A Peculiar Kind of Particularity: Plants and Animals in Marianne Moore’s Early Poetry

Abstract

As an undergraduate studying biology at Bryn Mawr College in the messy aftermath of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Marianne Moore found herself surrounded by renowned biologists like Thomas Hunt Morgan, Jacques Loeb, Nettie Maria Stevens, and David Hilt Tennent – all of whom were highly invested in debates concerning the epistemological validity of empiricist and essentialist approaches to the natural world. As her biology class manuscripts reveal, these debates had a profound influence on Moore’s early poetry (1908–1924), especially when it involved plants and animals. Eager to perceive other living organisms with precision, Moore rejected the demands of wider vision and focused her inquisitive intensity on the particular properties of individuals. The more that Moore attended to these particulars in her poetry, the more pressure she was able to place on the categorical structures that biologists impose upon organisms for the sake of a stable scientific nomenclature.