The Marianne Moore Digital Archive and Feminist Modernist Digital Humanities

The Marianne Moore Digital Archive (MMDA) is making the 122 working notebooks kept by Marianne Moore readily accessible to scholarly, classroom, and non-academic readers for the first time, in ways that will be fully searchable and include annotations, features contextualizing Moore’s writing and life, and access to both the original source texts and diplomatic transcriptions. Moore’s notebooks are unique among modernist archives in their non-biographical documentation of her intellectual, personal, social, and artistic life across sixty years; these are not diaries but records of reading, correspondence, travel, finances, cultural events she attended, and early drafting of poems (including some that have never been published). These notebooks, and other features of the MMDA, enrich studies of Moore and of the modernist period generally, by illuminating personal, political, historical, and cultural contexts for her compositions and by providing source information for the many quotations and allusions in her published work. The site includes a lively “Education and Scholarship” section, open to reader contribution. This essay describes the MMDA and gives two examples of ways that Moore’s notebooks contribute to a richer understanding of her poetry through her drafting of two poems, “Marriage” and “The Buffalo.”.