Marianne Moore's Observations stands with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's early Cantos, and Wallace Stevens's Harmonium as a landmark of modern poetry. But to the chagrin of many admirers, Moore eliminated a third of its contents from her subsequent poetry collections while radically revising some of the poems she retained. This groundbreaking book has been unavailable to the general reader since its original publication in the 1920s.

Presented with a new introduction by Linda Leavell, the author of the award-winning biography Holding On...