“Humor Saves Steps”: Laughter and Humanity in Marianne Moore

Abstract

Marianne Moore treats humor as a means of both recognizing commonality and creating mutual understanding between individuals. In two comparatively minor poems, A Prize Bird (1915) and The Wood-Weasel (1942), Moore uses humor as a test of friendship, and suggests that sympathetic laughter constitutes a distinctively American approach to collaborative artistic creation. Humor in The Pangolin (1936), like the artists' tools Moore discusses in the poem, is both an end in itself and a means to ever-greater things: it becomes the marker of shared humanity and a medium for uniting the human with the divine. Throughout Moore's work, her humor can be read as a kind of ars poetica, modeling the synthesis of diverse components that she performs in her poetry.