Restoration …

… Marianne Moore’s Poetry, the Way She Intended It - The New York Times. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Heather Cass White has set things right. This elegant, big volume, “New Collected Poems,” gives “Moore’s poems as they were when she first wrote and published them,” arranged (with well-explained exceptions) in the order of Moore’s individual books, from “Observations” on: We see what Eliot and Bishop saw. We also see Moore emerging, in her 20s, from late Victorian light verse (“I could not bear a yellow rose ill will / Because books said that yellow boded ill, / White promised well”). We watch her discover her style: ultra-long complex sentences, intentionally awkward rhymes, embedded quotations and multiple changes of subject, each with its own quirky simile. Moore admired and emulated elaborate artifice, so long as its products turned out less boastful than useful; another early poem lauds “An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish,” whose “scales turn aside the sun’s sword with t