Marianne Moore was an unrelenting critic and censor of her own work. This
shows in her revisions of individual poems but it invisibly exercised a far
greater influence through her rigorous selection of poems to exclude or
preserve in succeeding collections.

When Moore assembled her first American book, Observations (1924), for
example, she included 54 of her 90 periodical publications from the previous
decade. Of these she allowed Eliot to reprint 39 in Selected Poems (1935)
and ultimately omitted several more from Collected Poems (1951) and Complete
Poems (1967).

In 2004 the conditions of Moore's literary estate finally allowed a new,
first posthumous edition of her poetry to appear, the Poems of Marianne
Moore, edited by Grace Schulman. Schulman collects all Moore's published
poems, together with additional texts from manuscripts, and presents them in
chronological sequence.

It begins with 68 "Early Poems 1907-1913" from manuscript, one previously
published in book form, a few in college magazines. This is not juvenilia.
A handful are prankishly collegiate but most represent journeywork
comparable to what Pound and Williams were publishing in these years.

The following section presents the work of the period during which Moore
found her mature style, including the 54 poems excluded from Observations
(1924) alongside the 36 that survived. Moore's self-criticism proves
accurate. Few or none of the poems that fall below her bar persuade us they
belong above it -- but she places the bar way too high.

Read through in sequence, the full range of her poetry in cumulative detail
reveals a teasing, high-spirited, innovative daring less apparent in Moore's
exactingly exclusive selection from this period, and watching Moore invent
Moore is the best way to learn how to read her work as it becomes
progressively more challenging. Schulman's edition fundamentally and
radically transforms readerly access to Moore's poetry in ways comparable to
Johnson's edition of Dickinson. It is a great way to meet Moore for the
first time or the second and a vast improvement over all previous editions.
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