Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore

by Linda Leavell

Winner of the Plutarch Award for the Best Biography of 2013

A mesmerizing and essential biography of the modernist poet Marianne Moore

The Marianne Moore that survives in the popular imagination is dignified, white-haired, and demure in her tricorne hat; she lives with her mother until the latter's death; she maintains meaningful friendships with fellow poets but never marries or falls in love.
Linda Leavell's Holding On Upside Down —the first biography of this major American poet written with the support of the Moore estate—delves beneath the surface of this calcified image to reveal a passionate, canny woman caught between genuine devotion to her mother and an irrepressible desire for personal autonomy and freedom. Her many poems about survival are not just quirky nature studies but acts of survival themselves.
Not only did the young poet join the Greenwich Village artists and writers who wanted to overthrow all her mother's pieties but she also won their admiration for the radical originality of her language and the technical proficiency of her verse. After her mother's death thirty years later, the aging recluse transformed herself, against all expectations, into a charismatic performer and beloved celebrity. She won virtually every literary prize available to her and was widely hailed as America's greatest living poet.
Elegantly written, meticulously researched, critically acute, and psychologically nuanced, Holding On Upside Down provides at last the biography that this major poet and complex personality deserves.

Genres: Biography, Poetry, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Literary Criticism, History, American

481 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 22, 2013

About the author

Linda Leavell is a scholar of American poetry and art, especially of the early twentieth century. She attended Interlochen Arts Academy and has degrees from Baylor University (BA) and Rice University (PhD). She taught English at Rhodes College during the 1985-86 academic year and taught American literature at Oklahoma State University from 1986 to 2010.

Her first book, _Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color_, analyzes Moore's poetry within the context of modernism in the visual arts . Research for that book led to her second book, _Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore_ . This is the first authorized biography of the poet.

“The moment is ripe for [Moore] to be restored to us, depixified and complex," wrote Holland Cotter in _The New York Times_, "And so she has been in a swift, cool but empathetic new biography...It says much for Ms. Leavell’s account of Moore’s life that for all the hard and hard-to-fathom facts it marshals, it leaves the miracles intact.”

Linda Leavell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, The Humanities Center at Oregon State University, and the Oklahoma Humanities Council.

Her first book won the South Central Modern Language Association book award. _Holding On Upside Down_ won he PEN/Jacquelin Bograd Weld Award for biography and the Plutarch Award for the best biography of 2013. It was a finalist for t the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.

Reviews

[Steve Donoghue]

Reading the poems of the great Marianne Moore, or her letters, or just bumping into snippets of her antics and the odd, larger-than-life persona she took on in her later years will most almost any readers wish there were a big, definitive biography -- and there is, this one! My full review here: https://www.stevedonoghue.com/review-...

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Linda Leavell has written a beautiful portrait of poet Marianne Moore. Perhaps she spends too much time on Moore's childhood. At least for me the biography stuttered until Moore entered Bryn Mawr and began to write seriously. After that it's a biography which is sleek and satisfyingly filled with what seems the right amount of detail and convincing understanding. Of course, Moore led a simpler life than most literary women. She never experienced the messy complications of love. She didn't have a drinking problem. She didn't take drugs. As a writer she was never involved in a literary controversy of any consequence beyond something as slight as the arrangement of poems or rejections. She was never crazy. She wasn't politically active. She just wrote what was always considered great poetry. Even considering that during her lifetime she was recognized as one of the great modernist poets of the 20th century, and is still regarded as such today, it's a testament to Leavell's skills in organizing and writing her biographical material that she could fashion such an engaging life story out of the conventionally normal Marianne Moore.

During the span of her writing life and her stints at editing journals, notably The Dial, Moore knew everyone who wrote. The stories of her interactions with the influential writers of her lifetime, from Pound to Plath, make for fascinating reading. This is fine critical biography as well. Her major poems are discussed in depth as Leavell gives us, if not first insight, fresh insight about where they came from and how they came to be.

Moore was 5'3" tall, Leavell writes, weighed less than a hundred pounds, talked in a low mumble and praised others while disparaging herself. Yet her poetic gift and reputation hung about her as charismatically as her signature black cape, so that everyone was afraid of her. This is such a superb biography that such unintended intimidation and power is transformed into a lovely, loving life. Leavell has made Moore a woman I wish I'd known.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating book. This was an interesting book. I keep telling myself these things because I don't want to let my feelings about the subject of the book get in the way of my feelings about the book. Marianne Moore was...IS...my favorite poet. But she was a real wierdo.

I know writers tend to be strange, but Moore was strange in an offputting way. Anne Sexton, my fourth favorite poet (after Sharon Olds and Emily Dickinson) has always been my asterisk poet. She battled mental illness and committed suicide, so something keeps me from seeing her as a role model. Sexton's life and work was tragic, but not weird. It is not weird to be mentally ill.

It IS weird to have an unnatural attachment to your family. To share a bed with your mother until you are in your forties. To have rotating pet names for your brother and mother. To be such a tightly knit trio that the trio's needs come before everything else, including your brother's wife and children. To plan moves around where your brother (a military chaplain) is stationed. And to get insulted when someone (equally weird!) proposes marriage. To let your mother edit all your poems and correspondence. All of these things occurred in Moore's life. Did I mention that she and her mother spent years living in a basement hovel?

Still, Moore was a genius of language compression and observation. And now I know that much of her observing was done in the kinds of places that I either frequent myself or have been involved in professionally: museums, zoos, libraries. Much of her nature information came from a lecture series at the Brooklyn Academy of Arts. There was no tragedy in her life, and although she made noises about wrestling with her mother's influence, she never seemed to have any problem accepting it. In fact, not getting married or having children left her free to write poetry, which she did as if she was etching an elaborate landscape onto a pearl.

[Jenny McPhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

HINDERED TO SUCCEED: THE GREAT AMERICAN SPINSTER POETESS MARIANNE MOORE

For most of their lives, Marianne Moore and her mother, Mary, slept in the same bed. Together with Moore's brother, Warner, the family had many nicknames for each other: two favorites were "Mole" for Mary and "Rat" for Moore. In referring to her daughter, Mary usually used a masculine pronoun. Linda Leavell's new biography, Holding on Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore, provides a rich, complex portrait of an artist against a vividly drawn backdrop of the modernist era. Her book's greatest achievement, however, is her nuanced, sensitive, and revelatory depiction of surely one of the most intensely destructive/productive mother-daughter relationships in literary history.

In 1923, when Moore was thirty-six and living with her mother in the West Village at Fourteen St. Luke's Place in a one room, low ceilinged, dimly lit basement apartment with no kitchen, a neighbor gave them a kitten. They named him Buffalo, which soon became Buffy, and they regularly included reports of his adorable antics in their extensive correspondence. Then one day Buffy was dead.

"Mole got chloroform and a little box and prepared everything," Moore wrote to her brother, "and did it while I was at the library Monday... But it's a knife in my heart... a seemingly comfortable life in a shut up room would not be good for any cat so we were kind, but having had him so long as we had made the deed seem foul... We tend to run wild in these matters of personal affection but there may have been some good in it too."

"I never speak of Buffy to Rat," Mary wrote to Warner some time later. "His grief drove me frantic."

A common criticism of Marianne Moore's poetry, especially her early work, is its apparent lack of emotional availability, all feeling deeply buried behind and within her armor of poetic language, image, rhyme, and meter. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D., and many other modernists perceived this powerful absence as one of her greatest strengths as a poet. When Mary euthanized their cat, Moore justified the act but produced a poem entitled "Silence," which includes the observation:

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.

Born in Missouri in 1887, Moore grew up in rural Pennsylvania. Her father, an eccentric philanderer, suffered from mental illness and soon disappeared from the family's life. Mary, highly intelligent, an English teacher, had a strict Presbyterian code of personal ethics. She also had an ambiguous sexuality -- she had a long affair with another woman while Moore was growing up. Though Warner remained very close to his mother and sister, he escaped the suffocating domestic menage through marriage, much to his mother's horror. The letters exchanged among the three -- sometimes more than once a day -- provided Leavell with a bountiful, fertile source, along with other previously unavailable materials furnished by the Moore family archives.

While at Bryn Mawr, Moore discovered she was "possessed to write" and "a demon needing wild horses to drag me from the diabolical profession." A few years after graduation, she and her mother moved to New York City, where they would live together for nearly thirty years until Mary's death in 1947. Everything Moore did, everything she wrote, was subject to her mother's intense scrutiny. Mary did all she could to hinder her daughter's healthy, prolific existence while also devoting herself to Moore's success in body, soul, and literary vocation. She committed herself so fully to Moore's thwarting she often became an invalid herself, suffering from "nervous exhaustion," which forced Moore to become her nurse. Moore's only place to be alone was in her poetry: she relentlessly pursued syllabic meter, unsentimental topics, searing irony, quirky stanzas with odd line breaks, and an inscrutable language in an effort to keep her mother out.

Moore's poetry includes scraps of overheard dialogue, phrases from advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, descriptions of random artifacts -- all arranged in her uniquely fashioned stanzas -- where she introduces then suppresses a rigorous pattern of rhyme and syllables so that they become nearly silent. Her first mature poem, "Critics and Connoisseurs," published in Others in 1915, begins:

There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious
Fastidiousness.

Over the following decade Moore tentatively submitted her poetry to journals and magazines and was mostly rejected. What she did publish was immediately noticed and championed by the glitterati of her day -- Eliot, Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams -- but for decades Moore remained a kind of secret genius among the cognoscenti. She was an excellent conversationalist with a surprisingly wide range of interests who consistently made unpredictable and "diamond hard" observations.

"The frailest bit o' bones that could presume to be 'a man'" is how Mary described her daughter, and Leavell speculates that Moore's chronic low weight -- she probably suffered from anorexia -- may have contributed to her total lack of sexual interest. Pound flirted heavily with her, as did many artists, writers, editors, and patrons both male and female; but Moore's amorous indifference was profound and unwavering. Besides, as her poem "Marriage" suggests, for all intents and purposes she was already faithfully married to her mother and would do nothing to upset, much less betray, that formidable bond.

This mysterious, uncompromising attachment in which Mary masculinized Moore, at least on a linguistic level, became a source of great power. Throughout her life, in her subversive fashion that at once circumvented and celebrated her mother, she cultivated her own considerable power: "To be understood" is "to be no / Longer privileged." And in "Marriage": "men have power / and sometimes one is made to feel it." In a book review, she wrote, "Love is more important than being in love"; and in her poem "The Paper Nautilus," she described a mother's love as "the only fortress / strong enough to trust to."

Furthermore, in a letter Mary wrote to Warner after he had offered her daughter what he deemed constructive criticism of her work, Mary reveals her sensitivity to Moore's needs as a creative artist: "Write him a bit of commiseration, or perhaps I should say praise -- or something that's grateful and comforting. He knows he is a 'slight man' -- and that cheer of spirit would carry him over his bridge, and he beats himself continually for his 'oppressed' spirit..."

Moore's star began to seriously rise when T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound became her champions. Eliot, reviewing an anthology that included a number of her poems, singled her out, placing Moore in the company of Pound, Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis. He called her work "akin to nothing but language which is a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas." By 1935, Eliot was calling her "the greatest living master of light rhyme." Both Eliot and Pound would do much to promote her work for years to come. Eventually, Moore became a West Village legend and an inspiration to poets...
Read the rest of the review at Bookslut: http://www.bookslut.com/the_bombshell...

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

A poet giving a live performance has a personality and a context; we share that context as listeners and the live poet has at least some inclination to address us and our interests, in the selection and the presentation if not the original writing. When encountered on the page, as in a magazine or newspaper say, a contemporary poem usually retains some context that is shared with or recognised by the reader. Part of this context, always, is other poets, since every poem belongs to a poetic tradition and is in conversation with other poems and with other poets. When the poet is no longer accessible or even contemporary, and even though most poetry is indeed written for the page, I still have trouble recognising a poem as something abstract and impersonal. If I like the voice I become curious about the speaker. But, as our distance grows from the poet, from the terminology of her times, from her artistic environment, from her subject matter, the poetry itself does not lose its voice but it does shed a lot of its resonances, and we have to work at ways to restore what we can.

It seems to me that poetry generally represents a voice for which we need a speaker. A biography works for me by establishing this, a personality, a context, a history, which not only helps me to explore what the poetry might mean or signify, perhaps what it was trying to achieve, but also to establish why and in what ways the poem matters. This biography not only makes Moore’s poems far more accessible but also makes this reader more motivated and better equipped to engage with them. On that measure, which is the most important one, the book is a success and it stands among my favourite guides to a poet.

The poems are more important than the biography but they are not independent of each other. It is because of the poetry that I find her biography interesting and the poems throw light on the inner life of the poet in ways that the plain facts of her biography would otherwise miss. Alongside this book I have had my copy of the Complete Poems, and taken time out to read each poem as it was referred to in the text. ....The result has been a fascinating and enjoyable week, and the addition of several poems to my personal treasury of favourites.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Some quotes from the book:

Linda Leavell writes in her introduction to this biography: “Although Moore’s poetry does not invite biographical interpretation, ...” [pxviii] and she quotes Brad Leithauser, in a 2004 book review, saying “Moore’s poems are famously unforthcoming, you can study them for years and derive little sense of her family, friendships, jobs, and littler sense still of the nature of any balked hopes and private losses.” . [pxiii]

“Perhaps the most significant legacy of Marianne Moore’s kindergarten experience is her almost instant affinity, when she encountered it in the early twentieth century, for the work of other moderns. When she visited New York in 1915, she learned about the theories of Kandinsky and soon afterwards purchased Der Blaue Reiter, a large illustrated volume in which Kandinsky explains his concept of “inner necessity.” Clearly resembling the theoretical basis for kindergarten – which Kandinsky attended at the age of three – “inner necessity”, is a spiritual force that drives genuine art and that connects artists across geographical and historical boundaries. It manifests itself in the abstract patterns of art and nature.” [p34] [NOTE: Each time I returned to this passage it seems even less credible to me. ]

“Mary [Moore’s mother] assumed the role of first reader of Marianne’s poetry and first critic. While her standards were high and her appreciation for innovation limited, she no longer disparaged the effort or questioned the worthiness of the goal. Marianne felt disappointed when her poems failed to meet her mother’s approval. Yet her dogged pursuit of unconventional meter, unsentimental subject matter and cryptic language ran counter to all that her English-teacher mother held dear.” [p122]

In the new era of identity politics, Moore became the wrong kind of woman with whom to identify. Little did Rich and her adherents imagine that in the 1970s and ‘80s that the fatherless Moore had been reared by lesbians and educated by feminists. ... It is hardly surprising that the wizened, androgynous, admittedly prudish little lady in the tricorne would come to seem irrelevant, even embarrassing, within the youth culture of the later 1960s and ‘70s. [p373]

Although sexual acts between members of the same sex had been acknowledged for centuries, few people in central Pennsylvania would have heard of homosexuality, much less of lesbianism, as psychological proclivities. The terms would not come into common usage until the 1920s. Because the Victorian era assumed that only men felt sexual desire, women often held hands, kissed and slept together. When Mary was visiting relatives in Chambersburg, Norcross did omit the usual darlings and sweethearts from her letter, but this is the only indication of their hiding anything except their most intimate relations from their family and friends. [p46]

“If we had not the remarkable family life,” Mary later wrote, “even to a vocabulary that amounts to a foreign language, we would not be awkward with our friends, but we are like people interrupted in love-making the minute any outside persons come in” [p55]

“The net result of my experiences at Bryn Mawr was to make me feel that intellectual wealth can’t be superimposed, that it is to be appropriated,” Marianne wrote in 1921. By her senior year, she had learned to appropriate from college what she wanted. [p87]

For some time she had wanted to take Georgina Goddard King’s Imitative Writing course. ..they wrote imitations of seventeenth-century prose writers... King herself was an adherent of modernism. She ... taught Marianne to “relinquish [her] own notions of things ... and immerse [her]self in style pure and simple. Thus did she introduce Marianne to an important modernist principle, the detachment of style from content. In one of her first critical essays. “The Accented Syllable,” Marianne points out the rhythm of certain prose sentences as a pleasure distinct from that of the content. [p88]

...Marianne had little respect for the new editor. “Shirley is prejudiced against critical poetry, the informal Browning kind, picture-comment and music analysis, etc.,” she said. “and it is the very thing I like best. It is the most impersonal and un-forced. Spiritual aspiration, love and meditation are themes no puppy can do justice to.” It would be years yet before T.S.Eliot advocated impersonal poetry and Ezra Pound warned poets against sentimentality and abstraction. [p91]

When Mary and Marianne departed Le Havre, France, on August 19, [1909] they brought home an abiding Anglophilia and an appreciation not just for travel but for maps, museums and travel guides... One of her most ambitious poems, “An Octopus” (1924), may be read as an analysis of how travel guides and maps direct experience, and a 1929 editorial she wrote for the Dial took as its subject the art of the travel guide. [p116]

Three of the poems she sent out in February were accepted by The Egoist in London... By the spring of 1915, Moore had been writing poems for eight years and sending them to magazines for six. [p132]

Later in the summer she wrote an article about the kind of rhythm to which she now aspired in her poems. “The Accented Syllable” quotes a dozen prose sentences in which the intonations “persist, no matter under what circumstances the syllables are read or by whom they are read.” Conventional meter and rhyme, she realized, are not compatible with the natural, uneven flow of conversation. And so in “Critics and Connoisseurs” Moore creates for the first time a static grid of syllable count, indentation and rhyme, over which and through which the natural rhythm of her sentences could flow. [p142]

By her late twenties, Marianne had more or less come to terms with her own relationship with Mary. While willing to make sacrifices in her personal life, she refused to make compromises in her art... Although she could never risk open disagreement with Mary, she could write poems such as “Critics and Connoisseurs” that mocked Mary’s pieties so subtly that Mary herself would never know. [p146]

...Chatham’s train station also put her within an hour of New York. If it took special effort for the people of Chatham to see beyond Marianne’s “mousy” demeanor, such was hardly the case twenty five miles away, where she metamorphosed into “an astonishing person with Titian hair, a brilliant complexion and a mellifluous flow of polysyllables which held every man in awe.” [p147]

The many memoirs of Village life in these years note Marianne’s red hair, boyish attire, penetrating eyes and nervous laughter. Her unflinching devotion to her mother annoyed and mystified her literary friends. And yet the mysteriousness of that devotion, the unpredictability of her views, and her “diamond hard ... observations” captivated listeners and gave her a kind of power over them. Both in her poetry and in her persona, Marianne recognised and cultivated this power. “Mysteriousness” is “formidable,” she observed, “to be understood” is “to be no / Longer privileged.” [p168]

The thirteen poems that she published in the 1917 Others anthology drew attention from two influential poets who would become friends and lifelong supporters of her work. Ezra Pound ... chose to focus exclusively on what he called “the first adequate presentation of Mina Loy and Marianne Moore.” He distinguished their poetry from Imagism, which is primarily visual, and from melopoeia, which is primarily musical. He called it “logopoeia or poetry that is akin to nothing but language, which is a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas and modifications of ideas and characters.” ... Eliot ... placed her in the company of Pound, James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis as one who can be counted on to “write living English.” [pp168, 169]

“Poetry” and “In the Days of Prismatic Color” show her deeply engaged in the aesthetic questions being debated in Village tearooms, as do most of the poems she wrote over the next few year. [p170]

Poems received far more scorn than praise... All the poems rhyme, but more than a third precede the development of Moore’s mature stanza in 1916. Neither her sympathizers nor her detractors seemed to appreciate the innovation of her stanza. She had developed it when avant-garde poets were wearying of free verse. But now that readers had become accustomed to letting line breaks determine the length of the poem, they regarded Moore’s as mere quirkiness. Edith Sitwell, who ranked Moore “among the most interesting American poets of the day,” found the division of words at the ends of lines “irritating.” Louis Untermeyer accused Moore of neither caring about nor appreciating the function of rhyme. To Harriet Monroe, the geometrical stanzas were “forms which impose themselves arbitrarily upon word-structure and sentence-structure instead of accepting happily the limitations of art’s materials, as all art must.” Although Williams praised Moore for exploring the fundamental tension in modern art between form and substance, it was not until 1935 that Eliot called Moore “the greatest living master of light rhyme” and that Stevens explained how syllable count, rhyme and typographical spacing work together in her stanzas. [p193]

Moore had been using quotations in her poetry since college, and she had been using them in the ironic way Thayer describes since soon after her 1915 trip to New York. By the 1920s both Eliot and Pound had begun to appropriate quotations into their poems too. But, whereas their quotations invoke the authority of the past and erudite readers may congratulate themselves upon recognizing them, Moore’s quotations undercut both authority and erudition. She seizes phrases from the verbal ephemera of modern life – articles from Vogue and Scientific American, a newspaper advertisement, a remark overheard at the circus, a slogan on a statue in Central Park – much as contemporary artists pasted pieces of newspaper into their canvases. She does not expect her readers to recognize the quotations ...but to open their minds to unexpected source of poetry. Anonymous lines from Punch thus assume the aura of serious literary allusions. Descriptions of the sea come from a seventeenth-century religious treatise. The source notes enhance the wit and irony of Moore’s quotations and also show her imagination at work with the “real toads” of her environment. [pp 215, 216]

“Marriage” and “An Octopus” are Moore’s longest poems ... Both resemble The Waste Land and subsequent examples of the modernist long poem, such as Pound’s Cantos and Williams Paterson, in their resistance to narrative, their use of free verse, and the dense assemblage of quotations. “An Octopus” also overtly responds to The Waste Land with its use of landscape, its juxtopisition of modernity and antiquity, and the large questions it addresses about culture and knowledge. Not only does Moore’s far-from-wasted landscape teem with flora, fauna, and glacier-fed streams, but she also presents American pragmatism – or experience – as an alternative to what she considers the “macabre” failure of imagination in Eliot’s poem. [p216]

She wrote Watson that she wished to review Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. ... She read the nine hundred page novel, the prose of which rivals Finnegans Wake, and reviewed it within a week. [p239]

The sequence of seven poems that begins with “The Jerboa” and ends with “Nine Nectarines” takes as its theme the power of political ideology to shape both human destiny and the natural environment. Yet by focusing on plants and animals, Moore risks being dismissed as apolitical. ... When Pound urged Moore to pay attention to the economic situation, she replied that she paid “strict attention” to it but believed that “in art some things which seem inevitable ought to be concealed, like the workings of the gastric juice.” [p287]

The publication of Selected Poems proved that Moore was not, as some had feared, a one book poet, but it did not significantly change perceptions ofher work. It represents the height of her modernist achievement. By obscuring her early development, the arrangement of the poems had the desired effect of making her seem difficult. And since she reproduced Eliot’s arrangement in her Collected Poems (1951) and Complete Poems (1967) she would appear to decades of readers as a kind of Athena born fully grown from the mind of the Modern. [p288]

Eliot and Williams had no time for each other’s work. Nor did Pound and Stevens. But all four modernists concurred that Moore was, as Stevens put it, “A Poet That Matters.” Whereas to Williams she represented all that was “new” in poetry, to Eliot she was an enduring member of the “tradition.” And whereas Pound praised her early resistance to romanticism, Stevens paid her his highest compliment by calling her a “romantic.” Unless one is that,” he said, “one is not a poet at all.” Stevens’ review explained more precisely than anyone else how the elements of her stanza – syllable count, rhyme, and indentation of lines – work together to create a sense of rhythm. [p289]

In 1981, McMillan and Viking issued a revised, “definitive” edition of Complete Poems. ... Reviewing it for The New York Times Review, the art critic Hilton Kramer took Moore to task for her “farcical” exchange with the Ford Motor Company and for allowing the media to turn her into “the very stereotype of the quaint literary spinster.” “What remains imperative for us to understand just now,” he continued, “ is that this fabricated image had nothing whatever to do with the poet’s real achievement.” Virtually all of Moore’s critics since then have agreed with this assessment. Not only do they mostly ignore her late work but they also shun the photographs that once made her famous. [p380]

When awarded the 1968 National Medal for Literature, she said in her acceptance speech: “My writing is the result of books I have read and of persons I have known and I don’t see why gratitude should be given a medal.” [p381]

”It ought to be work to read something that it was work to write,” said Moore. [p347]

[Alismcg · Rating 5 out of 5]

How quirky... I ❤️ her , especially dressed in her tricorn hat and cape. Marianne Moore shines too perfectly from a deeper inward beauty.

She believes what she believes ⭐ :

"...When a piece of work focuses attention so strongly upon his grossness or its funniness that you can think of nothing else then all question of the writer's potential greatness disappears; he's not an artist...All my stinging legs stand out like the fretful porpentine...when I am told that if I were cosmopolitan I'd like lewdness too."

⭐She has something to share - besides poetry - something of true depth, with a powerful impact :

"Marianne came to view romantic love with deep skepticism, and she eventually adopted [Henry James] as her own model of chastity and literary bachelorhood. 'Love is the thing more written about than anything else...and in the mistaken sense of greed. Henry James seems to have been haunted by awareness that rapacity destroys what it is successful in acquiring.' " Yes. OMG Yes!

⭐She says things that make one smile:

"I take and take and take, without sullying friendship by reciprocal givings. But I couldn't take this."

She lived for years the life of a recluse from a selfless and sacrificial choice - to be present for her mother (and what a mother ! I would have suffocated and shriveled up within her embrace from the very moment she killed the kitten) ; ⭐ I 'feel' a deeper connection with Moore than any other poet I have read.

The poetry...beautiful in language, brilliant in depth , wholly unique...
⭐She inspires me to write again ; she will inspire all her readers to look more deeply.

My favorite longer poem in its completeness:

—What Are Years?—

"What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt—
dumbly calling, deafly listening—that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs
the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment, rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.
So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity."

My favorite fragment:

"Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron,
iron is iron till it is rust.
There never was a war that was
not inward; I must
fight till I have conquered in myself what
causes war, but I would not believe it.
I inwardly did nothing,
O Iscariotlike crime!
Beauty is everlasting
and dust is for a time."

from —In Distrust of Merits—


Without revealing too much , I do recommend before reading Leavell's bio, one should read Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows" for a better understanding ; the book itself plays a major part in growing family intimacy. I do not know how I pulled that one off; Grahame's tale was the very read I had just wrapped-up before I picked up "Holding On Upside Down". How can one describe that , but 'magical' ? ⭐


Tying it up with that poem that may just be my favoite of favorites:

—A Jelly-Fish—

"Visible, invisible,
a fluctuating charm
an amber-tinctured amethyst
inhabits it, your arm
approaches and it opens
and it closes; you had meant
to catch it and it quivers;
you abandon your intent."

(an earlier version : because she was a poet of revision)

"Visible, invisible,
A fluctuating charm,
An amber-colored amethyst
Inhabits it; your arm
Approaches, and
It opens and
It closes;
You have meant
To catch it,
And it shrivels;
You abandon
Your intent—
It opens, and it
Closes and you
Reach for it—
The blue
Surrounding it
Grows cloudy, and
It floats away
From you."

Just Wow! and which do you prefer ? 🤗
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 6 stars , oh I can only give 5.

[Warren-Newport Public Library · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972), her brother Warren, and her mother Mary formed a tight family threesome that stuck together even through Warren's marriage and career up until Mary's death. Marianne lived with her mother for most of her life (her college years at Bryn Mawr were the only notable exception) and insisted that her mother's solicitude allowed her to develop as a writer. If that's true, Marianne paid a high price for her art.

Mary Moore was a manipulative, possessive woman who bound her children to her with long letters, pet names, and secret code words. Remarkably, both Mary and Warren called Marianne "Rat" as an endearment and used masculine pronouns to refer to her. Marianne never married or even developed a deep relationship outside of her family, although she did count T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Elizabeth Bishop among her literary friends.

Marianne worked outside the home (for several years she was the editor of the prestigious literary magazine The Dial), but her mother sent all the money Marianne earned to a inaccessible savings account. Marianne didn't have a good grasp of financial issues, and she couldn't have gotten at her money if she had wanted to.

Marianne Moore's poetry was the only means of self-expression available to her. This literary woman never even kept a diary for fear her mother would read it.

After her mother's death, Marianne used her freedom to fashion for herself a new persona: a cape-and-tricorne-wearing eccentric maiden aunt, or, as Elizabeth Bishop put it, a "feminine, luminescent, delicate re-incarnation of Paul Revere," (p. 349). In her old age, Marianne toured, read her work to packed houses, and published poems in mass-market magazines. Her popularity peaked around the time of her death in 1972, but after that, interest in her work declined.

Linda Leavell, who was selected by Marianne's surviving family members to write this biography, does an excellent job of integrating analysis of Marianne's poetry with a narrative of her life. If you enjoy literary biographies, this is a good, readable example of the genre, even if in some places it raises more questions than it can answer. (Amy B.)

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

The detail can get tedious, but a fascinating story of determination to become a poet and life in NYC - west Village and Brooklyn in first half of 20th century - and friendships including Auden, Pound, Bishop, Tate, and on and on. Overbearing (bisexual) mother who would not leave her side - they slept in the same bed most of MM's adult life - and father who deserted her - but that tension makes poetry. Still cannot fully embrace her poems, though a handful hit me hard (and maybe that's enough!).

[Esther · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have nothing with which to contrast this, except my own decades old memories of packing up Moore's private library, and the things I learned about her doing that. It made me wish I'd been born early enough to be drawn to her, the way I was to Cummings, and to some of the books and authors she had on her shelves. It has also made me spend some time with Moore's poetry, and it is nice to have to do some work again.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marianne Moore, 1887 - 1972, is considered to be one of the most influential American poets. She was considered to be a Modernist, with the likes of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Yeats. A strange family dynamic with her mother and brother and her, what I believe, was anorexia (wanting and needing control over something in her life that her mother couldn’t control), defined her poetry. A fascinating woman and a feminist with a push/pull between solitude and notoriety.
Just excellent.

[Joan Colby · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive biography of one of our most original poets Marianne Moore. While well-written by an admirer of Moore’s (as am I) what the book lacks is more samples of Moore’s poetry. Possibly copyright laws interfered, but one would have liked to see Moore’s most important and well-known poems.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Loved the history, but the poetry was a bit beyond me. My dad wanted me to read it and it was worth it.

[J. Alfred · Rating 4 out of 5]

William Carlos Williams said that that Moore was "our saint-- if we had one."
I love Marianne Moore fiercely, but I can never remember anything but a line or two from her poems. She strikes me with much the same emotional feeling that I get from St Clare: joyful without much outward reason to be, you know, and probably vastly smarter than oneself? We should all read more of her. I swear it's worth it.
Also, this book is quite good. It's probably the best literary biography I can remember, outside the actually artistic ones, like Woolf's 'biography' of Flush, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog. It explains some of the principle poems in a satisfactory way, it gives scads of great quotes from the family's huge and strangely fascinating correspondence, and it hits just the right note much of the time, for instance when it describes that shadowy modernist phantom Bryher "as something of a Henry James character in reverse." Many kudos to the author, a hearty recognition for anyone searching for a good memorable biography.

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is serviceable but hard-going—nearly four hundred pages about a virgin homebody who lives with her mother. Leavell claims Moore's poetry to be a symbol of "multiculturalism" and "biodiversity" as opposed to "identity politics." It's just as much of a reach as it sounds. Sure, Marianne Moore wrote poems about animals; it doesn't make her E.O. Wilson.

Instead, I'd recommend the Marianne Moore section of David Kalstone's Becoming a Poet, which is more enlightening because he has ideas about her poetry that go beyond barely informative summaries.

[Michelle Hannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

How had I not heard of Marianne Moore before now? She was a prolific poet, 1952 Pulitzer Prize winner, and even spent time at the Lake Placid Lodge in my former corner of the Adirondacks. This book offers interpretations of some of Moore’s poems, giving them deeper meaning, and relating them to what was going on in Moore’s life and the world at large when they were written. It’s a captivating book about a fascinating, singular woman, and I’m inspired to read more of her poetry.

[Noah · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exemplary biography, "Holding On Upside Down" gets it all right, balancing the personal and the poetical, the individual and the societal. This is my third recent biography of a poet (Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens), and Leavell's is clearly the best of the bunch. Ultimately, it makes me want to dive deeply into Moore's poetry.

[Robert Walkley · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best biographies of a modern poet I have ever read. It’s as thorough and meticulous as one of Moore’s poems, say “Marriage,” for example. The best bios send you back to the poems.This one does, and more! A must read if you are interested in Marianne Moore.

[shosh!]

"... marianne moore is a poet of paradoxes. she was generous to a fault in answering queries and granting interviews, yet she revealed her deepest feelings to no one."

oh marianne moore, we're really in it now

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting story of the life of Marianne Moore. Not the most exciting poet's life to read about, but there is something extraordinary in the ordinary with her.

[dipandjelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

marianne moore sure did live a .... life... damn...

[Richard Haynes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book about one of my favorite poets. I now like the person as much as I liked her poetry.

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leavell's account of the life and work of Marianne Moore raised some objections that it was unfair to Moore's mother. The Moore family dynamics were certainly off. But Leavell adds to the case that Moore was one of our most significant American poets.

Moore wrote without regard to labels. She was a Modernist who used a precise syllabic form and rhymes. She was a defender of the underdog, an early white champion of civil rights and of black artists and athletes who also voted Republican and defended LBJ's continuing the Vietnam War, the latter mainly so as not to abandon the South Vietnamese. She wrote "advertising" verse and patriotic poems during WWII. She was raised by lesbians and then denigrated by second wave feminists.

Her poetry must be read and dealt with if you care about American poetry. Her carefully controlled poems were often described as emotionless and overly intellectual. In truth, she was able to contain deep emotion and thought in precise verse, a skill and aesthetic often not practiced or appreciated since the Confessionals came along.

A fascinating biography. No there are no fireworks or is there physical violence. But there is emotional violence and the heroic strength of a small woman with a large vision and poetic craft.

[Ann Cefola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating look into the early modernists through the life of poet Marianne Moore, who was drawn to the ground-breaking arts scene in New York in the early century. The book balances her bio and analysis of her work against the historical upheavals of the 20th century. Thanks to Leavell's exhaustive research, I have a new appreciation for Moore, her significant contribution to the canon, and her relentless focus on craft. I too squirmed over her insular family life--yet Leavell suggests this conundrum helped feed Moore's work. Who can say? This is a solid, engaging introduction to Moore and her work.

[Millie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always liked Moore's poetry, having studied it in college. This biography gave me many insights into her life and influence, especially with some major American poets, such as T. S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bishop. She was also sports-minded and liked to play tennis, which is a favorite of mine. Her early collegiate life at Bryn Mawr was trail-blazing for its time, thanks in large part to the women faculty and president of that school. Moore's relationships with her mother and brother were parts of her life that I knew little about. So the book was informative as well as engaging.

[Jan Larkey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a unique story about a unique character in our literary history who changed the mode of poetic expression.

I had the privilege of sharing the development of this book during critique sessions of the Arkansas Writers' Guild. Leavell is a gifted writer. Her well documented story of Marianne Moore is fascinating.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely biography of Moore. Focuses just enough attention on the poetry without losing focus on the life and personality. Leavell's discussion of Moore's relationship with her mother and brother is fair and honest. She shows the difficulties but also shows that Moore was able to write despite her lack of privacy or personal space.

[Robert Vaughan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic and insightful biography of one of America's foremost Modernists in the poetry realm. Marianne Moore's quirky, unusual life and work is not only reviewed in a careful, precise manner, but more importantly, MM is revived and placed where she belongs: in the canon as one of the finest American poets!

[Genon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a fascinating family. I had to keep reminding myself that this was early 1900's and not 2013. I didn't know much about this poet before reading this book, but I feel like I understand the heart and soul of her poems. A true humanist.

[Julia Hendon · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impressive biography of an interesting talent. Moore's family was odd yet nurtured her poetic talent in a way that might not have been the case with more standard relationship. It turns out that Moore's grandparents lived in Gettysburg and the poet lived in Carlisle before moving to New York.

[Kit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, unique life, smartly and decorously told.