The Poetic Techniques and Morality of Marianne Moore

마리안 무어의 시적 기교와 도덕성

As a poet, a reviewer of books, and an editor of a major literary journal, Marianne Moore participated in aesthetic revolution which invented the American poetry of the twentieth century. Of all the modernists, she was one of the few truly technical originals, and became an endearing mascot of poetry. Innately attentive to detail, Moore wrote a myriad of poems about animal and plant subjects, and set out to develope and secure her own particular paradigm for modernist poetic and the poetry of objective and scientific description. Foregrounding a mind scientifically trained, Moore used her verse to demonstrate a means by which to see the reality beyond the obvious. Ironically enough, however, a central difficulty with understanding Moore's poetry lies with her concern for such scientific or surface description and precision. In order to understand Moore's poetry fully, it is of special necessity to appreciate relativity among the seemingly disparate entities such as science and literature, as Moore herself did. This paper explores the way in which the poetic techniques of Moore substantiate her sense of morality that underlies the creation of her poetry. Rather than merely addressing her artistic genius or craftsmanship as a modernist poet, Moore's methods engage the power of imagination, magic, lifting the human spirit and eschewing anthropocentric perspectives. For Moore, the poet's magic comes by diligence. In so doing, as I would argue here, Moore draws on the nature of language, especially what Bakhtin insisted with his notions of polyphony and carnival. By introducing openness to various perspectives and meanings in her verse, Moore succeeds in maintaining her own sense of creativity while continuing to acknowledge morality. In a similar skein, her use of active verbs in animal poems and the kaleidoscopic descriptions demonstrate how Moore accommodates imagination and reality, and form and content.