Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore

(Hardback, Main)

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Marianne Moore (1887-1972) has been heralded as America's greatest poet of the modernist movement. Her volume Collected Poems won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1952 and the Bollingen Prize in 1953.Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Moore eventually found her way to New York with her mother whom she continued to live with until her mother passed, a familial devotion so intense that William Carlos Williams complained that it was 'pathological' and prevented her from marrying any 'literary guys'. Moore never married. Linda Leavall is the first biographer to be granted access and freedom to quote from Moore's archives. More than just a standard biography, Leavall re-examines Moore's body of work to complement and enlighten the biography.Through Moore's poems and letters from T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and many others, Leavall has written what is sure to be the definitive biography of Moore.

Reviews

A 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for Biography "The moment is ripe for [Marianne Moore] to be restored to us, depixified and complex. And so she has been in a swift, cool but empathetic new biography called "Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore," by Linda Leavell . . . It says much for Ms. Leavell's account of Moore's life that for all the hard and hard-to-fathom facts it marshals, it leaves the miracles intact." --Holland Cotter, "The New York Times ""As Linda Leavell's perceptive and elegant biography suggests, Moore was herself a sort of literary mermaid, not quite the same creature from top to bottom. As a girl, she adopted animal names and a male pronoun; as an adult, she unwaveringly obeyed her mother even as she disregarded literary conventions. Later on, she transformed herself from a poet for the elite into a poet for the masses and from Brooklyn recluse into beloved performer . . . "Holding On Upside Down" captures well the strange and entrancing drama of Marianne's family life." --Abigail Deutsch, "The Wall Street Journal "*Five out of Five Stars* "Yet at the heart of Linda Leavell's revealing, respectful biography is a 'tyrannical love.' Amid a sea of poets with experimental domestic arrangements, Moore's still stands out as unusual . . . Leavell wields her wealth of material with great tact and conviction of the depth of love and understanding between Marianne and her mother. Mary might not have done her motherly duty of helping her daughter make the leap into adulthood. But her devoted ministrations enabled Marianne to make what William Carlos Williams called 'the unbridled leap' into new forms, new ways of seeing the world through words. Leavell is keen to point out how she thrived within her filial constraints, seeing self-discipline as freedom. She calls Marianne's poetry an act of survival. In Moore's own words, from one of her many animal poems, 'Paper Nautilus, ' she was 'hindered to s

Author Bio

Linda Leavell is a Professor Emerita of English at Oklahoma State University. Her first book, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color (LSU 1995), won the SCMLA book award and her articles on Moore have appeared in various publications, among them American Literary History and Twentieth Century Literature.