When Ford needed a name for its secret new car, it didn’t hire ad men. It asked a poet, and she answered with Utopian Turtletop, Mongoose Civique, and Resilient Bullet. Ford panicked, picked Edsel, and made history for all the wrong reasons.

This episode traces the life of Marianne Moore, one of America’s most idiosyncratic modernist writers, from a fractured childhood and secret suffrage activism to her reign as queen of Greenwich Village. It’s a masterclass in how rigid self-imposed boundaries can paradoxically create radical artistic freedom, and why true rebellion can be stunningly quiet.

• Why Ford’s marketing manager David Wallace secretly turned to a famous poet for car names, and the spectacular list she sent back
• How Moore hid radical pro-suffrage politics behind the pseudonym Miss M.M., building arguments entirely from quotations
• The 1921 betrayal when friends H.D. and Bryher published her first book without permission while she worked as a librarian
• Her invention of syllabic poetry and the famous line about “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”
• How she cut her most famous poem from 29 lines to 3, declaring “omissions are not accidents,” then threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium at 80