subscribe to this pageMoore, Marianne. Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907-1924. Ed. Robin G. Schulze. Berkeley, CA: U of California P,
2002.
Schulze gathers facsimiles of the poems Moore published in advance of her first volume of poetry, 1924's Observations. She compares the appearance of the poems in their original publication context to their appearance in Observations. Subscribing to a social text theory of editing derived from the work of Jerome McGann, Schulze considers the "bibliographic code" of a poem alongside the "linguistic code." The latter refers to the words of the poem, while the form refers to the way the poem's material embodiment - in a particular book or magazine, with a particular circulation, owned by agents with particular interests, at a particular historical moment - contributes to the meaning of the poem.
Because Moore revised her poetry as frequently as she did, an appeal to "authorial intention" in selecting authoritative versions necessarily fails, unless one declares by fiat that the final intentions are authoritative. Given the consensus that Moore's last versions are often vastly inferior to earlier versions, Schulze adheres to a principle of "authorial selection." This allows that Moore published different versions for different reasons and by extension that the critic can take an eclectic, particularistic approach to interpreting her poems. What Schulze calls "historical fitness" preserves authorial agency from McGann's emphatic displacement of authority onto the production process, resulting in a dynamic process whereby author and productive forces are mutually implicated in the variance that readers observe in a poem from one work to another. In interpreting "Poetry" and "The Octopus," Schulze's volume allows me to see the textual variance between two early versions, including an account of their respective publication contexts in Others and The Dial.
Diepreveen, Leonard. Changing Voices: The Modern Quoting Poem. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan Press, 1993.
From the perspective of a scholar of twentieth-century American poetry, Diepreveen sees his project as an intervention in a discourse of "citationality" that he believes has come to stand in for any type of intertextuality, whether allusion, quotation, or formal citation. Allusion and quotation are too different to be considered under the same concept, given how indirect an allusion may be and still qualify as an illusion. Though he grants that the assumption of appropriated materials characterizes a great deal of formally innovative twentieth-century art, he restricts the scope of his study to poetry. He aims, through practical criticism, to consider the impact that quotation has on features specific to poetry, such as stanzaic form, lineation, and metrics. Unlike Gregory, Diepreveen argues that "quoting poems" are quintessentially American, "coming partly from preoccupations with antecedents (Eliot and Pound) and with authenticity (Moore, Cummings, Eliot, and Pound)."
Studying American modernist quoting poems illuminates other concepts crucial to modernism, like fragmentation, difficulty, and impersonality. Diepreveen also looks at quotation as a destabilization of lyric voice that leads to the strands of postmodern art experimenting with ideas of dispersed subjectivity. He argues, against Gregory, that quotations inevitably distort the subject of a poem, adducing the way that quotations continually redefine the subject of "The Octopus," Mt. Rainier. He also reads Moore's famous statement about "Marriage" as an indicator that the poem falls under another genre, that of the anthology. Anthologies pay for licenses, while Diepreveen claims that the modernists were content to steal, quoting Moore that a "good stealer is ipso facto a good inventor." Does copyright law leave room for theft that will "make it [poetry] new," to quote Pound? Is modernism criminal? Are the supposed effects that quotations have on poems the traces of this criminality?
Understahl, Jennifer. "Copyright Infringement and Poetry: When is a Red Wheelbarrow the Red Wheelbarrow?" Vanderbilt Law Review Understahl observes that courts apply a substantial similarity test when determining whether a particular work of literature infringes existing copyright. She argues that courts fail to take into account the difference between different literary genres, and subsequently that different genres call for varying thresholds of originality. Moreover, courts lack a clear standard for establishing substantial similarity, disagreeing on the application of the "pattern" and "total concept and feel" tests, as well as on whether the burden of recognizable infringement should fall to the "lay observer" or to an "intended audience." The various expressive works encompassed by the umbrella term "literature" thus merit the formulation of individual standards for establishing substantial similarity. For instance, literature often features phrases in which the sound complements the sense. The sounds created by juxtaposing certain words can carry significance, as when a phrase describing Satan contains an abundance of sibilants, evoking the hiss of the serpent frequently employed to depict Satan in illustrations. If the same phrase occurs in an op-ed column about a celebrity, the context largely determines that readers will attend to the sense, and assume that effects of sound are incidental. In essence, Understahl argues that the idea/expression dichotomy collapses in the case of literary. Adopting Pound's dictum that poetry is "the most concentrated form of verbal expression, she suggests that poetry warrants the lowest minimal standard for originality. Typographical decisions, most notably features like the placement of the poem on the page, line length, enjambment, spacing, and strophic organization, all create substantial dissimilarities between copyrighted text and "new" writing, when justified as integral to that which the poem is designed to express. Moreover, poems that borrow language from this "new" writing but cast the language in a new form ought to be determined original. The substantial similarity test, Understahl argues, would even fail to find William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" copyrightable. She proposes an "expressive elements" test that evaluates the relation between form and content on a sliding scale of substantial similarity, one that accounts for the features that characterize poetic expression. The projected benefits are greater consistency in substantial similarity determinations and less overprotection. Moore's poetry would benefit from the adoption of this test, given the prevalence of sampling and quotation. Understahl draws on a surprisingly wide range of poets to substantiate her remarks about poetry as an art form, demonstrating the viability of the proposed test within the artistic community under consideration. Because she mentions no cases in which the court slighted poetic originality, the issues seem prospective, if no less important.
58.3 (2005): 915-54.
Saint-Amour, Paul K. The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2003.
Paul Saint-Amour's study is primarily concerned with British copyright discourse from the late Victorian period through the beginning of modernism. His eponymous pun seeks to capture the extralegal dimension of copyright law - namely, the interests and prejudices of those who set and implement the law, for instance, in favor of certain forms of creativity at the expense of others. The goal of the book is to argue that literature began thinking about copyright when terms began extending in the nineteenth century, and that for the sake of future literature, copyright protection must be significantly "thinned." Originality, Saint-Amour argues, is "only ever meaningfully a dialogical cultural phenomenon - a complexly intersubjective, intertextual product of social processes of consensus, contestation, distortion, and occlusion." The chapter pertinent to my study involves what Saint-Amour calls the "hauntology" of copyright, the process by which an author "lives" beyond death in the form of a continued monopoly over her works, even though she herself no longer exists to control the privacy of that intellectual property.
The 1998 Sunny Bono Copyright Act led a veiled assault on the public domain in the name of the artists' memory, effectively turning intellectual property into "a memento mori." This skews the public perception so that the public views copyright as the province of artists rather than as the province of copyright holders. Since Wordsworth believed that poets create the taste by which they are to be enjoyed, he expected that the greatest remuneration for his poetry would come posthumously. As a result, he thought that copyright should be perpetual, so that an artist's heirs can enjoy the benefits that ought to have occurred to the artist in her lifetime. Wordsworth grew more conservative with age, but what about Moore, and the avant-garde more generally? Given that an avant-garde presents itself as a force for change in society, are its views on intellectual property necessarily in favor of an expanded public domain? Unlike some of the other modernists, Moore made a living off of her writing, so these are questions that touch on her use of quotation and her attitude to copyright more generally.
Vaidhayanathan, Said. "Hep Cats and Copy Cats: American Music Challenges the Copyright Tradition." Copyrights and Copywrongs:
The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York: New York UP, 2003. 117-48.
Vaidhayanathan begins his chapter on the ethos of sampling in American music by claiming that "music, more than any other vehicle of culture, collapses the gap that separates idea from expression." Walter Pater ventured the same observation in the late nineteenth century, speculating that all arts aspire to the condition of music. This introduces great difficulty into the realm of copyright, which identifies protectable expression by consistently separating out idea from expression. Taking the case of "second takers," samplers building on the creativity of particular artist or, in the case of the blues, a common musical catalog, Vaidhayanathan argues that these important engines of culture need more protection than the idea/expression distinction can provide. In the case of American music, he goes so far as to claim that repetition and revision are "central tropes." The Blues tradition, more specifically, views the elaboration or improvisation of traditional compositions as the norm, as against the Constitution's model of progress or Romantic models of genius. If this is true, copyright law overprotects large swathes of American music.
The distinction Vaidhayanathan draws in this article between legal issues and aesthetic and ethical issues begs of the question of whether blues compositions ought to be eligible for protection. Then again, he also seems to support the "total concept and feel" test for substantial similarity. This would locate the aesthetic and ethical issues he cares about within the purview of the law as currently formulated, except that the test applies to the performance of a song, rather than to its composition, as is currently the case. Performance, he argues, constitutes a substantial portion of the "value-added" aspect of a musical work. The overarching question, as I see it, involves the degree to which discrete areas of culture like the blues tradition can push back against legal protections designed to apply to all areas of culture. Established works reap the benefit of asymmetrical power, in the form of a large and powerful music industry lobby. The power balance in and of itself doesn't decide the question. Moreover, a tension between recourse to national tradition - the idea of "American music" - and recourse to ethnocentric explanation - in the histories of the blues and rap - might have been more clearly handled.
Vaidhayanathan delineates five reasons for sampling - to draw on the authority of a cultural touchstone, to produce a new version, to make a political statement, to express appreciation or acknowledge influence, and to create an ambient effect. Works that sample arguably deserve a hearing on each of these grounds, as five possibilities for the nature of a fair use claim. Sampling more often than not adds value to a work of art and thus transforms the sample. Moore's poetry might profitably be considered in light of these five species of sampling, to see whether they would be adequate in pursuit of a fair use claim.
Barsanti, Michael and Evelyn Feldman. "Paying Attention: The Rosenbach Museum's Marianne Moore Archive and the New York
Moderns." Journal of Modern Literature 22. (Autumn 1998): 7-30.
Barsanti and Feldman represent the Rosenbach Museum and Library, which houses the largest archive of Moore's writings in the country, as well a recreation of Moore's Manhattan living room. In connection with a 1997 exhibit entitled Making It New: Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts, the two seek to give Moore's writing environment and process of composition greater public exposure. They focus on her library of over two thousand volumes, organized according to her unique system. Among literary works could be found books Yiddish expressions, Charlie Chaplin, religion, hunting, and natural history. Many books contain a personal index inscribed by Moore. Moore also kept all the various editions of her work, including manuscripts and drafts, suggesting that she wanted a record of the revisions she wrought over the years.
Concerning Moore's process of writing, Barsanti and Feldman relay the archive's proliferation of newspaper clippings, transcribed conversations, and baseball accounts, all of which would have served as raw material for Moore's poetry. They quote Moore describing a moment of inspiration, whereby a book calls up an association and both quotation and association survive in the finished product. Moore refers to her poem "Marriage" as "statements that took my fancy that I tried to arrange plausibly," most of which aren't Moore's. These material forms of "paying attention" interact with copyright law insofar as much of the language Moore mines for her poems is copyrighted, and that the practice constitutes a fundamental part of her poetics.
Friedlander, Benjamin. "Marianne Moore Today." Critics and Poets on Marianne Moore: "A Right Good
Salvo of Barks." Ed. Leavell, Linda, Miller, Cristanne, and Robin G. Schulze. Bucknell, PA: Bucknell UP, 2005.
222-39.
Friedlander solicited commentaries on the significance of Marianne Moore from contemporary avant-garde poets, with the intention of gauging exposure and tracing lines of influence. Interspersed are his comments on the vagaries of Moore's reception, and an inchoate argument that Moore's poetry should be a lot more important to contemporary poets than it is. Rachel Blau Duplessis calls her "a precursor without acknowledged followers," and then claims a mild affinity for the "collage textures of poetry and discursive slides" that also appear in Pound, Eliot, and Williams, but which Moore employed to feminist ends. Jena Osman looks behind the texture of the poetry to Moore's compositional practice, admiring "her use of footnotes/citations, her delight in and recycling of newspaper items, and her ‘research-based' writing strategies," and most of all Moore's practice of inserting clippings into books dialogically, which Osman calls "material hypertext."
Friedlander ultimately suggests two conclusions: first, an unfair prejudice against Moore results from the popular, genteel persona she cultivated in her later years, the period when most contemporary poets came of age; second, the texture of contemporary poetry and its practice of laying bare the mediation of truth comport with Moore aesthetically and philosophically to a greater degree than with her peers. The significance of this discussion for my project is that contemporary poets who admire Moore admire the way she samples from non-literary texts. Arguably, then, one of the most productive aspects of Moore's poetry in the present moment intersects with one of the most discussed concepts in intellectual property law, sampling.
Moore, Marianne. The Poems of Marianne Moore. Ed. Grace Schulman. New York: Penguin, 2003.
One of Marianne Moore's most famous poems, "Poetry," underwent radical revision over the course of its publication history, appearing first in Alfred Kreymborg's little magazine Others at thirty lines, in the spacing standard for Moore's syllabic poems. When the poem appears for the fifth time in the second edition of Moore's first volume of poetry, Observations, the lines hug the left margin and thirteen of them remain. Tinkering with the poem her entire life, the last authorized version appears in the 1967 Complete Poems and takes up a mere three lines. In between the poem swelled and shrank, complicating the question of whether any version ought to be considered authortative. Given that "Poetry" falls within the subgenre of the ars poetica, an account of quotation in Moore's poetics owes special attention to the quotations that appear in this poem. According to Moore's endnotes, "Poetry" quotes at least Tolstoy and Yeats, the latter of which would have fallen outside the public domain. Moore acknowledges Yeats, but she also rewrites him, leaving the status of the acknowledgement unclear.
The poem's most enduring phrase - "imaginary gardens with real toads / in them" - serves two important roles. First, it models what poetry can offer. Second, the phrase acquires quotation marks when it appears in Moore's Collected Poems, prompting the reader to identify it as an unattributed quotation. How does the poem justify Moore's acts of quotation? Might it also justify mis- and unattributed quotations? And how are these three types of quotation akin to sampling? An examination of one of Moore's most quotation-heavy poems, "The Octopus," reveals the same strange vacillation between acknowledgement and submergence. Moore often quotes for the felicity of the expression, rather than the idea expressed - how did she imagine quotation, and why did she represent the practice so eccentrically?
Gregory, Janice. Quotation and Modern American Poetry: "Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads." Houston, TX: Rice UP, 1996.
Gregory's study compares the poetics of quotation in T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore. Quotation, she argues, either draws on the authority of what a writer quotes or parodies that same authority. She identifies four pre-Modernist conceptions of the function of quotation, each allied with a different epoch: Christian antiquity and the medieval, Renaissance, and Romantic periods. Apostolic and Pauline texts quote Jesus and the Old Testament to invoke the awe of revelation, the binding force of law, and to establish their own authority. Medieval writers invoke the same authority from non-Christian authors, especially Aristotle. The Renaissance, through figures like Erasmus and Cervantes, instigates the double character of quotation, useful for authorization and parody. The Romantic period witnesses the rise of a discourse of originality that created immense anxiety in poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth over their belatedness in relation to great poets like Milton. Their rare instances of quotation are in the service of transferring authority to modern, secular forces. Setting this anxiety in an American context, Emerson insists in the 1830s that originality and quotation are not mutually exclusive, thus setting the stage for poetry that acknowledges a great debt to tradition but nevertheless seeks to establish an original relation to the universe.
Gregory argues that Eliot, Williams, and Moore all employ quotation to explore the way authority is gendered, particularly with reference to America's belatedness in secular history. Borrowing on the work of Marie Borroff, Gregory demonstrates how Moore's inclusion of "promotional prose" and the text from park monuments, intimate conversations, volumes of natural history, and other non-canonical language alongside quotations from Yeats and allusions to Browning throws into question the hierarchies on which the authority of quotation rests. These "unauthoritative" texts enter the realm of literature for multiple purposes, among them revaluation, modest depersonalization, and the establishment maternal authority. Gregory also suggests that Moore's practice of quotation influenced T.S. Eliot, not the other way around, by convincing him that he could fashion poetry "out of a refusal to digest the fragments of the texts that inspired it." Gregory allows me to argue that Moore's practice of quotation serves several of the analogous functions that sampling serves in music, and subsequently that there might be a causal relationship between Moore's nationality and the views she held on quotation.
Slatin, John. The Savage's Romance: The Poetry of Marianne Moore. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1986.
Slatin offers a startlingly original reading of Marianne Moore's poetry. His starting point is the New Critical conception of the poem as a largely self-sufficient artifact. Because Eliot and Pound quote to be recognized, and desire a certain kind of reader, they meet the self-sufficiency criterion. Moore, by contrary, quotes to a context-specific purpose, and the quotes she selects are from marginal texts or are marginal quotes from canonical writers. Slatin divides Moore's career in three ways - biographically, formally, and intellectually. The intellectual project gets the greatest shrift. Slatin envisions a genealogy of chiliast thinking - that is, thinking concerned with the establishment of paradise on earth - that runs from the Puritans through Emerson and James to Moore, Williams, Pound, and Eliot. Moore takes the most active role among the modernists in reshaping American, accounting both for the civic turn marked by the poetry she produced in the 30s and 40s and many of her poems about the natural world, beginning with "The Octopus."
Quotation contributes to this project by creating a dependent reader, one whom Moore asks to do more than simply nod in recognition. The reader must identify the quotation and pay closer attention to the source text than before, and perhaps to gain a new perspective on the source text that stands in a feedback relation to Moore's poem. In addition, most of Moore's quotations are from prose, destabilizing the boundary between the two. Both practices of quotation thus complicate the New Critical model, the payoff of which is an understanding of Moore's pervasive tropes of clarity and simplicity. Poems that are fully self-sufficient are unlikely to participate in the complex and messy process by which truths are arrived at, a process that Moore's poems better resemble. In step with a decline in quotation over the course of her career, Slatin affirms the consensus of a decline in the quality of Moore's poetry.