Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

My PhD focused on a poet who deserves to be much more widely known in the UK: Marianne Moore. I continue to find her methods and interests fascinating: her poems cover subjects from baseball to botany, and her syllabic poetry can be awe-inspiring. My PhD (completed 2007/8) was entitled '"Irish by descent": Marianne Moore, Irish writers, and the American-Irish inheritance'.

The main focus of my PhD was Moore's interests in Irish writers and writing, and her claim of 'Irish descent', which she made in a letter to Ezra Pound in 1919. An overview of these ideas can be found in an article, 'Irish by descent? Marianne Moore's American-Irish inheritance', which is available online in the Irish Journal of American Studies.

My PhD has also generated further articles and chapters: one discusses Moore's relationship with Irish playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw; another focuses on Moore's 1941 poem 'Spenser's Ireland' in relation to Irish and American politics during World World II; and the third looks at how Moore re-wrote the Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth's 1812 novel The Absentee as a play in 1954.

For more information on these publications, please refer to my webpage on Oxford's English Faculty website.