The Poems of Marianne Moore

Book excerpt: More than thirty years after her death, Marianne Moore continues to be one of America's best-loved poets, and is now regarded as one of the most significant and influential voices of the twentieth century. However, her inaccurately titled Complete Poems (Faber and Faber, 1968), from which the poet decided to omit nearly half of her published poetry - 'omissions are not accidents' - gave readers only a partial view of her work. The Poems of Marianne Moore, scrupulously edited by the poet Grace Schulman, for the first time includes all of Moore's poems, among them more than one hundred previously uncollected and unpublished versions. Organized chronologically, to allow readers to follow Moore's development as a poet, the volume includes an introduction and all of Moore's original notes to the poems, together with Schulman's editorial notes, attributions and the most significant variants. This long-awaited volume will reveal the true scope of Marianne Moore's poetry, particularly her increasingly admired early verse, and introduces her work to a new generation of readers in what will become the definitive edition. 'I am tempted simply to call her our greatest modern poet.' John Ashbery 'Moore's poems form part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time.' T. S. Eliot 'For sureness of execution, for originality of technical accomplishment, her poetry is unsurpassed in our time.' Randall Jarrell