1Marianne Moore and the Archives presents itself not as a comprehensive overview of Moore’s archival holdings but as a methodological intervention into how Moore’s archives shape the way we read and respond to her work. As Jeff Westover’s introduction to the volume makes clear, Marianne Moore and the Archives is concerned less with surveying archival materials than with exploring what it means to read Moore through her archive—understood not just as a repository of papers, letters, and ephemera, but as a generative space in which composition, preservation, and interpretation intersect. Central to this framing is the idea of “Moore as an archivist of her own work” (2), a claim that runs productively throughout the collection.

2The volume raises important questions about appropriate archival use—particularly in an era of expanding digital access. How do literary archives make certain features of a writer’s practice visible while obscuring others? How do scholars’ idiosyncrasies and techniques shape relevance and significance within a literary archive? What methodologies can be used to guide archival research in the face of so much interpretative possibility? Marianne Moore and the Archives offers a compelling case study for addressing these questions, especially where it attends to the selective nature of archival research and interpretation.

3The volume’s opening section—“Primary Sources and Resources”—establishes Moore’s active role in shaping her own archival legacy. The chapters that comprise this section emphasize how Moore deliberately engaged in practices of preservation, revision, and curation long before the likes of Patricia C. Willis (whose interview appears in this volume) began formally organizing her archive into what it is today. Bartholomew Brinkman’s essay is especially effective, offering a nuanced account of Moore’s “archival impulses” through her engagement with mass print culture (27). Focusing on Moore’s sustained attention to little magazines like the Literary Digest, Brinkman argues that Moore functioned as “an archivist of mass print” (27), preserving and recontextualizing ephemeral materials. The sheer scale of Brinkman’s object of study—5.6 million words published in the Literary Digest over the course of two years (July 1912-June 1914)—foregrounds the methodological difficulty of reading Moore through periodical culture while underscoring the sheer ambition of Moore’s “scrappy poetics” (28).

4Aurore Clavier’s contribution shifts attention from mass print to correspondence, arguing that Moore’s letters—both published and private—anticipate a third party: the reader, scholar, or librarian who would eventually encounter them (12). Clavier persuasively shows how Moore’s epistolary practice blurs the boundary between private expression and public reception. Her chapter complicates conventional distinctions between intention and interpretation, suggesting that Moore’s correspondence is structured to accommodate future audiences beyond the addressee(s) of her letters. Robert Volpicelli, meanwhile, underscores Moore’s “decisive[ness]” in choosing the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as the permanent home both for her papers and for her living room (49). Volpicelli’s chapter productively introduces questions of inclusivity and omission, asking how far a literary archive can stretch to accommodate all the “untraditional materials” (e.g., furniture, pieces of cake, financial records) to be found in the Rosenbach’s Marianne Moore Room (58).

5A substantial portion of Marianne Moore and the Archives is devoted to digital archives and methods, with chapters by Roger Gilbert, Claire Nashar, Ryan Tracy, and Jeff Westover engaging with the Marianne Moore Digital Archive (MMDA). While Westover’s introduction does not account for what distinguishes the MMDA from archival projects such as the Modernist Journals Project or the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (3), several chapters gesture to the MMDA’s unique features—such as its side-by-side presentation of Moore’s handwritten notebooks and edited transcriptions. Nashar’s chapter stands out for its pedagogical clarity, explicitly addressing how the MMDA can be used in teaching and modeling what it looks like to read poetry in sustained dialogue with archival materials. At the same time, the MMDA’s current limitations—most notably the absence of keyword search functionality—remain evident throughout.

6Marianne Moore and the Archives offers valuable models of archival reading that foreground method rather than mastery. This is particularly evident in the two central sections—“Sex, Race, and Economics in the Archive” and “Archives and Meanings”—with contributions from Elizabeth Gregory, Ryan Tracy, Linda Kinnahan, Luke Carson, and Jeff Westover. From Tracy’s account of Moore’s support for Black liberation to Westover’s research on Moore’s interest in blazonry and bookplates, it is clear that Moore’s poems, as Carson notes in his contribution, offer more than just “immediate” meanings (136). Instead, “at the threshold of the work” are a plethora of “possible” poetic meanings that are made salient through archival research (135). Together, these contributions underscore the extent to which archival research opens interpretive possibilities that can never be fully accounted for, positioning the archive not as a site of mastery but as an ongoing challenge to critical completion.

7Roger Gilbert’s essay on Moore’s notebooks is among the strongest in the volume, offering a careful account of their material and aesthetic features. Gilbert shows that Moore’s poetry notebook drafts are often closer to their published versions than scholars have assumed, challenging narratives that sharply divide draft from finished work. His note that Observations (1924) was ordered chronologically by composition is particularly suggestive, revealing the extent to which Moore’s compositional practice was “radically non-linear” (183) even as it ultimately resolved into “neatly organized stanzas and sentences” (176). The notebooks, Gilbert argues, preserve a “loose-jointed associative fecundity” that remains legible in the published poems themselves (186).

8The volume consistently reaches beyond Moore studies, situating her within broader modernist and transhistorical conversations. James Maynard’s introduction of Robert Duncan’s unpublished poem “On Reading Marianne Moore,” printed here for the first time, exemplifies this reach. Other chapters read Moore in relation to Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, William Empson, and Rainer Maria Rilke, thereby reinforcing the volume’s broader scholarly relevance.

9Taken as a whole, Marianne Moore and the Archives shows that archives do not simply preserve materials but actively expand visibility. What archives make salient depends on the idiosyncrasies and techniques that readers bring to bear on their encounters with a vast array of archival materials that resist any form of mastery. Research, the volume reminds us, is not a matter of analyzing data alone, but of asking particular questions of particular materials while remaining alert to which interpretations those materials invite and impede.

11Such selective approaches may invite anxiety about what is left out. After all, the act of focusing on one aspect of Moore’s work (such as her understanding of race relations) comes at the expense of focusing on any number of other possible aspects (such as her lifelong interest in biology). And yet, in her Bryn Mawr notebooks, Moore identified “the selective attentive activity of the mind” as the “most important” (Marianne Moore Collection). Like curiosity, which in Moore’s mind was connected to “a sense of the really significant” (Moore, 1987 515-516), selectivity is something to celebrate: it yields a new sense of significance beyond what has been important in the past. Oft-neglected poems like “Walking-Sticks and Paperweights and Watermarks” (1936), for example, now stand out in light of the idiosyncrasies and techniques that Moore scholars bring to the archive today.

12All archival encounters are necessarily selective—certain aspects go noticed or unnoticed depending upon the idiosyncrasies and techniques we bring to bear on our encounter with the archival materials we select for analysis. Occasionally, the volume fails to foreground its own partiality as a methodological strength, and in doing so misses an opportunity to reflect on how selectivity itself enables particular forms of insight. At its best, however, Marianne Moore and the Archives acknowledges and celebrates the selectivity involved in archival research. In the words of Volpicelli, “[e]ven though the archive may reach toward a sense of completeness, in practical terms it gathers its meaning through what it leaves out” (58; emphasis added).

13Marianne Moore and the Archives ultimately succeeds not as a masterful guide to Moore’s archives, but as a demonstration of how archives are co-created by authors, curators, scholars, and readers. By foregrounding method, materiality, and interpretive responsibility, the volume deepens our understanding of Moore’s poetry while offering transferable models for future archival scholarship. It is fitting that Westover should include the following quote from Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995) at the end of his introduction—“the question of the archive is […] a question of the future, […] the question of a response, of a promise and a responsibility for tomorrow” (7)—for the volume’s most important contribution lies in showing that Moore’s archive is not an endpoint but an invitation to read and re-read with a heightened awareness of our own idiosyncrasies and techniques.