Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore is a poet of paradoxes: a major figure in the Modernist movement, she is little known outside English departments. She kept a detailed record of her life, but never revealed her deepest feelings. Capable of warm friendship (with, among others, Elizabeth Bishop, TS Eliot and Ezra Pound), she apparently never fell in love. The first biographer allowed to access and quote from her archives, Leavell has created a sensitive, insightful and authoritative life of this deeply private poet.