One of the popular trends of modern literary criticism has emphasized the unity of form and subject as a first principle of a poem. Marianne Moore provides a thoroughly solid example of this principle in much of her poetry; the moral themes of her poems are reflected in her precise handling of the craftmanship of the poetic form. It is the purpose of this essay to review Miss Moore’s poetry within the implication of the phrase "poetic synthesis". In order for her poems to work for all levels of critical direction, that is language, metre, rhyme, metaphor, symbol, and philosophic,—and in her particular case- moral, theme, the reader must be aware of the singular unity of the poems. In other words, each of the facets of the constructed prism - poem reflects by its construction the light which comes the creative source of the poet: the act of the statement is the essence of the statement. This idea is the controlling method of this particular thesis: the work dealt with includes a range of material from fifty years of Miss Moore's publication of her poetry. For the most part, selections from her Collected Poems provide the basis of discussion. No attempt is made to asses her work chronologically since the selections in the Collected Poems contain works that will have a fixed importance regardless of their time sequence. The first chapter offers a close reading of poems in terms of the concept of the poetic synthesis. References are made to the deliberately controlled metric and syllabic system which is found in most of her works as well as to the many types of rhyme that contribute to the structural unity of the poem. Some mention is made of the moral themes which occur in many of the works, often with reference to the “armoured" metaphor of which she is so fond. The second chapter suggests some comparisons between Miss Moore and several of her contemporary writers; William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, to show how, against the Imagist background, each of these poets projects a particular concern in both technique and theme. No mention has been made of Miss Moore's most recent publication since the thesis had been written and approved before its appearance. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Historically, women have not been "speaking subjects" but "spoken objects" in Western culture--the ground on which male-dominated constructions have been erected. In literature, women have been conventionally held as the silent and silenced other. Lyric poetry especially has idealized not only the entrenched figures of masculine subject/feminine object, but poetry itself as the site of prophecy, vision, Truth. Most dramatically in lyric poetry then, the issue of women as subjects has been collapsed into Woman as object, that figure who has been the sacrifice necessary for the production of lyric "song" and the consolidation of the unified masculine voice. It has thus been difficult for women poets to take up the position of speaking subject, most particularly because of women's problematic relationship to Woman. Recent feminist theorists have explored female subjectivity, how women put into hegemonic discourse "a possible operation of the feminine." This dissertation analyzes that possibility in poetry as exemplified in the works of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and H.D. I contend that these paradigmatic American poets constitute speaking subjects in their poetry that both figure Woman conventionally and reconfigure it, i.e. subvert the stability of those representations, thereby disturbing our view. I argue that this double identification produces, in effect, a divided or split subjectivity that is enabling for the female speaker. As an alternative to the traditionally specularized figure of Woman then, such a position opens up distinctly counter-hegemonic spaces in which to constitute the female subject, rendering problematic readerly consumption of the image of Woman as a totality. I explore the attempts to represent women's difference differently--the tenuous accession to, rejection of, or play with the lyric "I" in these poets' works. Dickinson, Moore, and H.D. reconfigure Woman and inscribe female speakers as grammatically and rhetorically, but not necessarily visually, present, thereby frustrating patriarchal economies of mastery and possession.