“Humor Saves Steps”

Marianne Moore treats humor as a way to recognize what we have in common with others and to create understanding across difference. In her early work, Moore experiments with combinations of satire and empathy. In “A Prize Bird” and “The Wood-Weasel,” she uses humor as a test of friendship, and suggests that sympathetic laughter constitutes a distinctively American approach to collaborative artistic creation. Humor in “The Pangolin,” like the artists’ tools Moore discusses in the poem, is an end in itself and a way to discover new possibilities: it marks shared humanity and unites the human with the divine. Moore’s laughter occurs when we understand intuitively what it is like to be someone else; the more apparently unlike us the other, the more satisfying the laughter. Throughout Moore’s work, humor can be read as an ars poetica, modeling the synthesis of diverse components that she performs in her poetry.

Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry argues that American poets of the last hundred years use laughter to promote recognition of shared humanity across difference. Freud and Bergson argue that laughter patrols the boundary between in-group and out-group, but laughter can also help us cross or re-draw that boundary, creating a more democratic understanding of shared experience. Poets’ uses of humor reveal and reinforce deep-seated beliefs about the possibility of empathic mutual understanding among unlike interlocutors. These beliefs also shape poets’ senses of audience and their attitudes toward the notion that poets are somehow exceptional. When poets use humor to promote empathy, they make a claim about the basic ethical function of poetry, because humor and poetry share fundamental structures: both combine disparate subjects into newly meaningful wholes. Taking W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore on one side and Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot on the other as competing models of how humor can embrace, exclude, and transform, the book charts a developing poetics of laughter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the work of Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Bishop, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, and Lucille Clifton, among others. Poets whose race, gender, sexual orientation, or experimentalism place them outside the American mainstream are especially interested in humor’s potential to transcend the very differences it demarcates. Such writers increasingly replace mockery, satire, and other humorous attacks with comic forms that heighten readers’ understanding of and empathy with individuals, while revealing the failures of dominant hierarchical moral and logical systems.

Marianne Moore’s Ghost Revisions

The Rosenbach Museum and Library contains The Marianne Moore Library (MML), the largest collection of Marianne Moore’s personal objects and literary papers. Among these objects and papers are the poet’s personal copies of each of her published books. One of the first observations to be made about Moore’s revising method is her habit of revising on copies of her books from her first publication, Poems (1921), through her final publication, Complete Poems (1967), often neatly writing in an updated word or phrase in small cursive handwriting. Indeed, her lifelong habit of using published texts as sites of revision began with Poems (1921) not long after it was published. To date, I have not found a study that addresses these revisions made upon her own copies of her books, especially Poems (1921) and both editions of Observations (1924 and 1925). In order to better understand Moore’s revision process in her early years before becoming editor of The Dial, their curious presence becomes a prerequisite for reading and positing a chronology to the revisions on her manuscripts and typed scripts of her other early poetry. This essay intends to explore the revisions that Moore made on her two copies of Poems (1921) and on Observations (1924).

Review of Victoria Bazin, Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine (2019)

Review of Victoria Bazin, Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine (2019)

Social Media and Modernist Authority: The Hauntology of Facebook

Highly biographical Modernist author profiles on Facebook seem to adopt or encourage a purely biographical, Genius Cult-esque understanding of the relationship between an author and that author's work. This is initially problematic, as authorial intent is a particularly complex issue of consideration for many of the authors currently haunting Facebook. This article thus establishes the paradoxical view on author-ity of three such authors -- T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and James Joyce -- and examines how such Facebook profiles undermine and simplify the arguments made by these authors both through their critical and creative works. It then suggests that, by mere nature of being present on Facebook, these profiles may indeed engage in teasing out the very same paradox that these Modernists proposed in the first place, using Derrida's Hauntology to examine Facebook as a textual space both of biography and self-prosthesis. The argument ultimately seeks to propose that all Facebook users are indeed just such spectres haunting digital spaces.

Echoes of Sapphic Gods and Goddesses, Immortality, Eros and Thanatos in the Work of Modernist Women Poets

In the context of Modernism’s constant return to the past that results in self-knowledge and innovation, certain women writers found Sappho’s writings relevant for their own poetic endeavours. My article will mainly focus on the mythological aspects of both Sappho’s and the modernist women’s poetry. Invocations of and allusions to gods and goddesses and other mythical figures, which involve introspection and expressing certain erotic concerns in stylised ways, will be discussed in order to show how all these women poets innovated. and, in many different ways, significantly enriched the literature of their times. Critics have mainly focused on H.-D.’s poetry in relation to Sappho’s, most likely because the modernist poet had also translated (or adapted, according to most scholars) a number of Sappho’s poems. As regards other modernist women poets, such as, for instance, Amy Lowell or Marianne Moore, critics have refrained, for various reasons, from analysing their work in relation to Sappho’s. There are very few critical accounts of Sappho’s influence on their (and even H.-D.’s) poetry, and this article will, perforce, draw on these, but aims, all the while, to provide new and relevant insights.

Briefer Mentions and Lyrical Lexicons: Marianne Moore’s Responses to Dictionaries in The Dial and Observations

1925 was an important year for the poet and editor Marianne Moore. First, she began assuming editorial responsibility for the American literary magazine The Dial, taking over from her predecessor Scofield Thayer. Second, she saw her collection Observations published, with the first edition selling out within a month. Moore’s interest in dictionaries at this time displays some intriguing overlaps between her critical and creative lives, still an underexplored area within Moore studies. Therefore, this chapter discusses Moore’s early reviews of a range of reference works, before turning its attention to Moore’s poems ‘Injudicious Gardening’ and ‘Marriage’, to demonstrate how Moore’s preoccupation with questions of definition becomes altogether more subversive, and revealing of her capricious attitude towards the notion of ‘definition’ itself.