Marianne Moore, Kenneth Burke and the Poetics of Literary Labour

Abstract

Writing to Morton Zabel in 1932, Marianne Moore praised Zabel’s review of Emily Dickinson for Poetry magazine but also took the opportunity to remind her addressee that ‘‘Emily Dickinson cared about events that mattered to the nation.’’ In his review, Zabel had repeatedly insisted upon Dickinson’s ‘‘fast seclusion’’ from her community, locked as she was within an ‘‘asylum of the spirit.’’ This emphasis upon ‘‘isolation’’ and ‘‘introspection’’ represented the woman poet as being oddly detached from the ‘‘real’’ and implicitly masculine world of political and social change, a critical strategy Moore would have been all too familiar with, her own work having been repeatedly constructed in terms of aesthetic ‘‘purity.’’ Moore’s defence of Dickinson as a poet fully engaged with the political and social issues of her day is also, implicitly, a reminder to Zabel that women’s poetry need not be confined by critical interpretation to the private and feminized sphere of ‘‘introspection’’ but could be related to public affairs of national importance.