Marianne Moore and the Cultures of Modernity

Bazin, Victoria

doi:10.4324/9781315593906

Cited by 9 publications

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“…Victoria Bazin contends that '[w]hile Moore acknowledges that things can never be extricated from ideas, she suggests that it might be practically useful to believe that they can be'. 33 Like the towers, trees and graves of James's descriptions, lost and mourned and found again, Moore seeks out and sometimes finds in England and in Englishness a confirmation of the pleasure, the pain and the sheer awkwardness of the Anglo-American experience when refracted through the prism of its own peculiar inheritance; but through this, too, a place for poetic expression can also be discovered.…”

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‘Its native surroundings’: Marianne Moore, England, and the idea of the ‘characteristic American’

Stubbs¹

2016

Modernist Cultures

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Marianne Moore claimed that she was ‘Irish by descent, possibly Scotch also, but purely Celtic’. Critics have gone so far as to claim Moore as an Irish-American poet. In so doing they have glossed over the English side of her family background (as did Moore herself). This is perhaps unsurprising, considering that it was Moore's father, from whom she was estranged throughout her life, who was of English ancestry. Nevertheless, this ancestry lurks in the background of her imagination. This article argues that Moore's poetry and prose often map ‘Englishness’ onto ‘Americanness’. Here she is both the American tourist and the American settler, engaging with a colonial legacy upon which Englishness has been heavily imprinted. By considering the ways in which English and American cultures converge and diverge within Moore's writings – particularly in relation to the arguments she rehearses in her essay ‘Henry James as a Characteristic American’ (1934) – this article shows how Moore's ‘English’ background cannot be regarded as incidental to her writing.

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confidence: 98%

‘Its native surroundings’: Marianne Moore, England, and the idea of the ‘characteristic American’

Stubbs¹

2016

Modernist Cultures

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“Sketch of a Man on a Platform”: The Modern Feminist Portrait Poem

Epstein¹

2022

A Companion to American Poetry

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Marianne Moore’s Depression Collectives

Harter

2013

American Literature

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The Great Depression engendered a special kind of first-person plural, which drove fundamental changes in Marianne Moore’s quoting practice during the period. She moved toward a quotation practice that was less dense, drawn increasingly from mottoes and collective speech, and couched as words “we” said rather than words put in the mouths of others. Subtle changes in Moore’s well-known poem “Silence” show her questioning the kind of artistic superiority displayed in the act of quotation, while her letters to various correspondents allow us to connect her changing notion of quotation with her attempt to steer between the alternate dangers of artistic solipsism and artistic toadyism. Finally, in “The Frigate Pelican,” mottoes, quotation, and the first-person plural all participate in a nuanced description of the limitations of artistic expertise, in which Moore maintains her admiration for aesthetic excellence but opts to place the poem’s lyric speaker not aloft with the solitary and expert artist but below with a set of well-meaning but inept creatures. This shift in Moore’s artistic priorities provides a lens for understanding the topicality and fond humor of her later poetry as a principled commitment to a wider, less perspicacious public.

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Marianne Moore and the Cultures of Modernity

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

‘Its native surroundings’: Marianne Moore, England, and the idea of the ‘characteristic American’

‘Its native surroundings’: Marianne Moore, England, and the idea of the ‘characteristic American’

“Sketch of a Man on a Platform”: The Modern Feminist Portrait Poem

Marianne Moore’s Depression Collectives

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