Susan Gubar at Lit Hub:
At midcentury, Marianne Moore emerged as a public personage, but not before a painful period of loss. Prefaced by a host of personal disasters—the death of her mother’s onetime partner Mary Norcross, her own hospitalization for digestive problems, her mother’s painful shingles and neuralgia—the decade of the 1940s brought sorrow. Moore had to deal with the rejection of her only attempt at a novel and the news that her Selected Poems had been remaindered at thirty cents a copy. Bouts of bursitis and bronchitis prompted her to hire a succession of nurses and helpers, one of whom—Gladys Berry—would work for Moore into her old age.
The busy rounds of teaching, conference going, and verse or letter writing were interrupted by her mother’s “battle to eat; or rather to swallow,” Moore explained to Pound: “I cannot write letters or even receive them.” To Bryher, she listed the ingredients—“dehydrated goat-milk, vegetable iron, brewers’ yeast”—she used to nourish her mother. After one visit, Bryher described being “terrified” about the poet: “she could not eat if Mother could not eat, and thus got rashes and kidney trouble and pains.” Caregiving confined Moore to the Brooklyn apartment, where she started juicing vegetables.
more here.
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