Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color

by Linda Leavell

Leavell (English, Oklahoma State U.) examines the role the visual arts played in the development of Moore's poetry. B&w photos and examples of modernist art show the poet's work in its interdisciplinary context as the author traces the formation of Moore's modernism from her exposure to arts and crafts ideology in adolescence to her position as editor of the Dial in the late 1920s, where she became America's foremost arbiter of modernist taste. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Genres: Nonfiction

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Linda Leavell is a scholar of American poetry and art, especially of the early twentieth century. She attended Interlochen Arts Academy and has degrees from Baylor University (BA) and Rice University (PhD). She taught English at Rhodes College during the 1985-86 academic year and taught American literature at Oklahoma State University from 1986 to 2010.

Her first book, _Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color_, analyzes Moore's poetry within the context of modernism in the visual arts . Research for that book led to her second book, _Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore_ . This is the first authorized biography of the poet.

“The moment is ripe for [Moore] to be restored to us, depixified and complex," wrote Holland Cotter in _The New York Times_, "And so she has been in a swift, cool but empathetic new biography...It says much for Ms. Leavell’s account of Moore’s life that for all the hard and hard-to-fathom facts it marshals, it leaves the miracles intact.”

Linda Leavell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, The Humanities Center at Oregon State University, and the Oklahoma Humanities Council.

Her first book won the South Central Modern Language Association book award. _Holding On Upside Down_ won he PEN/Jacquelin Bograd Weld Award for biography and the Plutarch Award for the best biography of 2013. It was a finalist for t the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.