Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University) argues that Marianne Moore was a connoisseur of modern clutter, drawing on the historical residues of “antiques, rare art objects and ancient artefacts”, but also the disorder of the information age: the disaggregated fragments thrown up by contemporary journalism. Moore takes the discursive production of China in the “Illustrated News” and creates a constellation, after Benjamin, that goes further than the confirmation of the West as “a superior site of knowledge” to gesture to something beyond a technocratic modernity.

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Writing to Morton Zabel in 1932, Marianne Moore praised Zabel’s review of Emily Dickinson for Poetry magazine but also took the opportunity to remind her addressee that ‘‘Emily Dickinson cared about events that mattered to the nation.’’ In his review, Zabel had repeatedly insisted upon Dickinson’s ‘‘fast seclusion’’ from her community, locked as she was within an ‘‘asylum of the spirit.’’ This emphasis upon ‘‘isolation’’ and ‘‘introspection’’ represented the woman poet as being oddly detached from the ‘‘real’’ and implicitly masculine world of political and social change, a critical strategy Moore would have been all too familiar with, her own work having been repeatedly constructed in terms of aesthetic ‘‘purity.’’ Moore’s defence of Dickinson as a poet fully engaged with the political and social issues of her day is also, implicitly, a reminder to Zabel that women’s poetry need not be confined by critical interpretation to the private and feminized sphere of ‘‘introspection’’ but could be related to public affairs of national importance.

Acknowledgements This project was supported by Northumbria University and has benefited profoundly from the insights and encouragement of colleagues in the Gender and Society Research Hub and the Network of American Periodical Studies. We would also like to acknowledge Margaretta Jolly, whose 'Sisterhood and After' project has been an invaluable resource, and Debi Withers. Finally, a special debt of gratitude is due to the Feminist Archive North and the British Library for the kind use of their archives.

The decisions Marianne Moore made when editor at The Dial magazine between 1925 and 1929 are often interpreted as evidence of a fussy or even “hysterical” antipathy to obscenity. This article questions the gendered assumptions embedded in the critical history of Moore's editorial role at The Dial by comparing her encounters with Hart Crane and James Joyce to the less well-known cases of Mary Butts, and D. H. Lawrence. It argues that the “downstream work” of editors needs to be recovered and understood in relation to the material constraints of periodical publication.