Forthcoming in November 2011
Adversity and Grace: Marianne Moore, 1936-1941

A new edition of
Marianne Moore's poetry from 1936-1941
EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY HEATHER CASS WHITE

ELS 107 (2011). 150 pp. (est.)
$35.00. ISBN 978-1-55058-389-2

The five year period examined in this volume, 1936 to 1941, was a time of multifarious personal and professional adversity for Marianne Moore, as well as one in which she came to believe that America as a nation was in need of a grace to which her art had not, until that point, been sufficiently attuned. Her 1941 book What Are Years was her response to that need, and is a milestone in Moore's writing: it is the meeting point between the end of the early Moore and the beginning of the late, and the first book in which Moore makes thoroughgoing revisions to major poems with the intention of re-shaping her earlier work to fit later intentions. As such it is crucial to our understanding of Moore's life-long, ever-intensifying practice of revision. Adversity and Grace reproduces What Are Years in full, as well as the earliest published version of each poem it contains, and provides variant tables that note all of the changes Moore made to the poems in revising them.

A companion volume to A-Quiver with Significance: Marianne Moore, 1932-1936, the editor's previous edition of Moore's work, Adversity and Grace presents in facsimile reproduction every poem Moore published between 1936 and 1941.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction

What Are Years

First Presentations:

Abbreviations
A Note on the Apparatus

"The Student"
"Half Deity"
"Smooth Gnarled Crepe Myrtle!"
"Virginia Britannia"
"The Pangolin"
"See in the Midst of Fair Leaves"
"Bird-Witted"
"Walking-Sticks and Paperweights and Watermarks"
"Four Quartz Crystal Clocks"
"A Glass-Ribbed Nest"
"What Are Years?"
"Rigorists"
"Light is Speech"
"Spenser's Ireland"
"He 'Digesteth Harde Yron'"

Works Cited
Index of Poems

Back to top

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Magic Mirror, Compassionate Friendship, and Thorn Thicket:
A Tribute to Erich Heydt

Edited and with an introduction
by Nephie J. Christodoulides

ELS 106. 300 pages.
$35.00. ISBN: 978-1-55058-388-5

Magic Mirror is H.D.'s unpublished roman à clef of her eight-year "strange relationship" with Dr. Erich Heydt, a psychiatrist in Zurich with whom she formed a bond which often oscillated between professional consultation and a sort of analyst-analysand intimacy accompanied by much inner conflict and resistance. Relatively short, and written in three drafts between 1955 and 1956, Magic Mirror is autobiography in disguise: "Everything is true there […] I had a hard time finding names for my people. They are real people; everything is real except the build-up of Eric's enigmatic German background." Magic Mirror sheds abundant light on her relationship with Heydt, who played a role much like Freud did in H.D.'s life twenty years earlier. The work also offers insights into her relationship with Ezra Pound; her unresolved bond with her half-brother, Eric Doolittle; Pieter Rodeck; as well as the sinking of the Lusitania and the still-birth of her first child on May 21, 1915. Further, the memoir is significant as a textual alembic which casts into sharp relief issues manifested in her other postwar works, for example, the occult, spiritualism, and how they both relate to psychoanalysis and her vocation as a writer. Magic Mirror contains material that is palimpsestically recycled and further expanded in her memoirs Compassionate Friendship (1955) and Thorn Thicket (1960). .

Nephie J. Christodoulides is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Cyprus. She is the author of Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking: Motherhood in Sylvia Plath's Work (Rodopi 2005) as well as articles on Sylvia Plath, Hilda Doolittle, Ted Hughes and Christina Rossetti. Several of her book reviews were published in journals and her research interest include women's writing, psychoanalysis, poetry and children's literature. She is currently working on her new book on H.D. and the figure of the rose (Mellen), and is co-editing the Cambridge Companion to H.D.

Back to top