Abstract
The Rosenbach Museum and Library contains The Marianne Moore Library (MML), the largest collection of Marianne Moore’s personal objects and literary papers. Among these objects and papers are the poet’s personal copies of each of her published books. One of the first observations to be made about Moore’s revising method is her habit of revising on copies of her books from her first publication, Poems (1921), through her final publication, Complete Poems (1967), often neatly writing in an updated word or phrase in small cursive handwriting. Indeed, her lifelong habit of using published texts as sites of revision began with Poems (1921) not long after it was published. To date, I have not found a study that addresses these revisions made upon her own copies of her books, especially Poems (1921) and both editions of Observations (1924 and 1925). In order to better understand Moore’s revision process in her early years before becoming editor of The Dial, their curious presence becomes a prerequisite for reading and positing a chronology to the revisions on her manuscripts and typed scripts of her other early poetry. This essay intends to explore the revisions that Moore made on her two copies of Poems (1921) and on Observations (1924).
 
Highlights
The Rosenbach Museum and Library contains The Marianne Moore Library (MML), the largest collection of Marianne Moore’s personal objects and literary papers
Many critics have recently asked: Does Moore’s epigraph give us an interpretive lens for reading her life’s work? Are all Moore’s authorial omissions premeditated and purposeful, or only those omissions she made to Complete Poems (1968)? What, does she mean by “accidents”?
Moore went from having had her work prematurely exposed with the publication of Poems in 1921 to earnestly exposing her life of compositional process with the publication of the MML archive
Summary
Torn from the ship and cast near her hull, a stumbling shepherd found embedded in the ground, a sea-gull of lapis lazuli, a scarab of the sea, with wings spread—. The revisions on Moore’s copies of Poems indicate that Moore might not have sent a revised version to The New Poetry by the time they could publish it This scrupulous examination of two articles seems at first glance only marginally significant for understanding the overall meaning of “A Talisman”. She changes the “nor” to “not” by writing a “t” over the “r”, so as to read “not until the poets among us” (MML 1555, 91) This revision does not appear in the subsequent publication because she reformulated it into 13 lines, for which readers have typescripts. In other words, when Moore restored a version of the 1924 version, these parentheses and this “not until” does not appear This revision — or this version — of “Poetry” is completely unique to her personal copy of Observations (1924) in the MML: it is a ghost revision.
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