Complete Poems of Marianne Moore

by Marianne Moore

Hardcover, 1981

Call number

811 MOO

Collection

Poetry

Publication

Macmillan Company (1981), Edition: Book Club, 305 pages

Description

"Teems with sharp observation, profound moral insight, high satiric wit, and all manner of aesthetic delight." -The New York Times Book Review A Penguin Classic This definitive edition brings together all the works that Pulitzer Prize-winning Marianne Moore wished to preserve, covering more than sixty years of writing, and incorporating the final revisions she made to the texts. The poems demonstrate Moore's wide range of interests, moving from witty images of animals, sporting events, and social institutions, to thoughtful meditations on human nature. In entertaining informative notes, Moore reveals the inspiration for complete poems and individual lines within them. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member dawnpen

Marianne Moore, you are very smart and bright and small. You can tell that about you and about you being with your mother and visiting just about everywhere there are brightnesses and so you are stretching and honeing and hawing, you call forth with a smirk the little things, forte and da, and all

of it is so very smart and bright in the smart light.

Show Less

3 more

LibraryThing member VioletDelirium

A friend, years ago, introduced us. I have been enraptured ever since. Even though I no longer pretend to write poetry, our love affair continutes.

LibraryThing member realbigcat

I have read many of the most famous classic poems and poetry of some of the greatest poets. I like to give poets the benefit of the doubt and read the entire book even if I don't like it. I tried this with Moore's book but I just couldn't finish it. Most of the poems start out with meaning and flow

but tend to end up as ramblings making no sense at all. Moore posses a fluent vocabulary but most of the time it appears she is just using words for their beauty but not making any sense in relation to the poem. I understand in poetry there is not right or wrong but I just didn't really get it.

Show Less

LibraryThing member JNagarya

Marianne Moore has a complex bibliography, as she revised some poems over the years; as result, the various "Complete Poems," especially that of 1967 (and its later republications), are not as complete as one would wish, because it is essentially impossible to pin down a specific version of a

revised poem as "the definitive version". "The Poems of Marianne Moore," and, "Becoming Marianne Moore," are the best beginnings.

None of that detracts from the fact that she is delightful, with that genuine, infectious childlike sensibility essential to the "wide-eyedness" of the artist.

Have a dictionary nearby ("pangolin," as defined in Merriam-Webster: "any of several Asiatic and African edentate mammals . . . having the body covered with large imbricated horny scales"), and you'll have fun.

Show Less

Fewer