespread recognition. She points out that gender biases within the literary establishment may have contributed to Moore's relative obscurity despite her critical acclaim. The digital archive serves as a pivotal tool in revitalizing interest in Moore's work, ensuring that her contributions to American poetry are both recognized and appreciated by future generations.

Miller emphasizes the importance of continuing to read and study Moore’s poetry, stating, “I hope that my listeners will continue reading more or start reading her” ([67:42]).

Conclusion

Jack Wilson concludes the episode by encouraging listeners to explore the Marianne Moore Digital Archive and engage with Moore's poetry. He underscores the significance of preserving and promoting Moore's work, which offers a rich and nuanced perspective on American modernism.

Notable Quotes:

• Jack Wilson ([01:29]): "In 1951, her collected poems won both the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the National Book Award."
• Kristan Miller ([22:38]): "The first time I read her, I loved the sound of her poem, my epic, the syncopation of her rhymes.”
• Kristan Miller ([19:58]): “Some say it's the worst revision ever done in history.”
• Kristan Miller ([30:00]): “Moore was very clear that she did not agree with his opinions in a lot of ways.”
• Kristan Miller ([52:08]): “The archive was founded to edit and publish the almost 120 notebooks Marianne Moore kept on virtually every subject under the sun.”

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Listeners are encouraged to visit the Marianne Moore Digital Archive at morearchive1word.org to delve deeper into Moore's extensive notes and unpublished work. The episode not only sheds light on Moore's literary genius but also highlights the ongoing efforts to preserve her legacy for future generations.

Stay tuned for the next episode, where Jack Wilson and guest Mike Palindrome will discuss Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil."

Transcript

[Jack Wilson]

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[Kristan Miller]

Hello, she is one of American literature's foremost poets, according to the Poetry foundation, and also one of its least well known according to my anecdotal research. Can a new digital archive of her works help to change that? Well, we'll talk to Kristan Miller about the life and works of Marianne Moore today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. Marianne Moore is one of those poets whom you might encounter here and there in an anthology. Maybe. And maybe you're different. Maybe you've really dove in to her works. But if you're like me, she's not as familiar as HD or T.S. eliot or William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound or her great New England predecessor Emily Dickinson and her great New England ish Brazilian sometimes successor, Elizabeth Bishop, who was also Marianne Moore's friend and protege. T.S. eliot said this living the poet is carrying on that struggle for the maintenance of a living language, for the maintenance of its strength, its subtlety, for the preservation of quality of feeling which must be kept up in every generation. Ms. Moore is, I believe, one of those few who have done the language some service in my lifetime. End quote. She was also, in her lifetime, a great Prize winner. In 1951. Her collected poems won both the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the National Book Award. She was also a public figure, a very prominent person in New York City, cutting a dashing appearance in a familiar tricorn hat and cape, making appearances in Life magazine and the New York Times and the New Yorker. She went to baseball games and wrote the liner notes for Muhammad Ali's record I Am the Greatest. Her liner notes included these. He fights and he writes. Is there something I have missed? He is a smiling pugilist. In the early. No comment. In the early. In there. I enjoy that. In the early 1950s, Ford, the motor company, asked Marianne Moore to come up with names for a new series of cars that they were rolling out. And here's what they said they wanted. They said, Ms. Moore, we should like this name to be more than a label. Specifically, we should like it to have a compelling quality in itself and by itself to convey through association or other conjuration, some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design. A name, in short, that flashes a dramatically desirable picture in people's minds. Well, who better to ask than a poet if that's what you want? Elmore Leonard, by the way, he used to do this for a living. He was asked. He's the one who came up with the Heartbeat of America. Very successful slogan. Apparently he would just sit there and read his books all day and work on his own writing his own novels. And this is the story I heard. I think I've told this before, but worth repeating. Elmore Leonard would be working away on his own stuff and someone would say, how come you don't fire this guy? He's not doing anything. And they said, well, let's see. Here's why we don't fire him. They went up and said we could use a new slogan for looking for a new slogan. And they told him what they wanted. And he said, how about the Heartbeat of America? And they said, see, that's why we don't fire him. Probably not a true story, but a good one. Anyway, this is what Ford Motor Company was asking Ms. Moore in the 1950s. We need this. We want it to have a compelling quality, a visceral feeling of elegance and fleetness, advanced features and design. Marianne Moore sent them back an amazing list. I'm going to read some of her suggestions that were on it. Some of them seem quite good to me and some of them a little bit off the wall. Number one, Hurricane Asipter. Apparently the accipter A C C I P T E R is a kind of hawk Hurricane, a sipter and I have to think, why not Hurricane Hawk, which. Everybody knows what a Hawk is. Here's one. The Impeccable. That should have been one. Why didn't they pick that? The Ford Impeccable. I like it. How about the Simachromatic? Does that bring an image into your mind? The Simachromatic. No, not for me. S Y M M E Chromatic. I don't even know what that is. Kind of long and clunky. I'm not surprised they rejected that one. Next one. Thunder Blender. Yes, please. Let me get my checkbook out. The Ford Thunder Blender. But then I think, why Blender? Why Blender? That sounds. Actually, that should have been an appliance, right? Why hasn't someone put that on their countertop? The Thunder Blender. I could use a smoothie. Let me get out the Thunder Blender. Okay, next one. The Resilient Bullet. No, thank you. I'm not going to buy a car called the Resilient Bullet. What is a Resilient Bullet? One that can. One that can take a bullet. One that bounces back. Like those cartoons where someone shoots a gun and a bullet is flying and then someone shoots the bullet out of the air. The Resilient Bullet. No, next one. The Intelligent Bullet. Also no. Next one. The Bullet. La Volta. Okay, that's the best bullet. But why so many bullets? The Bullet. La Volta. And also, why not just the Bullitt? The Ford Bullitt? Maybe it wouldn't work now. Probably would have worked in the 1950s. Okay, the next one. The Intelligent. She likes the Intelligent. Why not just the Ford Intelligent? That would have been good, too. Might be good today if you have a nice EV with a lot of gizmos inside. The Ford Intelligent. Okay, but that's not what Marianne Moore proposed. She proposed the Intelligent whale. Marianne. Come on. For a car. The Intelligent whale. Methinks she was reading Melville. Okay, next one. The Ford Faberge. Now that is a beautiful name that should have been chosen. The Ford Faberge. You know what it reminds me of? You remember Ramona from the Beverly Cleary books? Beezus and Ramona and Ramona. I haven't read those books in 40 years. 45 years, probably. But I remember that Ramona named her doll Chevrolet because she thought it was the most beautiful word in the world. And I remember reading that as a kid and thinking, this woman, Beverly Cleary gets kids. She gets us. And indeed she did. She was a librarian or a teacher herself, I believe. Had some real insight into the mind of a child. Why not name your doll Chevrolet? That's A beautiful word. Chevrolet. Also, the Ford Faberge. Now, you might be thinking, wait, wait, wait. Wasn't there some kind of trademark issue there? And Marianne Moore, she wrote a parenthetical after that one. She said that there is also a perfume. Faberge seems to me to do no harm, for here allusion is to the original silversmith. Well, tell that to the lawyers, Ms. Moore. I'm not sure they're gonna buy that. That's like saying, oh, I named my. I don't even know. I don't even know. That's like saying, oh, I'm calling my movie Goodfellas. But don't worry, I'm naming mine after some. Some Goodfellas, not the Scorsese movie. Okay, moving on. The Archangel. And then she writes parentheses. The rainbow. And I think, why not the Ford Rainbow? The Rainbow. It's right there. Marianne Moore is complicating things. And then her next one is Arkansiel, which is the same thing, but no hyphens. Why? Why her next one? The Mongoose. Civik. Why not just Mongoose. The Ford Mongoose. That's not bad. Why the Mongoose Civic? Next one. Anticipator. That's kind of cool. That sounds right, doesn't it? It sounds like a film. Like a. An action film. Jason Statham in the Anticipator. He is the anticipator. Let me jump into my anticipator. Oh, it's like the Pacer. That's what it reminds me of. The Anticipator. Okay, next one. Rain ya Racer. And then in parentheses, coron. A Coron. Sovereign to sovereign. What? I'm not following any of this, Rainier. Okay, next one. Arrow tear. A E, R, O T E, R, R E. That's okay, I guess. The Aeroter. I'm not sure. And here's the last one for Ford's new line. Let me repeat what they wanted. Convey through association or other conjuration. That's a nice little word. Whoever was asking Ms. Moore for this clearly was a fan of poetry and of her poetry to convey through association or other conjuration, some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design. A name, in short, that flashes a dramatically desirable picture in people's minds. And Ms. Moore comes up with the utopian turtle top. Why? Why? Why? Well, guess what? Ford rejected all of these. I think they could have gone with. With one of them. The Thunder Blender. Maybe the Ford Faberge. If their lawyers were getting aggressive, taking risks. The Mongoose, they could have maybe done Something with that. But anyway, they rejected them all. And what did they go with? The Edsel. The Edsel, which was a huge flop because of the car, no doubt, but also because of the name, I think. What an ugly sounding name. Edsel. You would have been better off with the Anticipator or even the Bullet. La Volta. Okay, that was Marianne Moore. I think that gives you a sense of how famous she was, that a company like Ford would have reached out to her, thinking we need. How about we get a poet? And who better could they call upon than Marianne Moore? Gives you a sense of how famous she was in those days. And yet today we don't read her so much. We're going to talk to Kristan Miller about why that is and what's being done about it. But first let's hear a little bit of Marianne Moore's poetry. This is a famous example of editing. Some say it's the worst revision ever done in history. That's a pretty bold statement. Moore revised and revised and revised. She was often reluctant to have things in print. I think she didn't like the finality of that, which is interesting. But this revision was pretty drastic, even for her. We're going to read one of the original versions of her poem Poetry, which is, I don't know, 20, 30 lines or so, and then 30 lines, I guess. And then we'll hear what she did when she cut it down decades later. So first, this is the original version of the poem Poetry. 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 when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible. The same thing may be said for all of us that we do not admire what we cannot understand. The bat holding on upside down or in quest of something to eat. Elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, A tireless wolf under a tree. The immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea. The baseball fan, the statistician. Nor is it valid to discriminate against business documents and schoolbooks. All these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction. However, when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry. Nor till the poets among us can be literalists of the imagination above insolence and triviality, and can present for inspection Imaginary gardens with real toads in them. Shall we have it in the meantime? If you demand on the one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand, genuine. You are interested in poetry. Okay, there's some really nice images there, right? Imaginary gardens with real toads in them. Basically a perfect phrase. I also like a wild horse taking a roll, elephants pushing a tireless wolf under a tree. Those are all demonstrations of what poetry can do, right? Well, decades later, all that was gone, cut out of the poem. A victim of a kind of radical hacking down. If you like the second version, you might say, well, this is Michelangelo taking the raw material and finding what's in it, reducing it. That was his statement about that. Anybody could be a sculptor. You just take away what doesn't belong there. Okay, well, if that works for you, doesn't work so well for me. Okay, poetry. This is the revised version. Poetry. I too dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it. One discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine. Okay, that's it. That's all we get. It does crystallize the thought. Everything else maybe just. What is it? Cap on a hat. Is that what the phrase is? Unnecessary, needless words, needless examples. I like the examples, but it's true. This has sort of got a. Almost like a haiku quality to it. Zen, like reduction, an essence boiled down to its essence. Maybe we're lucky we have both poems. A fascinating mind wrote that poem and revised it and did all the other things that Marianne Moore did in her lifetime. We have some access to her exploits that we didn't have before via her diaries. And we have access to her innermost thoughts as well. And Kristan Miller has helped to open these doors into Marianne Moore. Is there something I have missed? Kristan Miller joins us after this.

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[Jack Wilson]

Foreigning me now is Kristan Miller, who's an expert on numerous subjects, including Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and modernism. She was here before to discuss the letters of Emily Dickinson, and she rejoins us today for a discussion of Marianne Moore and the Moore Digital Archive. Kristan Miller, welcome back to the History of Literature.

[Advertiser]

Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here.

[Jack Wilson]

So you've been writing about Marianne Moore for, it seems like decades, but what originally drew you to her work?

[Advertiser]

I'm going to answer that question in two ways. I loved Moore's from the very beginning. The first time I read her, which was in college, I loved the sound of her poem, my epic, the syncopation of her rhymes, really just lovely sounding poems. But I also loved her sense of humor, and I liked the way that she addressed very serious topics through decades of her own poetry, mostly indirectly, never with any kind of bombastic edge or moralism. Then when I got a job at Pomona College, one of the courses on the books in the English department was called Great Works of Western Literature. It was predictably all men in those days. And so I decided to teach a course called Great Works by Women Writers. And I wanted to pick out two significant poets from the 20th century. Moore was my choice for one of them. It was just a blast teaching her. My students loved the poems I loved teaching her. And so since then I've been, I've been hooked.

[Jack Wilson]

It's interesting that you say she's not bombastic because she was an associate of Ezra Pound and she's kind of in that same generation, and they have a lot of parallels. And I'm sure there is more than one anthology that has Ezra Pound on one page and Marianne Moore on a page coming very close nearby. He seems like kind of the ultimate in bombastic poetry to me. And, you know, is she carving out some space for herself? Was that just because it was just her natural temperament, do you think that led her to take a different approach, or do you think that she saw kind of an opening of poetically, there's room here to not go down the path that some others of her peers were going down?

[Advertiser]

Well, among modernists, she was entirely unique in what she was doing. So many people were doing experimentalist things, but they were mostly following free verse mode. And you could say that this is a mode that was established by Whitman. One of the defining features of that mode is that the poetic line was determined by syntax. So it was a thought, it was a unit of thought, or you could say unit of syntax. Essentially the same thing. Marianne Moore. Instead, one way to describe what she did was she freed the poetic line from syntax. So she wrote in a syllabic style, where the number of syllables in a line was utterly arbitrary and different from line to line throughout the stan. But which meant that the line could end anywhere. It could end in the middle of a word, it could end on the. Or a. Or any place else. It was the. There was an arbitrariness to the form. But she brilliantly brought that arbitrary form into play in ways that both gave you this syncopated sense of sound, but also called attention to ways that this, you know, sort of coming. Coming into un. Or completion of the stanza. If I could just read you a little bit of the poem called the Fish. So in the Fish, the stanzas have five lines. The first line has one syllable, the second has three syllables, the third nine, the fourth six, the fifth nine. Right. So totally different numbers. And here's the way the poem sounds. It starts with the title. So the title is the Fish, which is not the topic of the poem, another one of her kind of revolutionary things, but just the way the poem be. The fish wade through black jade of the crow, Blue mussel shells. One keeps adjusting the ash heaps, opening and shutting itself like an injured fan. The barnacles which encrust the side of the wave cannot hide there, for the submerged shafts of the sun split like spun glass, and so on and so on. So you can hear this, the rhymes that occur at the end of the lines, but at irregular intervals because the lines are different lengths. And so you get that wonderful sense of almost suspense. When will the rhyme come? And. And then sort of glee at hearing it and. And how much fun they are.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, yeah. And also a poetic Persona or voice that seems to be saying, I'm going to be playful here. I'm going to be not the thundering poet shouting at you from the top of a mountain, but somebody who is confiding in you. A potential trickster or a good storyteller, but someone who's kind of taking. Who's inviting the reader to sit at the poet's level.

[Advertiser]

Yeah, absolutely. So the poem. Toward the end, the poem turns from this description of things on the shore in the ocean and sea, to all external marks of abuse are present on this defiant edifice. All the physical features of accident, lack of poornous dynamite, grooves, burns and hatchet strokes and so on. This is a poem, in fact, about human destructiveness and how it cannot destroy the sea. And it probably points to World War I, which was right around when it was written, and the terrible bombings and ships and other things on the seashore, as well as the. Yeah, so the ships being sunk and so on, and damage to the surrounding landscape. But it's a poem that begins with a kind of loveliness and never asserts its theme in a direct way. But I want to come back to Ezra Pound because Pound and More started corresponding in 1918. They had tremendous respect for each other, but More was frequently castigating him for his anti. Semitism, for his sexism. One of her reviews says that his views of sex are as old as Abyssinia. But they. But they nonetheless maintained a friendship because they respected what the other one was doing in poetry. So she was very clear that she did not agree with his opinions in a lot of ways. But there is, for example, just an extraordinary photograph of the two of them when they're in their 80s and they're standing at an Academy of American Poets reception by an American flag. And it's just. It really is lovely.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. And she went to see him right when he was having his trouble and he was in the hospital. And it seems like she could separate the ideas from the person and kind of support him as a friend or an associate, and yet still find that didn't mean that she had to swallow all of his ideas or all of his ideas about poetry or politics or anything else she could push back. But she was a loyal friend as a person.

[Advertiser]

Correct.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay. So she's often associated with New York City. I think that might be because of the famous essay. I guess it was George Plimpton, maybe, who wrote it, but. But she started out in Missouri. Did she view herself as belonging to any particular place or region? And was geographical location and her own background important to her work?

[Advertiser]

I think you are right in associating her with New York City. And that's where she mostly associated herself with until she was about maybe four, with her father, excuse me, with her grandfather, mother and brother in little town outside St. Louis. Then the grandfather died. They moved around for a couple of years and ended up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania where her mother taught high school. Then Moore went to Bryn Mawr College. But really as soon as she could, even when she was in college, she visited New York City a couple of times and wrote. When she wrote a 54 page letter home to her mother extolling everything that was wonderful about New York and moved there with her mother as soon as it was possible for them to do that.

[Jack Wilson]

And I read that she was a classmate of HDS at Bryn Mawr College. What kind of a relationship did those two have?

[Advertiser]

Well, HD was only there for a year or a year and a half and they did not really become friends in college, but they knew of each other and consequently when they each began publishing poetry, they were very attuned to the fact that the other was publishing. And they quickly became very good friends. They reviewed each other's work. Moore was also a friend of Bryer, HD's lover. HD and Breyer invited Moore to move to London where they could, you know, she could be with them. And she said no, that as odd as it sounded, the restrictions of her life living with her mother in New York City, she believed enabled her to write. And she also said she felt as though she, her mother was too needy, she couldn't leave her mother. So. But very close friends, and there is a long and wonderful correspondence between them. It's also interesting to know that Moore's mother was in a lesbian relationship for most of Moore's growing up years. And most of Moore's friends, including H.D. and Breyer, were lesbian or gay. Moore herself never entered into a sexual or partnered relationship with anyone but her closest friends. And she had many close friends were almost entirely lesbian or gay.

[Jack Wilson]

So what was the relationship with her mother? Did they have money? Was Moore the provider? How did they end up having this kind of lifestyle that they were living in New York City?

[Advertiser]

Yeah. No, they did not have money, which is to say Moore's mother owned a little bit of property, which brought in some financial assistance. When they moved to New York City, Moore worked at the public library and her brother, who was a chaplain in the Navy, sent money home to support his mother and sister. But Moore's mother was also, she was one of those oddly domineering but also needy people in such a way that they had less to live on than they might have had. But you know, so that was a little problematic. On the other hand, the family that Moore grew up in, that is to say, her mother and her brother and she were extremely playful with each other. So they. One of the things that they did was to create a kind of menagerie of names in which they referred to each other as different characters almost. So when Moore was young, she was called Lancelot, Barca, Fangs. Fangs for short, or. Or Gator, or Her brother was Toad, and so on. And then they. In about 1914, the family read the Wind in the Willows, and they took on the names of those characters. So Moore became a rat and her brother became the mischievous Badger, always getting in trouble. And her mother was Mole, who stayed at home and took care of them. Moore was always referred to within the family circle as he. So her mother might, for example, write to Warner Rat took his ball gown back to Bryn Mawr when, you know, after the vacation or something like that. So there was. There was no mistake ever about the fact that she was female. But within the family, she was. She was referred to as. With the masculine pronoun, right? So they had what they sometimes refer to as almost a secret language, very playful.

[Jack Wilson]

So when did she achieve poetic success? And when did she feel. I mean, did she. How old was she? When she felt like she had found her vocation and that she could point to external success as confirmation of it?

[Advertiser]

She started writing when she was in college and really, by, I would say, 1913 or 14, was committed to writing poetry. But she, like many poets when they're first starting out, couldn't get things published, and couldn't get things published until close to the end of the decade of the teens, when she did start publishing in a variety of magazines. But her first real achievement or success or affirmation of her as a poet came in 1924 when she won the Dial Award, which was an enormously important award for experimentalist poets. Eliot had won it in 1922. Moore won it in 1924. Then in the next three years, E.E. cummings, William Carlos Williams and Pound won the Dial Award. So you can see the kind of award. It was affirming modernist work. So that was really a tremendous success.

[Jack Wilson]

And she would have been in her mid-30s then.

[Advertiser]

Yes. And then during the 1930s, T.S. eliot helped her arrange a Selected Poems edition and wrote the introduction to it, which was quite important for her. And in 1950, she published her Collected Poems. And in that year she won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollinger Award and the National Book Award. So that was the point at which she became truly famous. And by end of her life she'd won really every important poetry prize in the US and she was also a Chevalier in France, basically knighthood.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. And did that change her professional career as a librarian? Did she start teaching then or was she able to live just off of her poetry and public appearances and so on, or did she keep the library job?

[Advertiser]

She became editor of the dial in 1925 and edited the dial until it closed in 1929. And that was a paid job. So she left the library and in the 30s she did a little bit of part time work in the library. But mostly by that point they lived from, you know, a little bit of money that came in through the property, the money that Moore was making through poetry, selling essays and books of poetry and so on, and through the brothers contributions to their income. So. And by the 1950s, yeah, she lived from, basically from her poetry, you know, from her professional life.

[Jack Wilson]

How was she viewed by her fellow poets? I mean, she's had all this, she has all this success. Did her peers, you know, admire anything in particular about her work or consider her to be an exemplar of anything in particular?

[Advertiser]

Well, other poets revered her. So even poets like each other's work, like Eliot and Williams, thought that Moore was writing the closest thing to pure poetry that could be written. They tremendously admired the intelligence of forms and also of what, what she was saying. Right. So that the way forms and the content meshed with each other were really singular and extraordinary. So all the modernists thought of Moore as an exemplary poet and then the next generation did too. So Louise Bogan wrote, oh gosh, sometime in the 40s or something, that she was our most distinguished contemporary American poet. And 20 years later John Ashbery wrote, I'm tempted simply to call her our greatest modern poet and so on. So she painted and photographed and interviewed and even sculpted by various people. She was, she, a critic in England has called her the public face of modernism. And in many ways that was true. It's a bizarre phenomenon, I think, partly due to sexism in the critical community, that More is not more famous because she was so revered by her contemporaries and was so important to the development of modernism.

[Jack Wilson]

And there really isn't a reason why, looking at the poetry itself, it's not as if it's less ambitious or somehow that there's some reason to say that it's not on a par with Pound and Eliot and William Carlos Williams. I mean, she had the same artistic ambition, the same intellectual ambition as them. It is kind of. I think you may be onto something when you say that the canonization that those poets have received, that maybe more hasn't, is kind of inexplicable when you look at the poetry itself.

[Advertiser]

I would say that Marianne Moore faced a dilemma that they did not, which is that in 1950, when she really became famous, when she won every. She won more poetry awards than any of those other poets, she was really being acknowledged by the poetry world as well as by her modernist peers. But the dilemma that she faced was that essentially everybody at that point who had a conception of the famous poet thought of him as male, right? It was basically his elf model. So what could she as a woman do as a famous poet, appearing in public and so on and more, was again, in an understated and unspoken way, I think, quite feminist about the choices that she was making, even though they might seem to us now odd. So she presented herself deliberately as a woman. She wrote for women's magazines. She took on relatively unassuming, so not self absorbed, not egotistical guise. Again, she didn't pronounce. And she, in her later years, in some ways, simplified the kinds of poems that she was writing. So many of the early poems that she wrote interwove highly detailed information, kinds of information about a wide variety of things closely juxtaposed. So she could be writing about, let's say, Chinese lacquer carving and then the behavior of ants and then something else, you know, the way men drive in Texas or whatever. It is one of her famous poems, the Jerboa. So the Jerboa is the name of a desert rat. But this poem called the Jerboa, begins with descriptions of Roman and Egyptian imperial empires and their slaveholding practices, both the way that they enslaved, or let's say, domesticated animals, but also their literal slaveholding. Then it moved, describing the extraordinary art or inventions of the Egyptians and Romans, and then it moves to the Sahara Desert, then to the Pharaoh's mongoose, and then slides into a description of the Jerboa. And for about 15 stanzas at the end of the poem, she describes this desert rat with allusions to contemporary American racism. It was published in the 1930s, describing it in relation to Chippendale furniture, Bedouin flutes, and so on and so on. So there's a kind of precision and particularity that covers a very wide range of kinds of knowledge that Moore has engaged in. And in her late poetry, she does a lot less of that. So one of the most famous late poems, if I can read it, Is oh, to be a dragon. Quite short. Oh, to be a dragon. If I, like Solomon could have my wish. My wish. Oh, to be a dragon. A symbol of the power of heaven, of silkworm size or immense at times. Invisible, felicitous phenomenon. Right. Quite simple. We get on one hand, elusiveness. Right. So, okay, makes us think, wow, if I like Solomon could have my wish, it might make you want to go look up what Solomon's wishes were. Right. Yeah. Then the notion of the dragon as symbol of the power of heaven or invisible, teeny or huge. The rhymes, again, that are so indirect. So dragon Solomon phenomenon. But they provide a kind of echoing lyricism in the poem. Anyway, so the later poems were simpler. And I think this also contributed to the fact that the critical establishment was less interested in her during the 60s and 70s. Oh, she was like a mascot. Oh, she was publishing in women's magazines. Oh, she was, you know, there was a kind of downplaying of her early work and more. Also contributed to this in some ways by not republishing a great deal of the early poetry that had made her so famous. So she writes as an epigram to the Complete Poems. Omissions are not accidents. So, okay, she deliberately omitted a lot of those early poems, but one of a day, they're so wonderful. And now they've been republished, thank goodness. So, Right.

[Jack Wilson]

So you wrote a book, and the subtitle for one of your books on Moore is Questions of Authority. And I was wondering how questions of authority play into Moore's work and maybe.

[Kristan Miller]

Her life as well.

[Advertiser]

Well, in a way, I've been talking about this in part, so Moore couldn't really take on the authority or authority in the ways that men did, so had developed her own style of authority. And that was something that she did primarily through her poems. But she also wrote a great number of essays, lots of reviews of other poets and of other artists. And those reviews are also. They were not available for quite a long time, not until, I believe, something like 1987. So that is to say, they hadn't been collected. So her critical work was not as well known as that of Pound and Eliot, Williams and so on. But she was, in fact, doing all that she could to create a platform, platform of authority through indirection, through ways that didn't call attention to herself as authoritarian spokesperson, but that did call attention to her knowledge and to her, I'm going to say, brilliance. That story that you mentioned early on about her being in. Going to a Brooklyn Dodgers game with George. Right. So he starts for things. And then she tells him so much more than he potentially knew about baseball. So that's the way her authority worked. Let's talk about something. Somebody would say, and she would say, yeah, and she would know more than you could possibly have imagined about.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. So I think of her as being so much more recent than Emily Dickinson. But actually, if you look at just. If you just count the years, she was closer to Dickinson's era than we are to Marianne Moore's. Do you draw a line from Emily Dickinson to Marianne Moore? Do you see parallels there? Or do you see them as belonging to different schools and just being completely different poets?

[Advertiser]

Well, they're very different poets, and I think that that division that occurs between most 19th century poetry and modernism is one that holds for them. On the other hand, Dickinson's. The compression, the concision of Dickenson's poetry does in some ways anticipate the kind of work that Moore and other modernists are doing. More actually reviewed one of the early books of Dickinson's letters, reviewed it very positively and sort of scolded previous reviewers for wanting to read Dickinson through the veil of biography. You know, no, she's saying, read the poems, read the letters. They were both indirect feminists, both very concerned about gender equality, but not writing about it in. In the ways that, you know, we became used to with, let's say, Adrienne Rich or other more openly feminist poets. They were both entirely independent in the ways that they wanted to construct poetry. At the same time attentive to what their fellow poets were doing and enthusiastic about it. So Dickinson was an enthusiastic reader of 19th century poets. Marianne Moore was an enthusiastic reader of 20th century poets, but she wasn't really influenced by them or I think by Dickinson.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Okay, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back with some questions about the Marianne Moore digital archives.

[Discover Advertiser]

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[Kristan Miller]

You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries. You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns. McDonald's breakfast comes first.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, we're back. So, Kristan, you are the director of the Marianne Moore Digital Archive. Tell us about that.

[Advertiser]

What exactly is it is an archive that was founded to edit and publish the almost 120 notebooks, working notebooks, that Marianne Moore kept on virtually every subject under the sun. So Marianne Moore kept six notebooks in which she drafted toward her poetry, but she kept another, you know, over 110 notebooks on her reading, on lectures she heard museum exhibits, she went to sermons, she heard classes, she attended concerts and so on, on her travel, on conversation that she had with people, with her mother, with Pound, with people at parties or conversations she overheard when she was at the circus or on a train or again, sometimes said at parties. So these notebooks are an extraordinary, extraordinary record of what a very intelligent woman with a lively mind was seeing and hearing and reading and thinking in the 20th century. And they start around 1905, and they go through almost the time of her death.

[Jack Wilson]

Wow. And mostly in New York City.

[Advertiser]

Mostly. Well, so the early notebooks are from classes she took at Bryn Mawr or from when she was in living, went back to Carlisle and was living there with a mother or the year that she was in New Jersey with her brother as he was beginning his chaplaincy for the Navy. But, yeah, most of them are what she was seeing and hearing and doing in New York, Although the travel notes also show there's a wonderful travel notebook of her first trip to England and to Paris. So really quite extraordinary about what she was saying, who she was talking to and so on. Some of these notebooks are over 400 pages long, some are five or seven pages long. She's keeping notes in multiple notebooks at the same time. So it's just extremely interesting to see how those again, interweave with each other in taking notes about one thing or another thing. And they are otherwise completely inaccessible. So they have never before been published. They are physically housed at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. But the Rosenbach is only open for scholars or anybody to see these notebooks 12 hours a week. So, you know, what can you do in 12 hours a week?

[Jack Wilson]

It would take you a long time just to get through all the notebooks.

[Advertiser]

Oh, my gosh, it would take you a lifetime. If you don't live there, you would have to keep going back. Cost a fortune.

[Jack Wilson]

And the Marianne Moore Digital Archive, you not only get to see the pages in her handwriting, but you can also read a transcription, correct?

[Advertiser]

Correct, yes. What we're doing, transcribing, editing, annotating, and we write an introduction for each notebook that goes up. So it's so you can read through the transcription at any point you want to. You can glance to the manuscript page and see what it actually looks like in her handwriting, especially when she's drafting toward poetry. But just being able to read through the transcription makes it so much easier to follow ideas or to follow patterns in the writing. And then there's a whole array of resources around the notebooks that the website also now provides. So educational resources. For example, if you wanted to see what scholars have said about various poems, you can go to the educational resources area and look at about the poems. And there are readings of, I don't know, 15 or 20 of her most famous poems. Or there's an educational resources section that's called Context and History. And it has. Right now it has two little essays in it. One is about Moore and Muhammad Ali as they are writing a poem together. And then she later writes the liner notes for his poetry album. And the other anecdote is about a Braniff airline commercial that she makes with Mickey Rooney. So you can see the old commercial.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Advertiser]

Other resources for scholars, things that Moore was reading so that you yourself can go and look at the London Illustrated Magazine or whatever it is that is taking notes from.

[Kristan Miller]

Right.

[Jack Wilson]

And is this available to everyone or people who have a university library subscription, or how does one access it?

[Advertiser]

It is freely accessible to everyone in the world. And the URL is just morearchive1word.org Anybody can access it anytime from anywhere. And there are callers internationally who are making a lot of use of this.

[Jack Wilson]

And I would guess that it would be of interest, in addition to shedding light on more, we would be able to see if you had a particular interest in another poet from that century and you knew that they were in New York City, or you guessed that Marianne Moore might have commented on a book that they came out with, and so on. You could probably learn a lot about just the whole cultural scene from taking a look at these notebooks.

[Advertiser]

Absolutely. And when, of course, more notebooks are up, that it will provide an even fuller portrait of the cultural scene in New York. One of the things that we've been working on for the past few years and which is about to go up on the more digital archive, is a glossary. And this is a degree of people that she mentioned. So if you go into that glossary and you look up, let's say, HD or Monroe Wheeler or Lincoln Kirsten or GS Elliott or whoever it might be, then it will tell you every place in the notebooks where that person is mentioned. And then you can quickly and see. Oh, wow, that was a snide comment about Ezra. Oh, Lincoln. Kirsten gave her tickets to this ballet or whatever it is.

[Kristan Miller]

Yeah.

[Jack Wilson]

Is that the kind of voice that she has? I mean, is she. Does she seem like she's writing, confiding something? Does she seem like she's writing for the public, aware that the public might read it someday? Or is this, like, her deepest and darkest secrets and what she really thinks of people and so on?

[Advertiser]

Yes, these notebooks are very clearly not written for a public. They are her work notebooks. They're her notes. And the way she used the notebooks is that she took from them lines that were phrases that were used in poems.

[Jack Wilson]

Oh, wow.

[Advertiser]

So you can go, for example, in, oh, gosh, around 1930, I think she sees a candelabra in a advertisement for a Christie's auction house. She sketches it in a notebook. Two years later, she publishes a poem on that candelabra. So I think even she doesn't know how she will use this material that's in her notebooks. But she's constantly going back through them and pulling things out or remembering, oh, yeah, I took notes about that. I remember a phrase I want to use. Some of the notebooks even have indexes.

[Jack Wilson]

That she prepared herself.

[Advertiser]

Yeah, but she herself prepared. But almost none of them are just her own commentary. So, for example, in the conversation notebooks, she's quoting other people. So, you know, there is, in fact, this night comment about pound, and it was probably made by her mother, but it's hard to tell because she's just writing down things that she, you know, the conversations she's overheard or things she's heard people say without tabulating where they came from and when and who said them. So one of the challenges of editing these notebooks is to try to give some sense of what we can know and what we can't know about what is commentary and what is quotation.

[Kristan Miller]

Right.

[Jack Wilson]

Is there a passage you might be able to read for us so we can get a sense of how her voice sounds in these notebooks?

[Advertiser]

Well, again, because it's hard to talk about her voice because so much of it is quoted. But if I could read you two very short passages, both of which have to do with gender relationships. One is from a notebook and one is from a poetry drafting notebook. And they both contribute, I think, in some indirect ways to this a very famous poem that she writes called marriage. So in 1923, she's taking notes on an article on courtship that was Published in Harper's Magazine. And this is quoted, rules for courtship do not apply to super emotional people, to artists, or to the unduly intellectual. Such monsters must look after themselves in the list of love. Success today is no more likely than success a century ago unless one applies to courtship a certain degree of low cunning. Okay, so this is an article clearly representing courtship as weaponry or as fighting. And so, you know, very interesting. All right. In a note, a poetry drafting notebook that she's keeping at just about the same time, she writes, I don't know what Adam and Eve think of it by this time, I don't think much of it. And then a few pages later, she writes under the heading marriage, the one institution, I should say enterprise, which is universally associated with a fear of loss, Match breaker, descended from a snake. So I think there she's playing on matchmaker, match breaker. And then another page or two later, she writes, marriage is like a road uphill in the sand for an aged person. Okay, so then if I could just read one more little thing. So this is the way the poem sounds that she's thinking about, I think, as she takes all these notes. So she writes, this institution, perhaps one should say enterprise out of respect for which one says one need not change one's mind about a thing one has believed in, requiring public promises of one's intention to fulfill a private obligation. I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time. This fire gilt steel alive with goldenness, how bright it shows of circular traditions and impostures committing many spoiled, requiring all one's criminal ingenuity to avoid.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, you hear the echoes from the notebooks.

[Advertiser]

Yeah, exactly right. And I think that while she's taking notes on things that interest her, and this goes all the way from tennis to baseball to courtship to the ways that margins have been used from the medieval time to the present in printed books and so on. Right. So every conceivable thing, philosophy, poetry, poetics, children's verse. But what you also hear when you look from the notebooks to the published poems is that she's either echoing or quoting directly from these notebooks in a lot of ways. And just what she's quoting gives you a sense of what interests her, even if it's not her own voice, and.

[Jack Wilson]

What interests her and what her artistry could do with taking something out of one context and putting it into a different context text.

[Advertiser]

Correct? Absolutely correct. And the other thing that we see in the notebooks that we don't so often see in the verse is a Lot of use of the personal pronoun. Right. When. When she writes in her poetry notebook. I don't know what Adam and Eve think of it by this time. I don't think much of it. Never appears in the poem.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. It's like the. The beginning of that poem. Poetry.

[Advertiser]

Yes, exactly. Right. I too dislike it.

[Jack Wilson]

I too dislike it.

[Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Jack Wilson]

What a great start. Okay, well, that is the. More archive. M o o r e archive. All one word.org and I think people are going to really enjoy it. It sounds like it's still in progress. How complete is it so far?

[Advertiser]

Oh, gosh. So there are 120 notebooks, and we have a primarily volunteer staff of editors and digital encoders and technicians and so on. So we have only put up four notebooks so far. We're currently applying for an NEH grant that might help us get another 10 to 12 notebooks up relatively quickly. But this will be in process for longer than I'm alive.

[Jack Wilson]

But you've got the. You're putting in place a good structure here. I mean, you have of. It's not as if you're putting up all the notebooks and then putting up the apparatus around it. You've got everything in place so that what's going up is useful and you can add the new content to it. But it has the timeline, it has the images, it has the annotations and the scholarship, and everything is all available. So people who go there, they'll feel like they're looking at a mature website.

[Advertiser]

Correct. And I have to say, the other thing that holds us back slightly is that the Rosenbach Museum and Library has not digitally digitized most of those notebooks. So we can't proceed with editing and transcribing a notebook until they provide us with digital files. And for various reasons having to do with librarianship, it is not possible for us to do the digitizing. They have to do it at their end. So there are hurdles to be overcome, and we're frequently fundraising. It's a lot. But we feel that this is an extremely useful website. We've gotten a lot of enthusiastic responses to it from high school students and college graduate students and scholars. And, yeah, we hope people use it.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, well, I hope our listeners go and check it out because I think it is a valuable website and a lot of fun. And good luck with continuing to build it out. Kristan Miller, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.

[Advertiser]

Thank you so much, Jack, for the interview, and I hope your. Our listeners also continue reading more or start reading her.

[Kristan Miller]

Okay, there we go. I too hope that my listeners will continue reading more or start reading her. That's going to it for this episode of the History of Literature. We'll be back. My thanks to Christan Miller. We'll be back next time with some Mike Palindrome. Oh boy. Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Minister's Black Veil. What a story. What would happen if an esteemed member of your community, let's say the leader of an anti sinner group, shows up one day wearing a veil over his eyes and he keeps wearing the veil and refuses to explain why? What would happen to him and his community? We will hear the story and find out and Mike and I will discuss just what to make of all of it. That's Thursday this week, so please do stay tuned. Check it out. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

[Advertiser]

SA.

[Mike Toffel]

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