For the 1967 volume of her Complete Poems, Marianne Moore preceded the section devoted to endnotes with a statement about quotation and intellectual property. "A Note on the Notes" reads as follows: "A willingness to satisfy contradictory objections to one's manner of writing might turn one's work into a donkey that finally finds itself being carried by its masters, since some readers suggest that quotation-marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. But since in anything I have written there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest. Perhaps those who are annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts could be persuaded to take probity on faith and disregard the notes." In this project I hope to parse this statement, look at the history of "Poetry" and "The Octopus" to see how quotations operate and change across versions, and ask whether and why modern American poets like Moore who quote borrow or steal.

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? 

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.