The web of friendship

the long version

The Web of Friendship offers a lively critical account of the little-known and long-lived poetic and personal relationship between two important American Modernist poets: Marianne Moore (1887-1972) and Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). Throughout their careers, Moore and Stevens studied each other's poetry, reviewed each other's volumes, edited and offered advice about each other's projects, and wrote poems directly addressed to one another. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival material - manuscripts, marginalia, letters, and diaries - this book charts the chronological development of a literary friendship. Schulze traces Moore and Stevens's shifting poetic conversation from the years immediately following the First World War to Stevens's death in 1955 and explores how events like the Great Depression, the rise of leftist poets in the 1920s and 1930s, and the devastation of the Second World War shaped their poetic exchange. She provides a unique account of the poignant personal conversation between Moore and Stevens in the 1950s, their final years of close friendship before Stevens's death. Grounded in manuscript study, The Web of Friendship also uncovers hitherto unknown source materials for a number of Stevens's and Moore's poems that lead to fresh interpretations of their verse.