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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?
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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?
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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.
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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.
tagged authority intellectual_property modernism originality poetics quotation sampling by fedors ...on 09-APR-09