The Review of English Studies Advance Access originally published online on June 7, 2007
The Review of English Studies 2007 58(236):531-551; doi:10.1093/res/hgl157
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press 2007; all rights reserved
Marianne Moore and the Poetics of Pragmatism
Oxford Brookes University
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Abstract |
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This article suggests that we get the best purchase on Marianne Moore's poetry by situating it alongside the work of the American pragmatists—William James, John Dewey and Reinhold Niebuhr in particular. It is evident from Moore's reading and from her personal associations that she was familiar both with the ideas of the pragmatists and with the intellectual context within which their thinking developed, and her affinities with a pragmatist epistemology are apparent in her poetic practice. Yet her adjacency to pragmatism has never been fully investigated: the key studies of American poetry and pragmatism make no mention of Moore, and Moore scholars seldom refer to pragmatism. I argue, primarily through an analysis of the 1924 version of ‘The Past Is the Present’, that Moore's early formal experimentation—her collage technique and use of syllabics—is best read in relation to the work of James and Dewey, with an awareness of their pragmatist understanding of the world we live in and of the manner in which we might engage with and shape that world. Later in Moore's life, as she began writing a more accessible poetry of public values, correlations between her work and the writings of the protestant theologian and pragmatist Reinhold Niebuhr become increasingly apparent.