Marianne Moore's Poems, in the Process of Becoming

For Boston Review, Christopher J. Adamson reviews Marianne Moore's New Collected Poems, edited by Heather Cass White and published last year by FSG. "Complete Poems is—by Moore’s own design—far from complete; White’s New Collected Poems is much more so. Yet throughout her editorial commentary and insertions, White implies that to truly collect all of Moore’s work, original and revised and omitted alike, would involve a variorum much heftier than the comparatively modest reading edition here considered," writes Adamson. More about Moore (had to):

...As she writes in the second of the two essays that bookend the poems, “For Moore a poem was always in the process of becoming, and any one printed incarnation of it was not its essence, but only the visible souvenir of a living process of composition.”

To point out White’s interest in Moore’s “living process of composition” is not to say that White admires Moore’s revisions, the process by which the poet made her earlier modernist works conform to the post–World War II moralist she became later in life. White is very clear about her preference for prewar Moore, the poet of “An Octopus,” “The Jerboa,” “The Pangolin,” and the full five-stanza incarnation of “Poetry,” the version that includes the oft-quoted line about poetry embodying “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” In fact, White has built this new edition by consistently subordinating any incarnations other than Moore’s first. “My aim is simple,” White writes. “I have here presented Moore’s poems as they were when she first wrote and published them, not as she later revised them. In her own collections Moore treated her early work as ephemeral forms of what it later became. I have reversed her procedure, treating later revisions as footnotes to the original poems.”

The clarity and consistency of White’s principle of editorial control are vital to this edition’s success. An edition of Moore’s work published in 2003 and edited by Grace Schulman, The Poems of Marianne Moore, neglects to offer such a coherent editorial vision, and Schulman seems simply to have included the poems’ versions that she preferred. For example, she bewilderingly prints the 1951 eight-stanza version of the iconic and critically celebrated “The Steeple-Jack,” a thirteen-stanza poem first published in 1932, a poem which Moore herself restored to its original length for Complete Poems (making it, as White notes, “the only example of a poem returned to its original length as a result of Moore’s revisions”). And while Schulman includes all the poems Moore excised from Complete Poems, such as “Half Deity” and “The Student,” she also prints many pre-war poems in their Complete Poems revisions, mixing Moore’s final and first intentions and thereby crafting a hybrid, inconsistent poet on the page.

To be continued at Boston Review.