“WRITING WAS RESILIENCE. RESILIENCE WAS AN ADVENTURE”: MARIANNE MOORE, BERNARD SHAW, AND THE ART OF WRITING

Abstract

In his literary biography of American modernist poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972), Charles Molesworth describes balance of praise and blame that is apparent in Moore's 1915 poems addressed to other writers and cultural figures.1 By establishing a form of address in these poems, Moore foregrounds anxiety of influence that preoccupies her at this early stage in her literary career: for, as Harold Bloom would put it some fifty years later, the of influence is what governs relations between poets as poets.2 This language appears to be anticipated in conversational form of Moore's early poems, which delineates her personal anxieties concerning literary and cultural influences. Robin Schulze describes in Becoming Marianne Moore how Moore spent much of 1915, first year of her life as an internationally published poet, composing poems addressed to various literary and historical figures. These included Gordon Craig, Yeats, Disraeli, Browning, Blake, George Moore, Merlin, King Arthur's fabled magician, and Bernard Shaw.3 Molesworth traces Moore's interest in to 1906, when in her freshman year at Bryn Mawr College, she wrote with aplomb about such people as George Bernard Shaw, then a figure of great controversy and ideas.4 Much later in her career and in her life Moore was still displaying an interest in Shaw. In a response to a questionnaire published in Christian Century in 1963, Moore includes Shaw's Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant and The music criticism of George Bernard Shaw in a list of books that Did Most to Shape her Vocational Attitude and Philosophy of Life.5 Yet Moore's early poem addressed to Shaw, originally entitled To Bernard Shaw: A Prize Bird, published in Egoist in August