With this selection of the letters of Marianne Moore (1887–1972), Bonnie Costello and her collaborators have winnowed to one volume the poet’s extensive correspondence of some thirty thousand surviving missives. Though she wrote fewer than George Bernard Shaw, who by his editor’s estimate dashed off in the neighborhood of two hundred and fifty thousand communiqués, the number and general length of Moore’s letters will impress many a present-day litterateur whose own correspondence might comprise, at best, a slim edition of collected emails. Beginning here in 1905, when Moore was attending Bryn Mawr College, the volume extends to 1969, the year of her disabling stroke (and three years before her death in New York City). Moore’s dispatches contain her almost daily—and often more than thrice-daily— concourse with a world that she both delighted in and, to a fair extent, retreated from, favoring instead the genial privacy of life with her mother, for whom she was a perennial companion.

While Moore became during her lifetime a much-loved public figure, as a poet she continues to suffer from what might be called, in the parlance of public relations firms, an image problem. Though by no means as damaging as the infamy that beset Moore’s champion and good friend Ezra Pound, Moore’s late fame as a baseball-loving, zoo-going magazine personality and a correspondent of the Ford Motor Company has taken its toll on the poetry in a way that her work is particularly susceptible to. Her poems’ almost preternatural personal reserve, linguistic playfulness, wit, and satiric distance–accompanied by promiscuous quotation, baroque detail, prosodic invention, and Moore’s particular brand of ingenious slant rhyme—all run the risk of overriding their deep-rooted seriousness and emotional complexity. Perhaps because of the poetry’s difficult idiosyncrasies, readers have too easily chalked it all up to the musings of the eccentric in a tricorn hat famously pictured on the cover of Esquire in June of 1966.

Moore’s life and poetry, in this regard, represent a double irony: remembered as a darling of the media, she was in fact an extremely private individual possessed of a bedrock sense of moral responsibility; often criticized for its remoteness from experience, her poetry is situated on the front lines of human struggle. Taking aim at the verse in 1984, the poet and novelist Gilbert Sorrentino leveled this heavy barrage: “[Her] language failed her because it lost any touch with the reality that language bears. Miss Moore retreated from life; and her language retreated with her, until it finally died, it finally became good copy, bright and slick and incapable of carrying emotion to the page, to the reader.” He attributes this paucity of experience to the poet’s famous fascination with obscure animals and other natural curiosities: “Miss Moore cast about for subject matter outside her human terrors and desire and meanness—outside, that is, her own humanity, much like a classy Ogden Nash.” Ogden Nash is brandished in this context, much the way the infamous Ambrose “Namby-Pamby” Philips sometimes is, as a synonym for empty versification that “classy” in no way redeems. Sorrentino likens Moore’s poetic fauna to creatures out of Walt Disney.

The best defense against this woeful misreading of the poetry was made proleptically by T. S. Eliot in his introduction to Moore’s Selected Poems in 1935:

It would be difficult to say what is the “subject matter” of [Moore’s great poem] “The Jerboa.” For a mind of such agility, and for a sensibility so reticent, the minor subject, such as a pleasant little sand-coloured skipping animal, may be the best release for the major emotions. Only the pedantic literalist could consider the subject-matter to be trivial; the triviality is in himself. We have to choose whatever subject-matter allows us the most powerful and most secret release; and that is a personal affair.

That Moore’s poetry was a “personal affair” of great consequence to her that also managed great universality becomes clear in her correspondence. When in 1920 two poems by Moore appeared in The Dial, John Warner Moore, the poet’s only sibling and most frequent pen pal, wrote to her: “I was … greatly impressed with the fundamental grasp of ‘Life’ in [the poems] and expressed too in our own special ‘language’ but so marvelously handled that the ‘aliens’ could and can understand them & enjoy them.” Moore’s “deference to common creatureliness,” as the critic S. P. Zitner put it, appears everywhere in her letters. Circular missives among Moore, her brother, and her mother carried appellations derived from The Wind in the Willows, such as Badger, Mole, and Rat. To her friend Bryher, Moore became Dactyl, shortened from pterodactyl. One of the poems from that Dial of 1920, “Picking and Choosing,” ends with this apostrophe to a diminutive canine:

Small dog, going over the lawn nipping

     the linen and saying
that you have a badger—remember

     Xenophon;
only rudimentary behavior is necessary to put

     us on the scent.
“A right good salvo of barks,” a few strong

     wrinkles puckering the skin between

     the ears, is all we ask.

It is through the “rudimentary behavior” of her animals, plants, and curios that Moore puts us on the scent of her true subject matter. While the sheer variety and, in Moore’s prized word, “gusto” of her descriptions give pleasure, her poems take the reader beyond their ornate surfaces, to qualities that are not necessarily human but that suggest standards for and reveal foibles in the human condition. Her animals are not stand-ins for people, but their attributes and excellences can be compared fruitfully with our own.

One disappointing aspect of the letters is that they do not deal more with the poetry. Moore often comments on the work of colleagues such as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and her good friend Elizabeth Bishop. But such remarks are usually brief, and either too specific or too general to shed much light on Moore’s views of poetry, her own or others’. She writes of Stevens’s poetry in the most admiring terms, but never at any length. (That she championed Stevens at a time when others, even Pound, dismissed his poetry or passed over it in silence is the single greatest testament to the fineness of her critical judgment.) Only Allen Ginsberg comes up for sustained, albeit riotously negative, appraisal. As a partial consolation, Moore’s elaborate descriptions of arcane animals and objects—often presented to her as gifts— can feel like preliminary sketches for poems, as this one for “The Jerboa” couched in the description of a trip to the screening of a nature film:

A rather amusing thing was the collection of animals and imitation cocoa-fiber at the mouth of the theater, round the ticket-booth—a kodiak bear on its hind legs, that kept nodding, and a nodding mustard yellow tiger with a cotton stockinet snake with red spots; about the size of two garden hoses looped careless round the body several times. They certainly did need a Pharaoh’s rat (rusty mongoose) in that jungle. The mongoose I might say, is the ichneumon; or rather, the rusty-backed Egyptian mongoose is called an ichneumon. I have been studying this up.

Far from the stuffed simulacra of Disneyland zoology, Moore’s scientific rigor with regard to the natural world has real teeth to it, and it was through her writing that she made her boldest expeditions.

Throughout Moore’s adult life, her engagement with the world, as these letters amply attest, was active to be sure; there were parties, art galleries, the Natural History Museum, Lincoln Kirstein’s invitations to the ballet, the literary whirl of Greenwich Village, baseball and boxing with George Plimpton, Stevens reading his poetry at the Y, and a trip to the circus with Bishop. Formerly a teacher and a librarian, Moore assumed editorship of The Dial in 1925, a position she held until the magazine’s final number in July 1929. Even so, her move in that year to 260 Cumberland Street in Brooklyn interposed between herself and the friends and activities in Manhattan what she occasionally referred to later as an insurmountable journey. By the late Thirties, as Costello tells us, “Moore became increasingly aware of her mother’s frailty and spent more time nursing or watching out for her. The seclusion and quiet they had welcomed in Brooklyn when they first arrived had become a necessity, as Mrs. Moore entered the last decade of her life.” Moore traveled little, beyond a postgraduate tour with her mother to England, Scotland, and France, a visit to Greece, and shorter trips to see family and friends in such places as Washington State, California, Virginia, and Maine. In a letter to her great friend William Carlos Williams, Moore characterized her relative isolation: “It is surely a kind of blasphemy as well as beggary, for anyone to live as I do like a squirrel in a squirrel-wheel, away from my natural associates but their books and other books—and house cleaning (don’t laugh)—are miraculous, don’t you think, in maintaining an illusion of vividness.”

Then there were bouts of illness, worst when both Moore and her mother succumbed at once:

On the door is a surly notice in red crayon— “Do Not RING or Knock. Leave package or other thing inside apartment door.” We let the telephone ring. (Could even Socrates have mustered equanimity to do that!) We pay no attention when a delegate from a charitable organization—or a bill-collecting milkman— does ring the bell. We are rationed as to letter-writing, and dark threats are concentrated on us when, say, three notes lie waiting in the hallway to be mailed.

The characteristic wit and fortitude of this passage seem strained, however, in Moore’s letter seven months later to Elizabeth Bishop: “Not a soul have I seen or been to see —all these months—but someday I shall be natural again. See if I’m not.” Money was also a concern over the years. Following Moore’s tenure at the The Dial, during which time she had written prose but published no poetry, Moore left off full-time employment to devote herself to her writing. Her brother, Warner, a chaplain in the Navy, provided the poet and her mother with money each month to cover expenses. Assistance arrived, too, from abroad. Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), a British poet and novelist and common friend of Moore’s and H.D.’s, helped Moore from time to time. A letter from Moore to Bryher in 1933 hearkens back to a baldness of personal disclosure seldom exhibited in the correspondence beyond Moore’s college years:

What matchless friendship, for you to think toward us and invite us to open our hearts in distress. And better even than having you give to us if we were in perplexity, is knowing that we have a friend that we could turn to without shame or the sense of desperation. We did lose most of my earnings, but have the greater part of my income we had before I went to The Dial, and Warner was so outraged at the thought of our losses that he is almost unbalanced in his determination to make it up to us; giving us for instance a Navy allotment that more than covers our rent, paying our telephone-bill, and subscribing to The Times for us.

What strikes the reader about such passages is not their frequency (they were, in fact, rare) but the break they represent with Moore’s otherwise tight-lipped decorum in her letters, a carefully woven fabric of the finest sentiments—perfect in their generosity of spirit and thoughtful regard for others—but for an occasional fraying. The letters are rife with what Moore herself called, referring to the works of La Fontaine, “a surgical kind of courtesy.” Moore’s admissions of need must have struck her friends like thunderbolts, coming as they did from someone usually so poised and lively. The way in which Moore’s letters reveal personal struggle recalls the way that such struggles are revealed in her poems: through restraint. Despite the hardships Moore endured in the Forties, exacerbated as they were by her mother’s decline and eventual death in 1947, the poet’s resili- ence and humor were largely unflappable. Moore’s famous lines on a beleaguered strawberry from this period suggest the hopefulness that she maintained, and at what cost:

NEVERTHELESS

you’ve seen a strawberry

     that’s had a struggle; yet

     was, where the fragments met,

a hedgehog or a star-

     fish for the multitude

     of seeds… .

The weak overcomes its

     menace, the strong over-

     comes itself. What is there

like fortitude! What sap

     went through that little thread

     to make the cherry red!

The observation of the cherry’s miraculous redness was initially made by Moore’s mother, and served as the impetus for the poem. Such input from the elder Moore was not uncommon; she was her daughter’s first and most critical reader, offering praise, or condemnation, and suggesting revisions.

In the years following her mother’s death—during which time Moore took solace from her brother, her friends, and from her faith—she continued to receive visitors, including W. H. Auden, whom she admired and whose Wednesday night Shakespeare classes she made a special effort to attend. Moore’s hospitality never flagged throughout her long life. Donald Hall recounts a touching lunch visit to Cumberland Street in 1965 at which Moore, then in her seventies, suspecting that he was still hungry, poured a small pile of corn chips onto his tray. A known lover of health foods, she quipped: “I like Fritos. They’re so nutritious.” Hall was delighted. The witty congeniality conveyed by this anecdote is also the tonic chord of the Selected Letters; Moore’s epistolary friendships, and her conscientious cultivation of them, confirm Williams’s early characterization of this fiercely intelligent and compassionate poet: she was “our saint—if we had one—in whom we all instinctively felt our purpose come together to form a stream.”