description: MARIANNE The Cage and the Animal is a study of the life, character, and art of one of America’s ﬁnest poets. Miss Moore is a major poet of strong emotion and great imagination whose work promises to retain a high place in the canon of modern art. This is the ﬁrst book to make such claims for Miss Moore, rejecting once and for all the easy cliche that she is essentially a decorative artist concerned with outsides and trivia. The book accounts for every phase of Miss Moore’s life, the early sources of her unusual character, the quick recognition and encouragement of her work by Ezra Pound, her years as a young poet in Greenwich Village where her contemporaries included Alfred Kreymborg, William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Wallace Stevens, her controversial editorship of the Dial, the most prestigious literary magazine of its day, her “retirement” to Brooklyn where she continued for decades consistently to produce some of the best poems written in our time. The major part of the book is devoted to Miss Moore’s poetry from her ﬁrst book, Poems, arranged for and published in 1921 by friends without her knowledge, to the Complete Poems. Mr. Hall sees danger and protection as recurring preoccupations in Miss Moore’s work, and shows how, in poem after poem, she has explored these themes, calling to her defense a wonderful array of self-sufﬁcient animals and objects, and conjuring such bright shields as independence, courage, love, and imagination. In this study, Hall reveals Miss Moore as a poet of fantasy, distortion, and deep feeling. He also assesses Miss Moore’s important translation of the Fables of La Fontaine and her prose works. In its sensitive and thorough accounting of Miss Moore’s complex character and poetry, MARIANNE MOORE offers valuable new perspectives on one of the most intriguing ﬁgures in twentieth-century letters and makes accessible one of the richest and most rewarding achievements of modern poetry.
language: English
title: Marianne Moore: The Cage and the Animal
titlecomplete: Marianne Moore: The Cage and the Animal
ratings_count: 4
publisher: Pegasus