Bringing Marianne Moore’s mind to light: UB scholar receives $300,000 NEH grant to expand digital archive
BUFFALO, N.Y. – Cristanne Miller, PhD, professor emerita of English in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences, has received a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to expand her work on the Marianne Moore Digital Archive (MMDA) by adding another 12 notebooks kept by Moore, one of the foremost modernist poets of the early 20th century.
Over the next three years, the grant will help secure technical and editorial assistance staff to make the printed notebooks publicly accessible and, eventually, fully searchable, a long process involving editing, annotating, transcribing, proofing and coding.
Moore (1887-1972) kept notebooks throughout her lifetime, often several simultaneously, providing a unique and comprehensive record of her intellectual life and personal enthusiasms. She took notes on what she was reading, conversations with friends or overheard in public, on museum visits, concerts she attended, sermons she heard, and her travels. Six notebooks contain her earliest drafting toward her poems.
The notebooks are not chronicles or diary entries but living references to the work and thoughts of others that Moore turned to when composing, borrowing words and phrases she may have recorded decades earlier.
She used her notebooks as a resource for her “hybrid” method of composition, lifting (as she says) many of the “actual phrases” or words of her poems from these notebooks — that is, from her reading and from other speakers. And now, through Miller’s work in directing the MMDA, scholars, students and enthusiasts across a range of disciplines can turn to the notebooks online, just as the poet did on paper, for inspiration, insights and knowledge.
“Most poets keep notebooks, but not to the extent of Moore. No other modernist poet kept anything as rich and varied as Moore,” says Miller. “Her notebooks are spectacular, a holding space for things she returned to, which often landed in her poetry.”
And there are a lot of them: 122 notebooks, which Moore kept from 1905 until roughly 1970. The long-range goal, extending beyond the grant period, is to get as many online as possible.
“This project will continue long after my participation,” says Miller, who retired from her faculty position in 2024.
Founded by Miller in 2015, the MMDA has the exclusive permission of Moore’s estate to publish the notebooks. The groundbreaking project made these materials available to the public for the first time.
Unlike digital collections from other significant writers, however, “the MMDA focuses on materials that have never been published in any form and were not intended for publication,” says Miller. “The archive illuminates for an international audience Moore’s vast and extraordinary recording of material from her daily life that contributes to new understandings of her compositional process and the power and breadth of her poetry by showing the wide range of sources she drew from.
“Encountering bits of language in Moore’s notebooks that she later used in poems gives us the context in which that language originally occurred, providing previously undisclosed ways to think about what she had in mind,” according to Miller.
Moore was an experimentalist whose mid-century work increasingly intersected with popular culture, touching on television, sports and public parks. She was friends with T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Mina Loy, and William Carlos Williams. Her role as editor of the prestigious literary journal “The Dial” put her in touch with its esteemed list of international contributors. In 1967, she even collaborated on a poem with Muhammad Ali.
Moore, however, never became a household name despite earning the highest degree of respect from her most famous peers and every poetry prize the U.S. offered, including the Pulitzer, the Bollingen, the National Book Award, the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Poetry Society Gold Medal Award for Lifetime Achievement. In France, she was made Chevalier de l'ordre des Lettres.
Miller says sexism was partly to blame, as critics skewed toward important male poets. Feminist critics, in contrast, skewed toward female writers with more obviously interesting personal lives, such as Elizabeth Bishop or Edna St. Vincent Millay.
“Moore’s poetry was radically innovative and influential on other poets (such as Bishop and John Ashbery), but when the second wave of the feminist movement came along, feminist critics were looking at poets who were openly writing about sexuality and gender,” says Miller. “Marianne Moore didn’t do that. She did write about gender, and she was a feminist, but that wasn’t critically recognized until the 1980s, when her reputation started growing, again.”