• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.56 no.2
• /
• pp.219-236
• /
• 2010

As a poet, a reviewer of books, and an editor of a major literary journal, Marianne Moore participated in aesthetic revolution which invented the American poetry of the twentieth century. Of all the modernists, she was one of the few truly technical originals, and became an endearing mascot of poetry. Innately attentive to detail, Moore wrote a myriad of poems about animal and plant subjects, and set out to develope and secure her own particular paradigm for modernist poetic and the poetry of objective and scientific description. Foregrounding a mind scientifically trained, Moore used her verse to demonstrate a means by which to see the reality beyond the obvious. Ironically enough, however, a central difficulty with understanding Moore's poetry lies with her concern for such scientific or surface description and precision. In order to understand Moore's poetry fully, it is of special necessity to appreciate relativity among the seemingly disparate entities such as science and literature, as Moore herself did. This paper explores the way in which the poetic techniques of Moore substantiate her sense of morality that underlies the creation of her poetry. Rather than merely addressing her artistic genius or craftsmanship as a modernist poet, Moore's methods engage the power of imagination, magic, lifting the human spirit and eschewing anthropocentric perspectives. For Moore, the poet's magic comes by diligence. In so doing, as I would argue here, Moore draws on the nature of language, especially what Bakhtin insisted with his notions of polyphony and carnival. By introducing openness to various perspectives and meanings in her verse, Moore succeeds in maintaining her own sense of creativity while continuing to acknowledge morality. In a similar skein, her use of active verbs in animal poems and the kaleidoscopic descriptions demonstrate how Moore accommodates imagination and reality, and form and content.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.55 no.1
• /
• pp.25-59
• /
• 2009

This study explores the characteristics of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry in comparison with the two of her closest friends and poets, Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Bishop's reputation has dramatically changed since her death. In the 1970s she was "a writer's writer's writer," and admired by a small group of poets or critics. Since 1990s, however, there has been a great shift in the evaluation of her poetry, which is so called "The Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon." It does not seem to be an easy task to examine what has driven the phenomenon, and why she used to be a minor poet or "the most honored yet most elusive of poets" but now she has a widespread recognition by the academy and beyond it. The "intrinsic qualities" of Bishop's poetry, however, can be one of the main reasons why it took several decades for Bishop to become a central figure in the literary canon. Looking into her "intrinsic qualities," this paper discusses Bishop's "The Fish," "Roosters" through the Moore-Bishop relationship, and reads Bishop's "Armadillo" and "The Monument" through the Lowell-Bishop relationship. It also deals with letters, interviews, Moore's "The Fish," and Lowell's "Skunk Hour" and "For the Union Dead" to show the Bishop's deep and complex relationships with the two poets, and more importantly their differences. Bishop's poetry is difficult, "elusive," and sometimes "enigmatic," not because her texts are full of difficult words to understand but because there are the subtle interchange between perception and meaning, "the dynamics of keen feeling," the unresolved patterns, and the transient vision under the seemingly transparent surface of the texts.