Customer Reviews (1)

Superb analysis of Marianne Moore's work
Linda Leavell's book on Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts is a great scholarly analysis of the work of the great Marianne Moore. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
This is a Haskell House original publication. A complete computer- generated guide to Marianne Moore's great poems. "All libraries should purchase this work." LIBRARY JOURNAL ... Read more

Product Description
This highly innovative work on poetic influence among women writers focuses on the relationship between modernist poet Elizabeth Bishop and her mentor Marianne Moore. Departing from Freudian models of influence theory that ignore the question of maternal presence, Joanne Diehl applies the psychoanalytic insights of object relations theorists Melanie Klein and Christopher Bollas to woman-to- woman literary transactions. She lays the groundwork for a far-reaching critical approach as she shows that Bishop, mourning her separation from her natural mother, strives to balance gratitude toward Moore, her literary mother, with a potentially disabling envy.Diehl begins by exploring Bishop's memoir of Moore, "Efforts of Affection," as an attempt by Bishop to verify Moore's uniqueness in order to defend herself against her predecessor's almost overwhelming originality. She then offers an intertextual reading of the two writers' works that inquires into Bishop's ambivalence toward Moore. In an analysis of "Crusoe in England" and "In the Village," Diehl exposes the restorative impulses that fuel aesthetic creation and investigates how Bishop thematizes an understanding of literary production as a process of psychic compensation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Rearguard Study of an Avant-Gardist
Grace Schulman is a poet who pretends to write a critical study of Moore's work; her appeal to critical sources is amateur.The book is most useful where Schulman relies on her own readings, which nonetheless utilize suchstodgy methods as counting syllables and stresses almost exclusively. Schulman has been meticulous and has uncovered a few things that could behelpful to readers, but her own logic is watery.This book serves as agood example of mainstream poetics trying to claim that Moore was a poet ofthe so-called "conversational" vein rather than an innovator whoplayed--successfully--with the big boys. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Opening the Doors of Perception
This book is an outstanding analysis of "reading and writing nature" in the works of four great American poets.I found the book specific and compelling. It helped clarify for me the problems of perception and cognition as they have been analyzed, written about and lived by American poets.It enhanced my own experience of and appreciation for these writers.The book also opens a door onto the larger dimensions of nature that can become locked or occluded through disuse. I recommend this book for anyone who is interested in the relationship between art, nature and the imagination. ... Read more