Description:
To say that Marianne Moore was an extraordinary woman would be something of an understatement. Poet, editor, critic, and correspondent, Moore was also a friend to many of the greatest artists and writers of the 20th century, as well as an inveterate letter-writer--she sometimes wrote up to 50 letters a day. The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore offers only some of the poet's 30,000 surviving letters, but the ones editors Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodridge, and Cristanne Miller have chosen are among the créme de la créme. Moore, who lived with her mother and never married, wrote often to her brother John, describing both the quotidian events of her life and her deepest insecurities about her writing. Other frequent recipients of Moore's letters included poets T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Elizabeth Bishop; singer Hildegarde Watson; and close friends Hilda Doolittle and Winifred Ellerman. Then there are the letters to E.E. Cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Edith Sitwell, and more, a veritable who's who of 20th-century arts and letters. Marianne Moore's letters are fascinating on several accounts: first, there is the originality of her prose, which is invariably charming, witty, and expressive. Then there is the delightful frisson the reader experiences from eavesdropping on other people's private conversations--especially when those people are famous. And finally, there is Moore herself, a complicated, highly intelligent woman whose letters reflect both the turbulent world she lived in and her own responses to it. From women's suffrage to Ezra Pound's treason trial, Marianne Moore witnessed it all--and then she wrote it down.
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