A Study of Marianne Moore's Concepts of Poetry: the Genuine and the Compressed

• Main Authors: Yao, Hui Mei, 姚慧美
• Other Authors: Chung Ling
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 1996
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/88436669381764581859

碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 外國語文學系 === 84 === This thesis attempts to offer an in-depth study of Marianne Moore's poetics in terms of her concepts of poetry and the representation of her own poetry. Poems from Moore's collections are studied in detail to support and mirror her own belief of poetry. Though Moore's reputation and her poetic achievement can meet as equals with those of her contemporary male poets such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Williams Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, she has been criticized as having feminine manners, for she often employs trivial and insignificant subjects as her writing materials. I try to argue that the so-called feminine style of Marianne Moore should be treated as the essence of her power because she retains a subversive feminist stance in her own subtl way. This thesis consists of five parts. The introduction is a brief summary of the study of Marianne Moore and the motivation of this research. In the first chapter, a comparison between modernist poetics and postmodernist poetics will be made so as to prove that Moore's poetry can serve as the bridge between these two literary movements. Moore's influence upon the younger generation, especially the New York School, will be discussed in detail. In the second chapter, I will scan Moore' s poetics from the contents of her poetry, in which aesthetics implied in her poetry will be thoroughly studied. Then I will inspect Moore's concepts of poetic style and the style of her verse in chapters Three and Four respectively. Finally, I conclude that the ideas of her poetics is essential to the study of Moore's poetry and her life because it has shaped a large part of her working process in her creative work.