MARIANNE MOORE: TITLE COMMENTARY

"Marriage"

BRUCE HENDERSON (ESSAY DATE 1992)

SOURCE: Henderson, Bruce. "The 'Eternal Eve' and 'The Newly Born Woman': Voices, Performance, and Marianne Moore's 'Marriage'." In Images of the Self as Female: The Achievement of Women Artists in Reenvisioning Feminine Identity, edited by Kathryn N. Benzel and Lauren Pringle De La Vars, pp. 119-33. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Henderson considers "Marriage" to be "the most complicated treatment by Moore of issues typically associated with the lives of women as women."

1987 marked the centenary of the birth of Marianne Moore, a poet more discussed than read, more often alluded to than analyzed: happily, with her centenary there seems to be a resurgence of interest in both the life and art of this idiosyncratic, yet often profoundly eloquent poet. Feminist critics and readers in particular have begun to revise earlier estimates of Moore, seeing, where once they found too much reserve and distance, a rigorous and imaginative authenticity of voice and perception. Moore's refusal to be autobiographical or confessional in the sense of revealing elements of her romantic or erotic life was once viewed as an unwillingness to deal with aspects of women's experience in a direct way; today, many critics prefer to see this as a very real and individualistic version of feminism: a refusal to write a certain kind of poetry (i.e., the love poems of Millay or Dorothy Parker) simply because it was deemed "proper" for feminine writers. It is not that Moore was unwilling to take a stand or reveal feeling in her poems about steamrollers and steeplejacks: rather, her path to the discourse of self was directed more outwardly than those of some of her peers. In terms of style, Moore is one of the least impersonal poets. Certainly it is next to impossible to read a poem by Marianne Moore and not know its author: the voice is unmistakable.

Elizabeth Bishop, herself a fine poet and a protegée of Moore, called for a reassessment of Moore's poetry vis-à-vis contemporary feminist criteria:

Lately I have seen several references critical of her poetry by feminist writers, one of whom described her as a 'poet who controlled panic by presenting it as whimsy.' Whimsy is there, of course, and so is humor (a gift these critics sadly seem to lack). Surely there is an element of mortal panic and fear underlying all works of art? Even so, one wonders how much of Marianne's poetry the feminist critics have read. Have they really read "Marriage," a poem that says everything they are saying and everything Virginia Woolf has said?

(143-144)

"Marriage" is the most complicated treatment by Moore of issues typically associated with the lives of women as women. Moore wrote it near the end of the first major period in her poetry. It is, with "An Octopus," one of her few poems sustained beyond the one-or two-page lyric.

"Marriage," the poem of a young woman in her mid-thirties, is an extended "observation" (one of Moore's favorite words, and the title of her first American volume) of this "institution." Unmarried, she took no individual part in the institution, but it surrounded her in rather involved ways. There are many speculations as to what gave immediate rise to the poem, some connected to Moore's own life, some to those of her friends.¹

Moore herself grew up in a family in which marriage was a painful subject: her mother left her father, who was at one time institutionalized for a nervous breakdown. About the time she wrote "Marriage" Moore joined the society of bohemian New York, the artists and writers who inhabited Greenwich Village: the often flexible interpretation of the marriage vow by some of her closest friends must have provoked her puzzlement or criticism or both. Certainly there is reason to believe that Moore herself was offered marriage, though whether she ever seriously considered it must remain a biographical mystery that may never be solved.

The poem is itself a brilliant example of how Moore "makes it new" (to borrow Ezra Pound's famous phrase). In "Marriage," Moore retells the story of Adam and Eve, casting the myth both diachronically and synchronically. Moore is selective in her refashioning of the story, focusing exclusively on the marital relationship: Adam and Eve as everycouple, not Adam and Eve as every-parents. Though there is some sense of temporal progression in the poem, this first marriage seems to exist contemporaneously with all marriages, almost in that lyric sense in which any historical moment may be contemplated in poetic time: the structure is not wholly unlike the "web" Estella Lauter describes in her introduction to this volume. Instead of using a straightforward, Aristotelian plot, Moore chooses to move between familiar incidents and images (such as the "colubrine" serpent) and an imagined, eternal dialogue between the "he" and "she" who are descendents of the archetypal Adam and Eve.

Adam and Eve, in this poem, are not in any simple sense the scriptural, quasi-historical personages familiar to all readers of the poem, nor even the more fully-dramatized characters in Milton's epic or in later treatments by writers like Twain or Arthur Miller. They are, at least on some level, these two people (and Moore names them as such); yet they are also what Mikhail Bakhtin might call "person-ideas," conflations of beings and represented ideologies.² What Moore has created is less a dramatic poem than a verbal performance, in the sense of the writer as an actor, a performer moving between a number of roles, as well as a discursive narrator, presenting her own consciousness simultaneously with those of her named speakers. Moore does not ask us to believe in the reality of her Adam and Eve as wholly separate from her own voice in the same way Frost or Browning do in their dramatic monologues: illusion does not seem to be a particularly desired condition of "Marriage." Also contributing to this sense of the poem as a polyphonic performance is Moore's interweaving of a complex sub-structure of languages into the text, from various kinds of imitated speech situations to written sources as stylistically and philosophically diverse as Puritan Richard Baxter's The Saints' Everlasting Rest to a contemporary article in Scientific American to an inscription on a statue in Central Park. Clearly, there is more than one kind of "marriage" in this poem: linguistic couplings as well as social and erotic ones.

"Marriage" is a poem that can withstand and deserves considerably more extensive and detailed treatment than the scope of this essay permits. Using the notion of the poem as performance as my basis, I would like to focus on two aspects of the poem that relate the question of voice and language to issues of gender. First, I will examine Moore's use of different kinds of communicative and performance situations in the poem as they affect the evolving sense of contrast between male and female discourse. Second, I will consider the ways in which Moore's interpolation of quotations from other writers creates a many-layered textuality, one that may speak to feminism more significantly than previously thought.

ON THE SUBJECT OF…

MOORE'S "MARRIAGE," ACCORDING TO ROSEANNE WASSERMAN

Among the corpus of Marianne Moore's difficult poetry, the piece "Marriage" is particularly complex, well armored in gorgeous abstractions and dazzling transitions. Its structure depends upon a quest for definition of marriage. But clues as to the nature of this definition are buried under Moore's ornate decoration, crazy-quilt quotations, and her protean ironic tone. To follow Moore's meaning, the reader must attend to lexis: not only to the familiar rhetorics of transition and addition that hold her borrowings in proximity, but to the weight of repetition and synonymity as ironic overtones develop; not only to the eccentric vocabulary, contributing gusto, but also to the smaller, ambiguously simple words that shift and change through pressure of position. The poem is in itself a difficult marriage, its elements united through the linear process of reading and the structure of making sense of what is read, but always suffering disjunction due to the complexity and multiplicity of detail.

Wasserman, Roseanne. An excerpt from "Marianne Moore's 'Marriage': Lexis and Structure." In New Interpretations of American Literature, edited by Richard Fleming and Michael Payne, pp. 156-63. Lewisburg, N.J.: Bucknell University Press, 1988.

In the first sentence of "Marriage," Marianne Moore describes this "enterprise" as "requiring public promises / of one's intention / to fulfill a private obligation" (Complete Poems 62). Her wording immediately suggests at least an element of criticism of the verbal performances associated with the wedding ceremony: the contrast between public and private acts, traceable throughout her writings, is one the poet herself felt keenly. This is not merely a contrast between negative and positive qualities; rather, Moore seems more concerned with determining the ethical appropriateness of a situation. The public act of promising, she seems to be saying, is finally neither a guarantee that either party will fulfill the private obligation, nor is it the most authentic or sincere forum for such a statement of commitment.

The lines also suggest a second set of contrasts, and again these are neither hard and fast nor purely definitive: the typical gender associations of public performances versus private ones. In "Marriage," Adam is more often than not cast as the orator, the public speaker, while Eve is more at home in the world of conversation, a witty, sometimes artificial (in both the most and least pejorative senses of that word) conversation, not unlike that of an Enlightenment salon. Although, as we will see, both characters venture into other realms of spoken discourse, Moore fairly consistently schematizes them.

In this linkage of masculine to public speaking and feminine to "interpersonal" or "poetic" communication, Moore looks ahead to contemporary French feminist theories associated with the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan and the deconstructive sorties of Derrida. Hélène Cixous, who in some ways represents the interests of both these major thinkers, differentiates between typical masculine and feminine responses to the acts of speaking and writing. Here she refers to women's resistance to oratory:

Every woman has known the torture of beginning to speak aloud, heart beating as if to break, occasionally falling into loss of language … because for woman speaking—even just opening her mouth—in public is something rash, a transgression.…We are not culturally accustomed to speaking … employing the suitable rhetoric.… The orator is asked to unwind a small thread, dry and taut. We like uneasiness, questioning.

(92-93)

Contemporary specialists in gender and communication theory might take issue with some of Cixous' generalizations, but it is true that the history of women has more often than not kept them out of the traditional public forums for rhetoric, and "relegated" (from a patriarchal point of view) them to the more informal (that is, invisible) worlds of kitchen and schoolroom. This is also often true in the representation of women in literature. A St. Joan is such a rara avis, both historically and dramatically, because she is a public speaker.

Eve is the first speaker introduced in the poem (that is, after the narrator, who is either female, in keeping with the implied lyric association of the poet and her poem, or neuter), and she is praised for her linguistic ability:

able to write simultaneously
in three languages—
English, German, and French—
and talk in the meantime.
(Complete Poems   62)

Eve is the writer in the poem (perhaps she is also the writer of the poem?), but her talents extend beyond the mere ability to compose sentences. She is also a polyglot (whereas Adam appears only to speak English, and the King's English at that), and a modern one, schooled in the three primary languages of twentieth-century scholarship: indeed, she might bypass many a contemporary Ph.D. in the humanities in this respect.

Not only this, but Eve is able to "talk in the meantime," suggesting both a superior mind and the traditional female dilemma of having to do more than one thing at a time: the image of the wife or mother who must tend house and do her "own" work of the mind simultaneously. Her first words are telling: "I should like to be alone." These are not the words of the rhetorician, but the blunt, declarative statement of the woman demanding a "room of one's own." Though Eve participates in rhetorical discourse throughout the poem, it is clear that language fulfills two principal functions for her: it is either a way of ordering her own experience of the world (a primarily poetic function) or a way of stating her needs and desires (here an essentially expressive function). Language and its enactment in performance are not, for Eve, strategies for persuasion; rather they allow her to maintain that sense of "unease" and "questioning" Cixous sees as the core of what she and other theorists call l'écriture féminine translated variously as "feminine writing" or "discourse of women."

Eve holds her own in the more traditionally rhetorical performances in the poem. Much of the last third of the poem consists of an exchange between Adam and Eve, an exchange that is somewhere between formal debate and heated discussion, initiated by Adam's critique of Eve's body, specifically her hair—"What monarch would not blush / to have a wife / with hair like a shaving-brush?" (Complete Poems 67). Her stylistically balanced but fierce responses to Adam's witty and wounding remarks are frequently composed of lists, rather than of arguments per se, and the objects in the lists are often connected through poetic inference, metaphoric and metonymic qualities, such as "Men are monopolists / of 'stars, garters, buttons / and other shining baubles.'" Similarly, in her response to Adam's definition of a "wife" as a "coffin" (these lines quoted, by the way, from Ezra Pound, one of Moore's closest friends and most respected peers), Eve questions, both rhetorically and existentially,

… This butterfly,
this waterfly, this nomad
that has 'proposed
to settle on my hand for life'—
What can one do with it?
(Complete Poems   68)

Eve moves progressively from one species of fragile insect to another to the final and damning "nomad" in her need to name the creature who is both her lover and enemy. The question she asks is perhaps in part a rhetorical one, not requiring a specific, uttered response, but it is also a real and serious dilemma for Eve: where and how to fit man into her lexicon and into her life?

Adam's language is situationally and stylistically closer to the traditions of oratory. His first words to Eve are a response to her request for solitude: he says, "'I should like to be alone; / why not be alone together'" (Complete Poems 62-63). Adam's first verbal performance is a highly complex rhetorical act: he begins by echoing the words of his "opponent," thus effectively appropriating them. The repetition diminishes the individuality of Eve's statement of desire, as if to say "we all need to be alone—what makes woman so special?" He then paradoxically turns the very meaning of the critical word "alone": how can "alone" and "together" coexist? Yet perhaps this is the point, both mythically and psychologically. In the tradition of the Old Testament, only Adam (man) ever existed alone (Moore uses this notion as the basis of her poem "In the Days of Prismatic Color" ), leading to the psychological inevitability of woman never having the opportunity to be "alone by herself": Eve—and thus all women—can only be "alone together," in the presence of at least the knowledge of man's existence. Given the inability of Adam and Eve ever to resolve their separate selves into a unity in the poem, "alone together" is both a description of the condition of being human (and, more specifically, female) and also a comment on the quality of this marriage (and perhaps by extension, the very state of being married).

More often than not Adam speaks in the voice of the rhetor. He advises an unspecified audience on the proper age for marriage; he takes the offensive in the debate, and, perhaps the most maddeningly for Eve, reminds her: "I am yours to command" (Complete Poems 69). The very granting of permission to "command" is itself a paradoxical statement, undermining any conventional sense of power suggested by "command." The distance Moore as narrator maintains from Adam underscores the ambiguity of such a statement: is Adam being purposely perverse, or is he unaware of his own irony?

This is not to suggest that Adam never displays moments of vulnerability or emotion: he does, and, interestingly enough, is most moving and human when at his least articulate. Reminding us of Keats' somewhat different response, Adam is "plagued" and "unnerved" by the nightingale "in the new leaves," evoking the early morning of creation. He is haunted not so much by the song of the bird, but by its "silence": "not its silence, but silences" (Complete Poems 64). This recognition of the variety of silences created by the nightingale seems analogous to Lacan's notion of Woman and the Real, as described by Alice Jardine: "The Real designates that which is categorically unrepresentable, non-human, at the limits of the known; it is emptiness, the scream, the 'zero-point' of death, the proximity of feminine jouissance" (567). The nightingale's song—and, more importantly, its silences, in some ways richer, by their very lack of single, finite meaning (like Isak Dinesen's "The Blank Page" and Tillie Olsen's history of women's Silences)—captivate him beyond his control, and he responds, at his most authentic moment of personal expression, "It clothes me with a shirt of fire" (Complete Poems 65). Moore maintains the neutrality of "it" in referring to the nightingale, but Adam's relationship to the nightingale evokes what Moore sees as the unbridgeable dimension of relations between men and women:

He dares not clap his hands
to make it go on
lest it should fly off;
if he does nothing, it will sleep;
if he cries out, it will not
"understand".
(Complete Poems   65)

Adam's traditional rhetoric fails him: not only is language ineffective to help him achieve his desires, he is unable to use language to establish for himself what those desires would lead to. He does not seem to know what he wants of this nightingale—song or silence, presence or absence, or, in Wallace Stevens' terms, "inflections" or "innuendoes." It is surely not coincidental that, "unnerved by the nightingale / and dazzled by the apple," Adam must next invent ("stumble over") Marriage, as a way of taming the emotions he cannot rein in by language he already possesses.

Although I used the word "schematize" earlier in this essay to describe Moore's presentation of Adam and Eve as verbal performers, it is clear that she does not wish to reduce either figure to a flat representation of "Male" and "Female." Rather, the complexity of their own relationships to language, to themselves, and to each other is the point of Moore's use of such distinctions. That they must resort to the over-formal language of a Restoration comedy or Augustan or Victorian parliamentary debate suggests that language serves both to create unity and maintain distance. Both Adam and Eve prove themselves consummate performers, in both public and private spheres, sometimes to creative effect (for what artist, what human being does not, to some degree, create his or her own "character"?), yet sometimes at the peril of becoming distanced from self, other, and world in the comforting script of the player.

In defining Woman, Adam says, "turn to the letter M / and you will find / that a 'wife is a coffin'…" (Complete Poems 67). Ezra Pound's phrase 'a wife is a coffin' is credited in the poem's notes, thus making Adam history's first intertextualist. A hallmark of Moore's poetry, particularly that of the middle periods, is its proliferation of quoted material. In many poems, Moore quotes a few phrases from sources directly relevant to the poem's subject (for instance, she quotes Sheldon Jackson in "Rigorists" and John Roebling in "Granite and Steel" ). In other poems Moore lifts material out of its original context and uses it to her own purposes. Moore seems to have been searching for just the right combination of words for a given moment or description. It is doubtful that, as some contemporary theorists suggest, to her meaning was so self-reflexive and unstable as to make the original context irrelevant. She was too traditional an ethicist for that. Indeed, the almost painstaking quality of her notes to the poems attests to an authorial sense of obligation to the original sources; she went T. S. Eliot (in The Waste Land) one better by using quotation marks to indicate the words of others: these quotation marks have proven an endless source of discussion for Moore's critics. Are they to be read as indications of spoken dialogue (not always, apparently) or the idiosyncratic formality of a writer who viewed documentation of source material in poetry no differently than she would have in a scholarly article or library catalogue (more the case)?

What results is a sometimes dizzying arachnid stitching, in which the reader must adopt a number of different stances towards the text in order to get as full an experience as possible of a poem by Moore. The information offered by the notes is indispensable: to simply read the "poem" without delving into the accompanying notes is to miss not only half the fun, but also half the dialogue between poet, reader, and language.

This is perhaps nowhere more true than in "Marriage." Moore herself sheds some light on the relevance of the intertextual material in a comment she made in lecturing on the poem, and which became part of her Foreword to A Marianne Moore Reader. Warning readers and audiences against either too autobiographical or polemical an interpretation of the poem, she suggested that "Marriage" was:

no philosophic precipitate; nor does it veil anything personal in the way of triumphs, entrapments, or dangerous colloquies. It is a little anthology of statements that took my fancy—phrasings that I liked.

(Reader, xv)

At the beginning of the notes to "Marriage" in Complete Poems, she calls these intertextualities "Statements that took my fancy which I tried to arrange plausibly" (271). Interestingly, this is the only headnote in the volume offering a critical perspective on a poem or on its source material, as if Moore were once more trying to ensure that readers would not jump to either biographical speculation or ideological explication. While we may not simply accept Moore's statement of intention as a satisfactory account of the developing sense of dialogue of the sexes that emerges from the poem, her comment does help focus our attention less on decoding a predictable strategy for her intertextual choices, and more on the variety of effects created by some of the juxtapositions.

Most interestingly, Moore does not work towards any kind of one-to-one correspondence between gender of dramatic speaker (i.e., Adam and Eve) and that of the original writer or speaker quoted. For example, one of Adam's most insulting remarks, referring to Eve's "shaving-brush" hair, is from a parody of Pope's Rape of the Lock, written by Mary Frances Nearing "with suggestions by M. Moore" (272). In terms of gender, Moore has here created a twice-turning set of ironies: Adam's words were originally written by two women; the two women were writing a parody of a mock-epic, itself something of a parody of relations between the sexes, glorifying woman in a most ambivalent way. Is Moore's Eve a cousin to (ancestor to? descendent of?) Pope's Belinda?

Another quotation that seems to comment on the gender themes of the poem occurs in the quoted passage above in which Adam admits impotence in the presence of the nightingale. The immediate source for the nightingale reference is a poem by Hagop Boghossian, including the words, "It clothes me with a shirt of fire." The lines that follow, which describe in third person Adam's inability to take action, are credited (at least in part) to Edward Thomas, specifically to his 1910 book of criticism, Feminine Influence on the Poets (271): again, careful not to attribute definite intention here, we can enjoy the irony in the title of the book that provided the poem with its description of male fascination with, perhaps even fear of, the natural singer. Is this sense of discomfort and doubt, yearning and fear, the "feminine influence on the poets"?

It would be valuable to explore each one of the relationships between "Marriage" and the other texts cited in Moore's notes; it is certainly worth noting some of the other sources alluded to. The text Moore quotes most frequently is Richard Baxter's The Saints' Everlasting Rest, a Puritan religious tract, and a favorite of Moore's. The sentences and phrases taken from Baxter seem selected less for their theological content than for their stylistic balance: both Adam and Eve speak some of Baxter's words, so it is unlikely that Moore was attempting consistency of gender and voice in this instance. Other sources underscore Moore's Bryn Mawr education, both in the number of quotations taken from eighteenth-and nineteenth-century prose works and writers (such as Trollope, Godwin, Charles Reade, and Edmund Burke), as well as a passage highly critical of men's authority over women, placed in Eve's voice and attributed by Moore to "Miss M. Carey Thomas," the legendary president of Bryn Mawr during Moore's years as an undergraduate there. A few quotations come from French texts, including one from La Fontaine, prefiguring Moore's later association with that writer (though the specific lines used in "Marriage" are not Moore's translation, as she did not begin that work for another two decades). Still other sources include the Bible and Shakespeare, though fewer from these sacred and secular scriptures than might have been expected, and from contemporary journals and advertisements. All in all, the notes suggest a writer who was quite a wide reader herself—for whom every text, as contemporary theory suggests, was an "inter-text," bridging various aspects of her intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic education and experience. This, itself, is a feminist testimony to the ability of the woman writer to integrate any number of traditions of the mind into her work, not limiting herself to "women's words" (not as in contemporary theories of language, but as stereotypically conceived in that period).

Moore's approach to intertextuality has a number of implications for this poem and, perhaps, for women's writing in general. First, her eclecticism and her seemingly random use of sources are designed not for strictly monistic ideological ends, but for the most appropriate stylistic effect, and for the creative playfulness of the act of weaving such a web of language: by spinning her thread in the pattern of the story of Adam and Eve, Moore allows herself to place the words in the voices of recognizable and somewhat archetypal figures; at the same time, her extensive use of the words of others and the accompanying notes also allows her to achieve a more resonantly polyphonic series of effects. Surely there is meaning in this "Marriage," but it is neither singular nor simple.

The eclecticism of texts used in the poem also distinguishes Moore from some traditional conceptions of intertextuality, particularly Harold Bloom's, whose "influence" roughly corresponds to the more deconstructive "intertextuality."³ Bloom's celebrated "anxiety of influence" focuses on "literary paternity" (to use Gubar and Gilbert's phrase), with a high degree of Freudian oedipalism. Moore's intertextuality does not seem founded in any of the typical set of anxieties Bloom identifies in the post-Miltonic poets. Rather, Moore embraces language itself and the various galaxies of discourse she encounters in her reading and living. Moore's poetry seems fairly free of any feminine equivalent of Bloom's male-centered anxiety for women writers: there is a generosity and gratitude in her celebration of voices—her own and others (both female and male)—woven into this poem. The poem is critical of "Marriage," the "institution," the "enterprise," but it is supportive of the people who continue to try to make it work. The last image, derived from a statue of Daniel Webster in Central Park, captures Moore's own sense of affirming ambivalence:

'Liberty and union
now and forever';

the Book on the writing-table;
the hand in the breast-pocket.
(Complete Poems   70)

Thus, "Marriage" ends with both of the major traditions of communication, held in an eternal frieze, like the ever-pursuing lovers on the Grecian urn: the Book, the Biblical Word, for Moore the central written text from which all others derive, and the "hand in the breast-pocket," the speaker arguing with eloquence and integrity. A particularly masculine image, this is also an image of marriage: a marriage of writing and speech, of creative inspiration and logical rhetoric. It is the integration of these two traditions of verbal performance which Moore celebrates and criticizes in "Marriage" ; it is also these two traditions in which Moore herself participates in the poem and participated in throughout her career. As a final note, it is interesting to observe that Moore frequently performed "Marriage" at her public readings. In the leather-bound notebook in which she kept notes and outlines for public performances, Marianne Moore wrote next to the title "Marriage," the phrase, "(but not all of it)." Though the natural interpretation of this statement is that the poem was too long to be spoken in its entirety as part of an evening's program, it is also a statement of limitations: "Marriage" is about that institution, and also, on some less direct levels, about other kinds of marriages (textual and linguistic, to name only two), but, as Moore said, it is "not all of it": perhaps that is why Moore could write about it with such eloquence, fascination, and passionate questioning.

Notes

1. For one interesting account of the possible origins of "Marriage," see Laurence Stapleton, Marianne Moore: The Poet's Advance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
2. Bakhtin's theories of dialogism and particularly the relationship between characters and ideologies are found in a number of his works, perhaps most notably in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) and Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
3. I am using "intertextuality" in the relatively broad sense of the ways in which a text interacts with another text or set of texts, not in the more specialized usages of either Barthes or Derrida, two of the term's principal champions. I prefer it to "influence," which carries associations of a pervading impact of one or a number of authors or texts on a writer: as I argue, Moore seems less "influenced," in the current usage of that word in literary theory, than to have been delighted or moved by a turn of phrase or a writer's style, and to have picked up the language of the original source. "Allusion," another feasible term, suggests that the reader might be expected to bring a wider knowledge of the work quoted than I believe either Moore or her poem intend. "Intertextuality" retains the sense of openness of relationship between writer, text, and "intertexts" that characterizes Moore's use in "Marriage" and elsewhere of the words of others.

Works Cited

Bishop, Elizabeth. "Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore." The Collected Prose. Ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984.

Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Jardine, Alice. "Gynesis." Critical Theory Since 1965. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986.

Moore, Marianne. The Complete Poems. New York: Macmillan/Viking, 1980.

——. A Marianne Moore Reader. New York: Viking, 1961.

——. Notes for Readings & Lectures. Marianne Moore Collection. Rosenbach Museum & Library.