Republicanism and Leisure in Marianne Moore's Depression

Carson, Luke

doi:10.1215/00267929-63-3-315

Cited by 13 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…This gratitude is tinged with her sense of helplessness in the face of the much greater economic devastation faced by strangers across the country and even by her own cousin. As Luke Carson (2002) has demonstrated, the economic situation brought Moore's moral and aesthetic credos into conflict, challenging her to square her deeply felt sympathy for the obviously undeserved suffering in evidence across the nation with her Protestant ethic of thrift and self-reliance. 11 Moore felt isolated in other ways as well.…”

Section: Politics and Persimmonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Alec Marsh (1998, 148-54) persuasively defends the plausibility of Burke's ideas alongside the Social Credit theories that Pound and Williams espoused. Carson 2002, Bazin 2001, and Schulze 1996 all discuss Moore's reply; Bazin offers a particularly thorough account of the theoretical implications of Burke's argument. 14 For example, Moore writes approvingly of a magazine editor who is "violently opposed to proletarian literature" (1997,309).…”

Section: Errror and Expertisementioning

confidence: 99%

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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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Section: Politics and Persimmonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Errror and Expertisementioning

confidence: 99%

Marianne Moore’s Depression Collectives

Harter

2013

American Literature

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“…7 See, for example, Craig (2000) and Lenthall (2007, 87-114). Carson (2002) 8 By contrast, one might look to Moore's letter on 22 February 1933 to Morton Zabel, in which she mentions "Mr. Hoover's call for a poem" and her unsuccessful attempt to come up with the goods (SL, 299). For the abbreviated history of this poem, see Molesworth 1990, 259-60.…”

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“Spenser’s Ireland,” December 1941: Scripting a Response

Allen¹

2017

Twentieth-Century Literature

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It has been noticed before that words require expert handling in theatres of war. That truth has come home to us in new and appalling ways in the wake of hostilities and regime change in the Middle East: dossiers have been sexed up, interrogation techniques enhanced, bottom-up reconciliation puffed up to do the work of diplomacy. Such "swindles and perversions," as George Orwell once put it (353), have prompted a new wave of linguists to probe and puncture the soft play of euphemism, and to scrutinise all over again the various kinds of drifting, bleaching, borrowing and compounding that typify semiotic procedure when language is conscripted. 1 Collateral, now, will be forever bound to damage, no matter how many words you slot between them. Heartened, certainly, by this renaissance in the field of lexical semantics, language philosophers of a more pragmatic disposition have shown a fresh concern for what we might call the performativity of warspeaka true Orwellian bit of jargon, and one that sets the tone for this essay. Picking the plumpest euphemism is important to those who dictate foreign policy, critics agree, but the difference between inciting feeling and effecting action is not only semantic, for there is an illocutionary distinction to be drawn between war-mongering and war-declaring, between the gravity of a speech and the weight of a speech-act. Declaring war is a delicate business, as Brien Hallett reminds us (2012)a business that relies on an exact coincidence of intonation, circumstance, and perceived authoritywhich makes it all the more surprising that rhetoricians have not always shown due regard for the conditions of political utterance: 2 Since Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor had created a state of war, President Roosevelt's message needed only to be a statement of that fact. But it was much more: with his skill in radio speaking the Commander-in-Chief welded a nation of listeners into a single great weapon of determined effort for victory.

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Marianne Moore

Schulze¹

2014

A Companion to Modernist Poetry

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Republicanism and Leisure in Marianne Moore's Depression

Abstract: Luke Carson is associate professor of English at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He is author of Consumption and Depression in Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, and Ezra Pound (1999).

Cited by 13 publications

References 20 publications

Marianne Moore’s Depression Collectives

Marianne Moore’s Depression Collectives

“Spenser’s Ireland,” December 1941: Scripting a Response

Marianne Moore

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