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

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Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color) challenges the persistent image of the modernist poet as a repressed and withdrawn spinster. From Moore’s birth in Missouri in 1887, the book follows her lively intellectual development and years of unpublished obscurity, up until 1915, when she began to find outlets for her work.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.)