Marianne Moore was a singular voice

New Collected Poems. By Marianne Moore. Edited by Heather Cass White. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 480 pages; $30. Faber & Faber; £30.

MARIANNE MOORE, who died in 1972, was one of the defining voices of American Modernism, but she always made life difficult for her admirers. There have been several versions of her collected or complete poems, but none has quite done her justice. Until now. Why? Because she was always fiddling with her own work, rewriting it, or leaving poems out altogether. As she aged, she tended to make light of her early work, or resketch it completely. Occasionally, these meddlings—these wasplike buzzings about—could be injudicious. Moore was not the best custodian of her own work. At last, a complete collection—variants and all—of her writings, from first to last, has been chronologically ordered.

Moore was born in Missouri in 1887, but by 1918 had settled in New York with her mother. And there she stayed. She would never marry. Instead, she became the editor of the Dial, an influential literary review of the 1920s, and her tastes and her strong opinions helped to shape the reading habits of generations of poetry lovers. But it is as a poet that she stands alone.

There is no one quite like her, no one to whom she could be compared, such is her rootedness in her own hugely eccentric and wilful Moore-ishness. Her poems are finically, even excessively observant, and scrupulously formally structured, with, on occasion, the most improbably outrageous of end-rhymes. She had a passion for animals, birds, flowers and insects. Her painstaking descriptions of the odd characteristics of such creatures (she had a great fondness for compound adjectives) cause her poems to read at times like high-literary glosses on David Attenborough’s “Planet Earth” decades before its time.

Sometimes it is difficult to tell exactly what she is writing about because her poems are always tacking sideways, reaching out for ever more oddball comparisons—on one occasion she likened Handel to a frigate pelican. Her manner of writing can be positively Jamesian in its degree of verbal attentiveness. She peppered her poems with epigrams. She loved odd words like “picardel”—an Elizabethan ruff. And the concluding line of “Half Deity” reads: “His talk was as strange as my grandmother’s muff.” She would also add in, for good measure, a freight of quotations from unusual sources: a magazine, say, or a member of the clergy.

As she aged, her poems became more moralistic, and Moore herself became a literary celebrity, seen about town in her cape and her tricorn hat. She rather enjoyed it, and even played up to it. In 1955 the Ford Motor Company asked her to suggest names for a new model. She opted for Utopian Turtletop or Mongoose Civique. Ford used Edsel instead. In 1968 she threw the first pitch of the season at Yankee Stadium. Baseball had engaged her before, as a poet rather than a participant. “Baseball and Writing” was published in the New Yorker in December 1961. The poem begins like this: “Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting/and baseball is like writing./You can never tell with either/how it will go/or what you will do...” Moore please.