Illusion is more precise than precision: the poetry of Marianne Moore

Abstract

In 1935, T.S. Eliot wrote that Marianne Moore's poems form part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time. In this comprehensive critical study of the American poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) and her work, Erickson sets out to justify Eliot's praise, demonstrating the poet's ability to combine close observation with a worldview presentation that is at once intuitive, kaleidoscopic and optimistic. Unfortunately, over the years the excellence and originality of Moore's work has been overshadowed by its apparent inscrutability. Erickson examines the work of Marianne Moore in order to provide some consistently successful strategies for understanding her poetry. The thesis is centered in a line from Moore's poem, Armor's Undermining Modesty: What is more precise that precision? Illusion. Erickson argues that Moore came to see herself humorously as Imagnifico, a Wizard in Words, a magician who used her conjuries to express a truth beyond reason, a truth described by the philosopher Henri Bergson as intuition, the highest stage of the evolution of human understanding. It is Erickson's contention that Moore's sense of magic is inextricably bound up in her own uniquely feminine epistomology, the tendency to place great value on intuition and to find one's own voice among collections of many voices. lllusion is More Precise Than Precision demonstrates that Moore's voice is arguably the strongest female voice in 20th-century American literature and that Moore's poetic voice could hold its own in the company of the best of the other modernists. Unlike many current scholars, Erickson examines closely the texts of Moore's poems themselves, allowing the poet's own voice to speak clearly. The study explores Moore's obsession with time, her preoccupation with the visual, her interest in the forms of Hebrew verse and her susceptibility to happiness, an outlook at some odds with the 20th-century's fascination with the romance of failure.