Becoming a Poet traces the evolution of Elizabeth Bishop's poetic career through her friendships with other poets, notably Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Published in 1989 following critic David Kalstone's death, with the help of a number of his friends and colleagues, it was greeted with uniformly enthusiastic praise. Hailed at that time as "one of the most sensitive appreciations of Elizabeth Bishop's genius ever composed" and "a first-rate piece of criticism" and "a masterpiece of understanding about friendship and about poetry," it has been largely unavailable in recent years.

The first book-length exploration of Marianne Moore's prose focuses on her private and public critical exchanges with Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T.S. Eliot. Drawing on previously unpublished material from the Moore Archive—correspondence, notebooks, manuscript notes, and books—Celeste Goodridge establishes Moore's central role as both poet-critic and prose stylist, providing a new perspective for considering Moore in relation to her contemporaries.

With clarity and elegance, Goodridge shows that Moore's most compelling critical judgments can best be recovered by examining the relationship between her private disclosures and her public pronouncements; her aesthetic of "hints and disguises" reveals a tension between what she felt free to voice and what she chose to veil.

In writing about these four poets, Moore made her greatest contribution to modernist criticism. With unusual perspicacity, she anticipated and defined many of the critical debates which still surround these writers' projects. Furthermore, Moore's critical exchanges indicated that her deepest alliances were with Stevens and Pound and not, as most have argued, with Williams and Eliot.

Erickson examines the work of Marianne Moore in order to provide some consistently successful strategies for understanding her poetry

Scholars no longer see Jonathan Edwards as the fire-and-brimstone preacher who deemed his parishioners “sinners in the hands of an angry god.” Edwards now figures as caring and socially conscious and exerts increased influence as a philosopher of the American school of Protestantism. In this study, he becomes the progenitor of an alternative tradition in American letters. In Knowing, Seeing, Being, Jennifer L. Leader argues that Edwards, the nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson, and the twentieth-century poet Marianne Moore share a heretofore underrecognized set of religious and philosophical preoccupations. She contends that they represent an alternative tradition within American literature, one that differs from Transcendentalism and is grounded in Reformed Protestantism and its ways of reading and interpreting the King James Bible and the natural world. According to Leader, these three writers’ most significant commonality is the Protestant tradition of typology, a rigorous mode of interpreting scripture and nature through which certain figures or phenomena are read as the fulfillment of prophecy and of God’s work. Following from their similar ways of reading, they also share philosophical and spiritual questions about language, epistemology (knowing), perception (seeing), and physical and spiritual ontology (being). In connecting Edwards to these two poets, in exploring each writer’s typological imagination, and through a series of insightful readings, this innovative book reevaluates three major figures in American intellectual and literary history and compels a reconsideration of these writers and their legacies.

Making Girls into Women offers an account of the historical emergence of "the lesbian" by looking at late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women's writing. Kathryn R. Kent proposes that modern lesbian identity in the United States has its roots not just, or even primarily, in sexology and medical literature, but in white, middle-class women’s culture. Kent demonstrates how, as white women's culture shifted more and more from the home to the school, workplace, and boarding house, the boundaries between the public and private spheres began to dissolve. She shows how, within such spaces, women's culture, in attempting to mold girls into proper female citizens, ended up inciting in them other, less normative, desires and identifications, including ones Kent calls "protolesbian" or queer.

Kent not only analyzes how texts represent queer erotics, but also theorizes how texts might produce them in readers. She describes the ways postbellum sentimental literature such as that written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Emma D. Kelley eroticizes, reacts against, and even, in its own efforts to shape girls’ selves, contributes to the production of queer female identifications and identities. Tracing how these identifications are engaged and critiqued in the early twentieth century, she considers works by Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop, as well as in the queer subject-forming effects of another modern invention, the Girl Scouts. Making Girls into Women ultimately reveals that modern lesbian identity marks an extension of, rather than a break from, nineteenth-century women’s culture.

This book examines the strategic possibilities of poetic self-restraint. Marianne Moore,Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson all wrote poetry that is marked by a certain reserve--precisely the motive against which most feminist poets and critics of the last thirty years have established themselves. Kirstin Hotelling Zona complicates this dichotomy by examining the conceptions of selfhood upon which it depends. She argues that Moore, Bishop, and Swenson expressed their commitment to feminism by exposing its most treasured assumptions: they not only challenge the ideal of autonomous self-definition, but also contest the integrity of a bodily or sexual authenticity by which that ideal is often measured.
In recent years critical studies of Bishop and Moore have flourished, a large percentage of them devoted to explorations of sexuality and gender. A gap is growing, however, between feminist repossessions of Moore and Bishop and recent readings of their antiessentialist poetics. On the one hand, these poets are appearing more frequently in the feminist canon, but the price of this inclusion is usually the suppression of their strategies of self-restraint. While Zona questions the poetic privileging of self-expression, she establishes contiguity between feminist poetry and developments in American poetry at large. In doing so she asserts the centrality of feminist poetry within discussions of contemporary American poetry, thereby challenging the common perception of feminist poetry as an "alternative" (which often means auxiliary) genre.
Kirstin Hotelling Zona is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Poetics, Illinois State University.

This book explores the relationships between four modernist poets and the museums that helped shape their writing. During the early twentieth century, museums were trying to reach a wider audience and used displayed objects to teach that audience about art, culture, and ecology. Writers such as Yeats, Pound, Moore, and Stein borrowed strategies and techniques from museums in order to create literary modernism. Poetry in the Museums of Modernism places these writers' poetry and prose within the context of specific gallery spaces, curatorial practices, displayed objects, and exhibition objectives of the museums that inspired them, exposing the ways in which literary modernism is linked to museums.
Although critics have attested to the importance of the visual arts to literary modernists and have begun to explore the relationships between literary production and social institutions, before now no one has examined the particular institutions in which modernist poets found the artworks, specimens, and other artifacts that inspired their literary innovations. Catherine Paul's book offers the reader a fresh encounter with modernism that will interest literary and art historians, literary theorists, critics, and scholars in cultural studies and museum studies.
Catherine Paul is Associate Professor of English, Clemson University.

When William Carlos Williams said, “It’s all in / the sound,” when T. S. Eliot hailed the invigorating force of the “auditory imagination,” or when Marianne Moore applauded “the clatter and true sound” of Williams’s verse, each poet invoked the dimension that bound them together. In Quick, Said the Bird, Richard Swigg makes the case for acoustics as the basis of the linkages, kinships, and inter-illuminations of a major twentieth-century literary relationship. Outsiders in their home terrain who nevertheless continued to reach back to their own American vocal identities, Williams, Eliot, and Moore embody a unique lineage that can be traced from their first significant works (1909–1918) to the 1960s.

 

In reconstructing the auditory dimension in the work of the three poets, Quick, Said the Bird does not neglect the visual text. Whether in the form of Moore’s quirky patternings, Eliot’s expandable verse-frames, or Williams’s springy stanzas, the printed shape on the page is here brought together with the spoken word in vital interplay: the eye-read text cut against by sequential utterance in a restoration of the poetry’s full effect. By seeing and hearing the verse at the same moment—together with reading side-by-side discussions of the quarrels, friendships, mutual borrowings, and shared energies of Williams, Eliot, and Moore—the reader gains a remarkable new understanding of their individual achievements.By sound and sight, Quick, Said the Bird takes the reader straight into the physical textures of the finest works by three outstanding figures of twentieth-century American poetry.