Marianne Moore is one of the most prominent and representative modernist poets; to understand her poetry, it helps to understand the larger movement to which she contributed. Ultimately, modernism in art, literature, poetry, and music constituted a break with the past and tradition, embraced the rapid progress and change of contemporary life, and played with form and image in defiance of literary and artistic conventions. Although modernism began in the 1910s, things shifted into high gear after WWI. This astonishingly brutal war and its chaotic aftermath resulted in profound disillusionment on the part of intellectuals. The former values of civilization seemed to be utterly irrelevant now, and incapable of accounting for the rupture. T.S. Eliot’s poems “The Wasteland” and “The Hollow Men” were some of the finest examples of poetry addressing this state of extreme cynicism and despair; “The Hollow Men” ends with the lines “This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper,” and the Poetry Foundation describes “The Wasteland” as “the archetypal Modernist text, rife with allusions, linguistic fragments, and mixed registers and languages.”
The main figures in poetry were Ezra Pound (his cry of “Make it new!” essentially sums up the movement), Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, E.E. Cummings, and Moore. Pound and Eliot used collaging techniques and looked to Chinese poets and Symbolist French poets, respectively. Stevens claimed that his poetry was intended to “press back against the pressure of reality” while Williams said his work had “no ideas but in things.” Cummings elided all capital letters, and Moore used esoteric quotations and imagery. All played with structure and form, experimenting with new syllabics, meter, etc. As the Ransom Center for the Humanities noted in their exhibition on modernism, “In this revolution, words were set free from syntax, notes from traditional harmonies and color and line from perspective. Dramatic works became musical and music became visual, and writings became sculptural.”
One of the most prominent themes in modernist poetry is, ironically, the inability of language to sufficiently represent reality. One’s self and the world are constructed only through language, but this means that it is essentially unstable; truth and meaning are decoupled, and the things that people once considered absolutes—God, art, authority, the nation, teleological history—are called into question. These poets are obsessed with the limits and potentials of language.
