Marianne Moore Collection

The Rosenbach’s literary collections include virtually all of the manuscripts and papers of Modernist poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972), as well as her personal library, thousands of photographs, and the contents of her Greenwich village living room, thus making the Rosenbach the undisputed center for the study of this important American writer. The Moore Collection is a unique literary repository, preserving intact a comprehensive record of a writer’s intellectual development. The Rosenbach has become a pilgrimage site for students and lovers of twentieth-century American art and literature, and the Moore papers are the heart of this collection. Their great significance to the story of Moore’s artistic and intellectual growth, as well as that of her peers, including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and many more has made the Moore papers such an important and heavily-used resource.

Moore’s Greenwich Village living room is permanently installed on the third floor of the historic Rosenbach house and is always on view to visitors as part of the Rosenbach house tour. The over 2,500 personal objects from the Moore room, ranging from furniture to figurines to postage stamps have been cataloged and are also a fruitful source of inquiry for interested researchers.

Marianne Moore Digital Archive

In partnership with the Marianne Moore Digital Archive at the University at Buffalo, select Marianne Moore notebooks from our collection have been digitized. A group of Moore scholars is using the digital images to transcribe the contents, which include notes on the vast array of reading, lectures, conversations, and other sources from which Moore drew inspiration for her poems; as well as drafts of some of the poems themselves.

Collection Highlights

Autograph letter signed to her family

In this letter, written during Moore’s senior year at Bryn Mawr, she describes a trip to Philadelphia to see the great pianist Paderewski at the Academy of Music. As the letter shows, Moore loved music and was an avid concert-goer. Moore and her group bought scalped tickets for the performance,…

Letter from Ezra Pound to Marianne Moore

In this letter, Ezra Pound responds to a set of poems he invited Moore to submit to The Little Review, an avant-garde literary magazine. Pound offers Moore various editorial suggestions, but also expresses interest in publishing a book of her work, even though “You will never sell more than five…

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