Marianne Moore's correspondence makes up the largest and most broadly significant collection of any modern poet. It documents the first two-thirds of this century, reflecting shifts from Victorian to modernist culture, the experience of the two world wars, the Depression and postwar prosperity, and the changing face of the arts in America and Europe. Moore wrote letters daily for most of her life long, intense letters to friends and family; shorter, but always distinctive letters to an ever-widening circle of acquaintances and fans. At the height of her celebrity, she would occasionally write...

Just as the look of the American landscape has changed since the 19th century, so has our idea of landscape, with a contemplation of wild nature giving way to an understanding of Nature as a human construction. Here Bonnie Costello reads six 20th-century American poets who have reflected and shaped this transformation and in the process renovated landscape by drawing new images from the natural world and creating new forms for imagining the earth and our relation to it. Showing how these poets' landscapes respond to the sense of constant change, and to the disruption and acceleration of life...

A profoundly visual poet, Elizabeth Bishop is said to have a prismatic way of seeing. In this companion to Bishop's poetry, making connections between modern art and modern poetry, Bonnie Costello aims to give a sense of the poet and her ways of seeing and writing. Costello also makes use of quotations from Bishop's letters, drafts, journals and occasional prose sketches.

Poets have long been drawn to the images and techniques of still life. Artists and poets alike present intimate worlds where time is suspended in the play of form and color and where history disappears amid everyday things. The genre of still life with its focus on the domestic sphere seemed to some a retreat from the political and economic pressures of the last century. Yet many American artists and writers found in the arrangement of local objects a way to connect the individual to larger public concerns. Indeed, the debates over still life reveal just what is at stake in the long-standing...

These essays from a distinguished, international group of scholars trace the process of thinking and creation in one of the great literary minds of the twentieth century. Archival and newly available materials reveal this canonical author's composition process and artistic virtuosity.