The Saintsbury Years of Marianne Moore

In 1925 Marianne Moore did what Emily Dickinson had done in 1862, enlisting a well-known critic to her cause. While Dickinson found in T. W. Higginson an addressee for her poems, Moore, upon becoming the editor of The Dial, made George Saintsbury a regular contributor — his historical perspective unsettled any strict divide between Modernist and pre-twentieth-century writings. Moore's new position enabled her passion for transforming public relationships into personal ones. In her poems this meant extensive quoting, but as an editor she could go further and establish a direct link with writers through correspondence. Moreover, the details of the Moore-and-Saintsbury relationship reveal its formative impact on her social aesthetic, the analogy she made between human and textual relations. We see her commitment to a pantheist or durational style; her ambivalence regarding the degree to which a writer should transmute other texts; and her assimilation of two of his key terms, gusto and naturalness, terms for the expression of emotion through form. Since the letter was strongly associated with those key terms, and he was an expert on its art and history, corresponding with him was a profoundly integrative experience.