Marianne Moore

Not confessional or autobiographical, not openly political or gender-conscious: all that Marianne Moores poetry is not has masked what it actually is. Cristanne Millers aim is to lift this mask and reveal the radically oppositional, aesthetic, and political nature of the poets work. A new Moore emerges from Millers persuasive bookone whose political engagement and artistic experiments, though not cut to the fashion of her time, point the way to an ambitious new poetic. Miller locates Moore within the historical, literary, and family environments that shaped her life and work, particularly her sense and deployment of poetic authority. She shows how feminist notions of gender prevalent during Moores youth are reflected in her early poetry, and tracks a shift in later poems when Moore becomes more openly didactic, more personal, and more willing to experiment with language typically regarded as feminine. Distinguishing the lack of explicit focus on gender from a lack of gender-consciousness, Miller identifies Moore as distinctly feminist in her own conception of her work, and as significantly expanding the possibilities for indirect political discourse in the lyric poem. Millers readings also reveal Moores frequent and pointed critiques of culturally determined power relationships, those involving race and nationality as well as gender. Making new use of unpublished correspondence and employing close interpretive readings of important poems, Miller revises and expands our understanding of Marianne Moore. And her work links Moorein her radically innovative reactions to dominant constructions of authoritywith a surprisingly wide range of late twentieth-century women poets.