Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1959. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 298-311).

This thesis examines Marianne Moore’s poetic project of creating hope within a modern context. Building on an initial discussion of Moore’s skeptical perspective, I go on to argue that Moore’s work fosters a desire both to believe in something unknowable and to maintain faith in a goodness that cannot be realized on earth. Moore posits a more demanding hope than one based on the search for truth and namelessness; she gives hope a meaning beyond the feeling that allows people to keep going. Moore’s hope requires a guarded vision of the future, a capacity for visualizing both the real and the imaginary, and, especially, careful observation. Actively manipulating the possibilities of language while recognizing their limitations, Moore transforms hope into an action, a pursuit of ethics and a focus on something other than the self.

Texte remanié de: Ph. thesis--Oxford--Oxford university. / Bibliogr. p. [200]-213. Index.

Persuasion in poetry, according to Marianne Moore, is the result of three attributes, humility, concentration, and gusto, and when a poet is aware of these attributes and incorporates each one into his / her poetry, the poem is more likely to be meaningful. In fact, Moore’s theory stands as a meaningful test to any poet regardless of aesthetic preference. Therefore, in order to argue that the combination of these three concepts work together to produce persuasive poetry, I will show how all three of Moore’s tenets—humility, concentration, and gusto—are present in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop as well as in the most emotionally convincing poems of confessional poet Anne Sexton and associative free verse poet Mary Ruefle. In addition, I will discuss how Moore’s aesthetics apply to my own work.

Figure moderniste à la fois centrale et marginale, radicale et anachronique, locale, cosmopolite et idiosyncratique, Marianne Moore (1887-1972) semble depuis ses débuts résister à la catégorisation. Son œuvre en vers et en prose permet ainsi de remettre en question les notions d’origines et d’originalité constamment invoquées dans les débats culturels sur l’Amérique, des années 1900 aux décennies suivant la seconde guerre mondiale. Tandis que, face à la hantise de la répétition, du retard, et de la dérivation, certains auteurs et critiques cherchent à recouvrer un fondement plus ou moins mythifiée, en passant ou non par l’Europe, elle tend à substituer à l’origine fixe les figures plurielles de l’amorce et du (re)commencement. Pour autant, son travail n’est aucunement voué aux idéaux de nouveauté et d’originalité artistiques. L’Amérique qu’elle décrit laisse affleurer les survivances de temps plus anciens, observées au filtre de multiples intermédiaires, visuels, scripturaires, et culturels. Le statut de l’auteur s’en trouve par là-même subverti, le créateur cédant le pas au lecteur, au critique, à l’artisan ou encore au bricoleur. Dès lors, la tradition n’est plus un modèle à refonder ou à exclure, mais le lieu d’aménagements continuels, où le mimétisme se révèle créatif et les importations étrangères une source d’expériences et d’adaptations, laissant toute place aux singularités irréductibles. L’enjeu de ce travail est d’étudier ces différents déplacements, ainsi que les redéfinitions qu’ils permettent autour de l’Amérique et de sa littérature. / As a modernist, Marianne Moore (1887-1972) appears both central and marginal, radical and anachronistic, local, cosmopolitan and idiosyncratic, and she seems to have resisted categorization ever since her first texts. Her verse and prose works therefore enable us to question the notions of origins and originality which constituted the heart of the cultural debates about America, from the 1900s to the decades following the Second World War. While, faced with the anxiety of repetition, belatedness and derivation, some authors and critics sought to recover a more or less mythical foundation, through Europe or not, she tended to replace the idea of a fixed origin with multiple beginnings and new starts. Yet, her work was not dedicated to the ideals of artistic novelty and originality. The America she described let the surviving forms of older times surface, and it was observed through a multiplicity of visual, scriptural or cultural intermediaries. The author’s status was thus questioned, giving way to more humble characters— the reader, the critic, the craftsman or the bricoleur. Tradition was no longer a model to be recovered or excluded, but the stage for continuous accommodation, through which mimicry could become creative and foreign imports could inspire experiments and adaptations, without erasing radical singularities. The purpose of this work is to study these various displacements, as well as the redefinitions of America and its literature they allowed.

This dissertation examines the influence of film on the poetry of H.D., Marianne Moore, and Adrienne Rich. It builds on scholarship by Susan McCabe (2005), Lawrence Goldstein (1994) and others, who have traced the way twentieth-century American poets reacted formally to film culture in their writing. My project responds to the call of the editors of the volume of Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism for critics to interrogate how authors harnessed the aesthetic and political possibilities opened up by cinema. This study draws from theories of feminist film phenomenology by Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks to analyze the aims and arguments of the texts. The literary works studied include: H.D.’s Sea Garden, “Projector” series, Trilogy, Helen in Egypt, and film essays; Marianne Moore’s animal poems from the 1930s and early 1940s and film essays; and Adrienne Rich’s The Will to Change. This dissertation argues that the poets drew from film to renovate their poetic vision and forms and ply at questions of power, visuality, and bodies. The poems articulate an awareness of the filmic gaze and how it constructs feminine or animal others. Through careful analysis of the poems, this dissertation locates each poet’s particular rapport with film and how it influenced her literary style and prompted her to challenge dominant patriarchal scripts. This dissertation makes several original contributions to twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry scholarship. It sets these three authors alongside one another to reveal how their engagements with film inspired their poetics and politics at various points throughout the twentieth century. The conclusions herein determine how the poets turned to film to construct their poetic projects. The dissertation offers new readings of the work of H.D., Moore and Rich as queer women poets invested in film culture. / Graduate

The poems in A Rat-Shaped Tear consider wide-ranging ideas of otherness using character and voice. Through misdirection, understatement and unexpected imagery I confront ideas of animal and female otherness in playful ways as a means of subverting traditional impressions of both. The othering effects of grief are also examined in poems that reflect on bereavement and mortality. Human-animal interaction is used to further explore the effects of death and disappointment, though overtones of cartoonish extravagance, dark humour and the surreal temper the more serious themes of loss, disillusionment and loneliness that recur within the collection. In the accompanying thesis, I focus on the work of three poets - D.H Lawrence, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop - each of whom confront animal otherness in their work. Through close examinations of their individual works, I explore the differences in approach to human-animal interaction, and the ways in which these poets draw meaning from animal otherness. It is suggested that although they engage with the concept using varied poetic techniques, they are drawn together by the intimations of spiritual transcendence that permeate each of their animal poetics.

This thesis firstly aims at discussing the early works of American poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) through the bio-philosophical perspectives developed since the investigations of Estonian Jacob von Uexküll (1864-1944). The study elucidates Uexküll’s research on the web-like forms of life that is the Umwelt of animals and Moore’s creation of poetic environments. Such investigations provide a basis for the analysis of Moore’s animals and environments in dialogue with Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) concepts of “poverty in world”, and “animal captivation”. Uexküll’s and Heidegger’s concepts are revised by Italian Giorgio Agamben (1942- ), who proposes that there is an openness in the state of being ontologically captivated, caused by interactional processes occurring within the environment. Subsequently, taking into account these same perspectives, this thesis offers a comparative study of Marianne Moore and Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920-1999), engaging, respectively, her early poems with his book O Cão Sem Plumas [The Dog without Feathers], written in 1950. From the bio-philosophical perspectives previously discussed, this study focuses on moral and ethical stances addressed towards interpretations of the onto-ethological (Buchanan, 2008) nature of animals. The study analyses how both Moore and Melo Neto convey their ethical reflections and specific moral issues through expressions of nature and animal life, especially when they emphasise contexts of violence, misery and deprivation, either in material or conceptual respects, involved with the ontological and world-forming conditions of both animals and human beings. Therefore, the research will focus on their use of literary devices, such as allegories, and literary genres, such as fables, in order to develop both explicit and implicit dimensions of their poetry, thus providing a deeper understanding of the ontological status of animals and human beings.

With evidence ranging from visual representations by scanning tunneling microscopes to the fluid and dynamic language of poetry, my research shows that we are shifting from a culture primarily based on ‘sight’ to one that is involved with ‘touch,’ metaphorically and literally speaking. Recent developments in theory and technology, especially quantum physics and post-structuralism, have redefined representation to encompass the necessary reflex of the representer. To be sure, my research has also found feminist and postcolonial criticisms to echo this theory: both have sought to challenge representations due to the objectivity normally attributed to the representer, the Cartesian logic of which quantum theory has destabilized. Thus, by reading poetry with a quantum theoretical lens, specifically the works of Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Anne Carson, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, I show how ‘touch’ plays into our language, consequently affecting how we think through language. / Master of Arts / This is an essay on language – how we read language, where we go with language, and how language affects the way we think. Because poetry is an activity that first realizes the limits of language and then attempts to go beyond those limits, reading and writing poetically teaches us to use language to think in a different manner, what I propose to be by <i>touch</i>: a quantum manner. With respect to the field of Linguistics, I want to clarify that I am not saying our thoughts are wholly limited and determined by our language – the space of our minds are quite far-reaching, and it is quite possible to think whatever we want. What I am saying, however, is that language <i>habituates</i> how we think, and poetry reveals these habits in an attempt to break from them. Marilynne Robinson calls these habits our “little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself” (21). Thus I explore attempts at breaking linguistic, hence cognitive, habits with poetry through the writings of Anne Carson and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. I use feminist, post-colonial, and post-structural theories to formulate a methodology that shows how we <i>touch</i> language and understanding through poetry, at the same time enacting this poetic through my own writing

Despite having a rather weak family connection to Ireland, the American modernist poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) described herself in a letter to Ezra Pound in 1919 as ‘Irish by descent’. This thesis relates Moore’s claim of Irish descent to her career as a publisher, poet and playwright, and argues that her decision to shape an Irish inheritance for herself was linked with her self-identification as an American poet. Chapter 1 discusses Moore’s self-confessed susceptibility to ‘Irish magic’ in relation to the increase in contributions from Irish writers during her editorship of The Dial magazine from 1925 to 1929. Moore’s 1915 poems to the Irish writers George Moore, W. B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, which reveal a paradoxical desire for affiliation to, and disassociation from, Irish literary traditions, are scrutinized in Chapter 2. Chapters 3a and b discuss Moore’s ‘Irish’ poems ‘Sojourn in the Whale’ (1917) and ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ (1941). In both poems political events in Ireland – the ‘Easter Rising’ of 1916 and Ireland’s policy of neutrality during World War II – become a backdrop for Moore’s personal anxieties as an American poet of ‘Irish’ descent coming to terms with her political and cultural inheritance. Expanding upon previous chapters’ discussion of the interrelation of poetics and politics, Chapter 4 shows how Moore’s use of Irish sources in ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ and other poems including ‘Silence’ and the ‘Student’ reflects her quixotic attitude to Irish culture as alternately an inspiration and a tool for manipulation. The final chapter discusses Moore’s adaptation of the Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth’s 1812 novel The Absentee as a play in 1954. Through this last piece of ‘Irish’ writing, Moore adopts a sentimentality that befits the later stages of her career and illustrates how Irish literature, rather than Irish politics, has emerged as her ultimate source of inspiration.