Marianne Moore and the Archives

Marianne Moore and the Archives explores the work of a major modernist poet in the contexts of material culture and the digital humanities. In major new discoveries, scholars discuss Moore’s engagement with sex, race, and class in poems about the gay black dancer Arthur Mitchell, the Emperor Haile Selassie, and Depression-era America. Other contributors address Moore’s letters, scrapbook engagements with a popular magazine, and her reconstructed living room on display at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. Contributors also analyze several of Moore’s notebooks available online at the Marianne Moore Digital Archives. They address the teaching applications of the digital archive, the aesthetics of Moore’s notebooks, her reflections on figurative language and the visionary poetic tradition, the role of categories in framing knowledge, and her epistolary exchanges with poet Robert Duncan. The volume closes with an interview with Patricia C. Willis, a foundational archivist of Moore’s work.