The Marianne Moore Digital Archive is a major work in progress, digitizing the notebooks of a significant modernist poet and making available a wide range of resources devoted to the study of her texts. The project is directed by Cristanne Miller, with Associate Directors Elizabeth Gregory, Robin Schulze, and Heather Cass White (all highly distinguished Moore scholars) and in collaboration with the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia.
The archive includes a catalog of the 122 notebooks held by the Rosenbach; these notebooks document Moore’s reading, drawings, her conversations, and her composition process. The site also offers a timeline of life and work, back issues of the Marianne Moore Newsletter, and a substantial scholarly bibliography. Some notebook images are available, and one element that has the potential to be a major asset to Moore scholars is a notebook reader, still in prototype. The Moore Digital Archive is a significant resource for scholars of modernist women’s writing and its archives.
Marianne Moore’s notebooks contain a vital record of a mind at work—drafts of poems and prose, playful drawings, copious notes from the events and performances she attended and her daily reading and research, impossibly catholic materials that range from quotations of high-toned commentary to advertisements for Johnnie Walker Scotch. Moore also recorded conversations—snippets of monologue and dialogue spoken by or about most of the most famous modernists and by family members and people she overheard on a train or at the zoo. Her notebooks constitute one of the great critical and cultural resources for modernist studies.
—from “The Notebooks,” Moore Archive
Screenshot of the homepage
Screenshot of the reader prototype
Screenshot of “The Notebooks”