A-Quiver With Significance: Marianne Moore, 1932—1936
edited and with an introduction by Heather Cass White
ELS 98 (2008). 170 pages. $22.00.
ISBN 978-1-55058-380-9
Order A-Quiver with Significance
A persistent problem for readers and critics of Moore has been, and continues to be, the difficulty of finding her work in any but its last published form. Scholars need editions of Moore’s poems that present them in their original forms, with variant tables indicating later revisions; A-Quiver With Significance: Marianne Moore, 1932-1936 will provide them with one such edition, focusing on a particularly rich period in Moore’s career. This book gathers together facsimile versions of all of the poems Marianne Moore published between 1932 and 1936, the period during which Moore wrote not only most of her greatest poems, but also (by critical consensus) the last great poems she was ever to write. The centerpiece of this book is a facsimile of The Pangolin and Other Verse, the limited edition that Moore published in 1936, and which she never republished in its original form.
“The edition Moore created at the height of her powers, Pangolin and Other Verse, is now mostly out of reach of the public, hidden away in rare books collections. And other poems and original versions of poems, are scattered in early issues of journals only a few academic libraries carry at all. Like other modernists, Moore took great interest in the material appearance of her poetry. To have access to a facsimile edition, with the versions of poems Moore created when her writing was at its strongest, and with the layout and illustrations she was so intimately involved in producing, is a scholar’s dream and an essential item in the personal library of all serious readers of modern poetry.”
“Building the edition off of a facsimile reprint of Moore’s powerful collection of poems, The Pangolin and Other Verse, makes good sense given the importance of the volume to her modernist peers. As White notes, Moore paid particular attention to the ordering of her verses in this collection, as she did to every aspect of the book’s production. The volume makes an excellent case study in the ways in which the material presentation of a book of poems can prove vital to addressing the content of the verses within.”
Table of Contents
I. Introduction
II. The Pangolin and Other Verse“The Old Dominion”:
“Virginia Britannia”
“Bird-Witted”
“Half Deity”
“Smooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle”
“The Pangolin”
III. First Presentations
a. “The Monkey Puzzler”
b. “The Steeple-Jack”
c. “The Student”
d. “The Hero”
e. “No Swan So Fine”
f. “The Jerboa”
g. “Old Tiger”
h. “The Plumet Basilisk”
i. “Camillia Sabina”
j. “The Frigate Pelican”
k. “The Buffalo”
l. “Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain”
m. “Half Deity”
n. “Smooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle”
o. “Pigeons”
p. “Virginia Britannia”
q. “Bird-Witted”
r. “Walking-Sticks and Paper Weights and Water Marks”
s. “See in the Midst of Fair Leaves”
IV. Notes and Editorial Apparatus
