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Certain Difficulties in Reading Marianne Moore: Exemplified in Her “Apparition of Splendor”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Rebecca Price Parkin*
Affiliation:
Sacramento State College, Sacramento, Calif.

Extract

A marianne moore poem must be walked round slowly—parts picked up, handled, mused on, laid back—then the whole thing walked round again—and again. The reader may give up on a particular poem, deciding that for the present he cannot decipher it. But the disjecta membra will not give him up so readily. Jigsaw puzzles exasperate some. Half-submerged in consciousness, however, these pieces from Miss Moore's poems breed connecting links.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966

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References

1 A Marianne Moore Reader (New York: Viking Press, Inc., 1961), copyright 1952 by Marianne Moore and reprinted by permission of the Viking Press, Inc.

2 Trans. R. H. Boothroyd (London, 1950), p. 192.

3 New York, 1946, p. 36.

4 Princeton, 1948, i, 192.

5 Waetzoldt, p. 192.

6 New York, 1954, Vol. i, Book i, pp. 670, 677.

7 Collected Poems (New York, 1951), p. 143.

8 Collected Poems, pp. 143–144.

9 “Interview with Donald Hall” in A Marianne Moore Reader (New York, 1961), pp. 254–255.

10 Goodwin, pp. 354, 355.

11 Goodwin, pp. 352, 356.

12 Marianne Moore, trans. The Fables, by La Fontaine (New York, 1954), Fable No. xiii, Book xii, p. 296.

13 La Fontaine, Fables (Paris, 1883), ii, 305–306. Twenty-three other editions were consulted; none contained an equivalent of Miss Moore's line.

14 Ed. Austin Dobson (New York: Everyman's Library, 1934), p. 138.

15 Goldsmith, p. 138.

16 She says, “Oliver Goldsmith in one of his essays refers to ‘a blue fairy with a train eleven yards long, supported by porcupines’.” A Marianne Moore Reader, p. 280.