Acts of Containment:Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure

Abstract

Marianne Moore and artist Joseph Cornell, most famous for his box constructions, shared a lively correspondence between 1943 and 1961. They also shared a similar working method of collection, selection, and containment, driven by moral impulses to enclose and preserve. correspondence between them serves as a lens for examining thematic and formal similarities in artistic production, for example, the use of Egypt in Cornell's L'Egypte de Mlle Cleo de Merode cours elementaire d'histoire naturelle and in Moore's The Jerboa. Furthermore, the letters reveal a mutual respect for and interest in one another's work, such as Cornell's responses to Moore's collection Nevertheless—in particular his praise of the anti-war poem A Carriage From Sweden. discussion culminates in an examination of Moore's animal poems in What Are Years, linking Half-Deity, inspired by the Monarch butterfly diorama at New York's American Museum of Natural History, to Cornell's Habitat series of the same period.