Holding on upside down : the life and work of Marianne Moore /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Leavell, Linda, 1954-
Edition:First edition.
Imprint:New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Description:xxi, 455 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm
Language:English
Subject:
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/9751345
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9780374107291 (hbk.)
0374107297 (hbk.)
Notes:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Review by Choice Review

As Moore's authorized biographer, Leavell (Oklahoma State Univ.) had unlimited access to the poet's papers, including family documents. In the first chapter, Leavell focuses on the year 1915, when Moore traveled to New York City and entered the world of modernism, meeting photographer Alfred Stieglitz and editor Alfred Kreymborg. Subsequent chapters are arranged chronologically, focusing first on Moore's childhood, including her absent father and her ever-present mother, then on the poet's literary relationship with Scofield Thayer and James Watson, publishers of The Dial. These two influential men promoted Moore's work, presented her with the Dial Award, and in 1925 appointed her editor of the prestigious journal, a position that allowed her, during her four-year tenure, to reject authors such as Hemingway and Joyce, but publish Pound, Yeats, and Stein. Throughout this biography, Leavell provides insightful analyses of Moore's poetry, which was precise, sentimental, witty, ironic, and accessible--qualities that Moore encouraged in young poets, Elizabeth Bishop among them. In her final years, as a literary celebrity, Moore appeared on talk shows and at sporting events, throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium. Like Moore and her poetry, this biography is honest, elegant, and circumspect, not controversial or confessional. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. R. Mulligan Christopher Newport University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review

The difficulty of explaining the great modernist poet Marianne Moore has always been part of her splendor. How does her obsession with animals relate to her life with her mother? Can her innovative syllabic arrangements be attributed to her psychological state? Biographers try to figure out why poets write the way they do - which leads to lots of explanation and equivocation, not many answers. By sifting through voluminous family correspondence, quoting liberally and only sometimes interpreting, Leavell gives us Moore as fascinating woman and poet, avant-gardist and prude, small-town girl, big-city dweller, submissive daughter and art world player. "Holding On Upside Down" is nearly as much the story of Moore's mother, Mary, as it is Moore's own. Mother and daughter lived together, mostly in cramped apartments, until Mary's death when Marianne was 59. Mary seems to have wielded a "tyrannical love," urging Moore not to publish until "after you've changed your style," and perhaps successfully suppressing any urges toward sexual adulthood Marianne might have felt. Mary also seems to have been necessary to Marianne's poems. "As constraining as Mary's love was," Leavell writes, "Marianne found in that love the artistic space she needed" and "developed her remarkable intellect as a kind of armor." The poems come to seem a fortress, in which a world of sensory, intellectual and ethical transformations take place. This smart, provocative book lets us see the woman and her work without resorting to simplification. DAISY FRIED'S latest book of poems is "Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 20, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Marianne Moore (1887-1972) is a poet of paradoxes, Leavell asserts at the outset of this superb, recalibrating biography, the result of three decades of intense effort. Singular in her tricorne hat and black cape, Moore eventually became a celebrity and public poet. But before her red hair turned white, Moore was an enigma, one of the most radical of the new poets, living docilely, it seemed, with her mother. Leavell tells the entire intense story of the poet's pre-Revolutionary War heritage; her institutionalized father, whom she never met; the intensely symbiotic relationships between Moore, her mother, Mary, and her brother, Warner; and Mary's long-lasting love affair with another woman. Leavell's cogent interpretations of Moore's poetry and chronicling of how diligently she pursued startling artistic innovation under her mother's watchful eye in Greenwich Village and Brooklyn while teaching, working in a library, and serving as editor for The Dial, are equally revelatory. Like a sculptor working in clay, Leavell steadily builds up contour and texture as she portrays Moore as a poet of sly wit and undetected but stormy passion, who jumped rope on the roof of her apartment building and assiduously perfected unconventional meter, unsentimental subject matter, and scientific precision in poems about exotic animals, freedom in confinement, and a sense of human dignity and reverence for mystery. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

An engaging blend of literary criticism and biography, this ambitious work by literature professor and Moore scholar Leavell (Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color) challenges the persistent image of the modernist poet as a repressed and withdrawn spinster. From Moore's birth in Missouri in 1887, the book follows her lively intellectual development and years of unpublished obscurity, up until 1915, when she began to find outlets for her work. Her dense, cryptic, and complicated poems attracted the attention of avant-garde writers like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and H.D. Torn between her closeness to her mother (with whom she lived all her life) and her desire to achieve literary celebrity, Moore went on to work at The Dial in the late 1920s and became a fixture of literary society. She toiled away for years as a poet's poet with a scant popular readership, eventually rising to national prominence when her Collected Poems swept the literary prizes in 1952, establishing Moore as a doyenne of letters until her death 20 years later. Where Leavell's biography stakes its claim is in its unprecedented insight into Moore's family relationships, made possible through previously unavailable materials furnished by her estate. In this well-researched biography, Moore emerges as a poet of freedom with a passionate inner life. Agent: Susan Rabiner, Susan Rabiner Literary Agency. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Leavell (Professor Emerita, English, Oklahoma State Univ.; Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color) draws from the archive and private estate of American poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) to illustrate how the modernist poet evolved from writing carefully crafted, cutting-edge poetry to producing the more prolific poems of her later years. Correspondence reveals that Moore's mother, Mary, used emotional manipulation, money, and a secret family vernacular to control both her son, Warner (John), and Marianne. Moore, who lived with her mother in her adult years, persevered despite little autonomy and no privacy and served as editor of the literary magazine The Dial while forging relationships with prominent poets William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and H.D., among others. Leavell's perceptive and poetic interpretation of Moore's writing and its relationship to both her life and the literary landscape of her era defines Moore as first a poet, then a woman poet. Photographs of selected archival letters would have served and enhanced the biography overall. VERDICT Recommended for students of poetry and readers of Moore. For more formative details of Moore's life, see Susan Forward's Toxic Parents. [See Prepub Alert, 4/29/13.]-Nerissa Kuebrich, Chicago (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A detailed biographical study and literary critique of modernist poet Marianne Moore's life (18871982) and work. Moore scholar Leavell's (Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color, 1995) intimate portrait is the first biography written with the support of the Moore estate. Though Moore left behind an extensive archive recounting each week of her life, she revealed little of the inner workings of her cloistered personal self. Leavell delves deeply into Moore's early work and its connection to her eccentric life and relationships. The poet never married, seemingly never fell in love and suffered poor health for much of her life. From her early 20s to her 60s, Moore lived with her mother. Yet the poet maintained intense friendships with Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bishop, and she became editor of The Dial in 1925. Critics agreed that she was the "finest poet writing in America," yet her popularity would be limited to a small devoted following. Her complex poems first began garnering recognition in 1915, and she went on to win major awards, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Moore was still receiving recognition and awards for her work "in the last decade of her life." In her 60s, the reclusive Moore became a celebrity. Major magazines published feature stories about the elderly spinster poet, and her college readings were sellouts. In 1967, on her 80th birthday, Moore appeared on Today to promote a book of her collected works. "Greatly beloved yet little understood, highly esteemed yet barely known outside of English departments," writes Leavell, "Marianne Moore is a poet of paradoxes." A well-researched, scholarly excursion into the life of a complex personality and the world she inhabited.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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