Marianne Moore’s Observations at 100

In the spring of 1934, a senior at Vassar College found herself trawling the library for any anthology or little magazine that would contain another poem by her newest literary obsession – Marianne Moore. Luckily, the college librarian happened to be a childhood acquaintance of the poet. The student later recalled:

Miss Borden’s copy of Observations was an eye-opener in more ways than one. [The poems] struck me, as they still do, as miracles of language and construction. Why had no one ever written about things in this clear and dazzling way before? But at the same time I was astonished to discover that Miss Borden [...] obviously didn’t share my liking for these poems.*

Despite her own reticence about the poems, Miss Borden the librarian arranged for the student, herself an aspiring poet, to meet Moore. This would lead to a close artistic and personal relationship between Moore and the young student, Elizabeth Bishop. Moore even shepherded the first appearance of Bishop’s poems in a printed anthology about a year after their first meeting.

Fortunately, we no longer need to happen upon one of the poet’s acquaintances to find a copy of Observations today. This past decade has seen a new edition of Observations (2016, ed. Linda Leavell), as well as a meticulously edited New Collected Poems (2017, ed. Heather Cass White). These new editions continue to perpetuate readers’ interest in Moore’s work, alongside recent critical and scholarly projects such as Linda Leavell’s 2013 biography Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore, the Marianne Moore Digital Archive and the anthology Twenty-First Century Marianne Moore: Essays from a Critical Renaissance (2018, eds. Elizabeth Gregory & Stacy Carson Hubbard).

As one of those readers whose love for Moore’s work was stoked by these recent editions and additions, as someone for whom the first encounter with her poetry ignited a response much like that of Bishop – again, “Why had no one ever written about things in this clear and dazzling way before?” – I knew I had to find some way of paying tribute to this inimitable figure on the centennial of her first collection of poetry. The first years of this third decade were marked by modernist centennials, from Ulysses to The Wasteland, and Observations merits its place right alongside them.

Pedantic literalists will note that Observations was technically not Moore’s first collection, as her Poems had appeared in 1921. At the time, Moore had been publishing poems for several years, but she was not convinced that she has enough material for an entire volume. Her friends, the writers Bryher and H.D., published Poems in England without Moore’s knowledge or agreement. As Linda Leavell writes in Holding on Upside Down, Moore was “furious” not only because of the betrayal of her trust, but “was even angrier that her first book was not the one she wanted.”** The book she wanted was Observations. But even that was not enough, as she published a revised edition shortly thereafter in 1925. She would have another chance to revise the poems, their order, their titles, everything, in 1935 when she put together her Selected Poems with T.S. Eliot. The poems of Observations would see further revisions at almost any point Moore had a chance to collect her poems: in 1951’s Collected Poems and in 1967’s Complete Poems. The latter edition notoriously opens with the epigraph, “Omissions are not accidents.” And indeed, at this late stage in her career Moore had no qualms about excising old poems from the supposedly “Complete” collection, changing their titles, or even heavily revising poems, including some of her most beloved works. “Poetry,” perhaps her most famous poem, began its life as a five-stanza poem, was immediately reduced to only thirteen lines as early as the 1925 edition of Observations, and by 1967 was whittled down to a tercet.

How to pay tribute to a poet whose thinking and writing is constantly on the move? A more important question – how should we let this thinking and writing move us a century later? These were the questions, among many others, that inspired this special section of Mantis, commemorating Observations at 100. Some of the poems, translations, and essays presented here were directly inspired by Moore herself. Others were included because they spoke to one of the many aspects and values of her work. Included here are also contributions by scholars and editors of Moore whom I would like to acknowledge before we begin (if there is a name for this particular community of Moore aficionados within and without the academy – “The Pedantic Literalists,” “The Dodgers,” maybe “The Rats”? – please do let me know).

Linda Leavell’s poem “Monhegan Island” opens the section with a dazzling tribute in verse. Cristanne Miller’s essay, “On Drafting toward Observations,” gives us a fascinating look inside Moore’s notebooks, published by the Marianne Moore Digital Archive (https://moorearchive.org), as she was drafting the poems for inclusion in her first volume. Concluding the section, Luke Carson’s essay “Observations’ Index,” provides our second bookend, exploring the strange index Moore attached to the book. Between these bookends, you will find more wonderful new poetry and translations. Some of them engage with Moore directly, but in all of them I hope you will find what she called “a place for the genuine.”