Adversity & Grace

The five year period examined in this volume, 1936 to 1941, was a time of multifarious personal and professional adversity for Marianne Moore, as well as one in which she came to believe that America as a nation was in need of a grace to which her art had not, until that point, been sufficiently attuned. Her 1941 book What Are Years was her response to that need, and is a milestone in Moore's writing: it is the meeting point between the end of the early Moore and the beginning of the late, and the first book in which Moore makes thoroughgoing revisions to major poems with the intention of re-shaping her earlier work to fit later intentions. As such it is crucial to our understanding of Moore's life-long, ever-intensifying practice of revision. Adversity and Grace reproduces What Are Years in full, as well as the earliest published version of each poem it contains, and provides variant tables that note all of the changes Moore made to the poems in revising them. A companion volume to A-Quiver with Significance: Marianne Moore, 1932-1936, the editor's previous edition of Moore's work, Adversity and Grace presents in facsimile reproduction every poem Moore published between 1936 and 1941.