Marianne Moore: A Literary Life

by Charles Molesworth

Book Overview

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0689118155
• ISBN13: 9780689118159
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Atheneum Books
• Length: 472 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Very good information

This book is quite informative -- the author has clearly done solid and serious research for many years to write such a book. However, the book is incredibly boring -- it has no through-line, no plot, just chronological plodding through year after year without any sense of how to tell a story, much less write one. The style is extremely uneven and at times just pure aggravation. He actually uses words like "ignorable," a word that is not in my Webster's Unabridged but that obviously means easily ignored, but after the fiftieth such term it does become difficult to ignore such awkward neologisms. Still, if you are interested in Moore, this book is the best place to start. He is right about everything where her critics are just a pack of psychotic feminist goofballs for the most part -- one book uses the term "anti-bourgeois" 123 times in 120 pages. Moore was for the Vietnam War, voted for Nixon and went to church twice a week. She spent her entire life in devotion to Christ. You won't find that out from reading her critics, who instead draft her into the feminist war on men. While Moore did think women should have the right to vote, she was also against any kind of self-righteousness and was very conservative, and long before Nixon had supported Taft and Hoover. She is also anti-feminist in many ways: Molesworth quotes her:"If there is any advantage in dress, it is on the side of woman; ... women are no longer debarred from professions that are open to men, and if one cares to be femininely lazy, traditions of the past still afford shelter" (162). Molesworth gets his facts straight and is right about the major themes of Moore's life, and this part of his book is pure pleasure. This is a great biography in terms of research and details, but very poor in terms of plot line, and readability. I've read about ten books on Moore, and this is far and away the best one. You get a good picture of her, while in most of the criticism you get willfully and woefully inaccurate depictions of her in which the authors simply don't care at all to present the truth. Molesworth really does care to present the truth as he sees it, and he has struggled hard to get to it. Thank heavens there is one useful book to get at this difficult, charming, incredibly ingenious poet. Set aside 60 hours to read it, it's about as difficult to read as anything I've read since Hegel, but he hews close to the facts, and has a very strong mind for understanding Moore's philosophy, religion, and temperament. He just has so many facts, and they don't seem to be well-organized, and sometimes you have to reread a paragraph three times to figure out what he was trying to say, as he can move from talking about her brother, to a poem, to a check she got, to her interest in the Presbyterian religion all in one sentence. Check out this sentence, literally chosen at random (there are some that I could find that are much worse):"The poem [The Plumet Basilisk], by treating his en