During her lifetime Marianne Moore was that rarest of combinations, a genuine leader in the art of poetry, as well as a bona fide celebrity. She was an instantly recognisable symbol of Brooklyn, New York, appearing on the cover of Life magazine, asked by the Ford Motor Company to christen their new family sedan, and by the New York Yankees to throw the opening pitch of their baseball season. However, because of Moore's restless, seldom-ceasing, decade-spanning revision of her own poems, creating a 'stable' text of her work has posed editors a challenge ever since.
Moore tackled the problem herself: Complete Poems (1967) was her own selection, but she favoured the later work, including less than half of her output up to that point. 'Omissions are not accidents,' she wrote pointedly in that edition, but for some readers the absence of more than one hundred poems constituted a wilful neglect of her startlingly innovative, highly influential early work, and...