Marianne Moore Marriage

In the paradoxical world of the modern, rejection of traditional poetry allows for new contrasting and often conflicting ideas to come together into one. The poetry of Marianne Moore in particular is full of contradictions; she examines average subjects in hyper-detail and employs both precision and an overabundance of metaphor and anecdote in order to develop her own personal style. Her poem “Marriage” is a fragmented piece that tackles the inherently contradictory “institution” of marriage. This caustic poem nearly totals 300 lines, and raises some questions about the changing attitudes towards gender and tradition during the modern era. Cristanne Miller’s “Gender, Sexuality, and the Modernist Poet” notes that during this time female poets, like Moore, were associating broken traditions (like marriage) with the masculine and patriarchal. In contrast, male poets assigned tradition a shrewd, feminine voice. Her essay examines the division between “masculine” and “feminine” poetry during the modern era and the differences between them. Moore establishes contradiction in “Marriage” through the close examination of marriage as a subject, and these contradictions both debate the existence of and mimic society’s growing aversion towards tradition.
The speaker of the poem paints marriage as a broken system rooted in an attempt to preserve a harmonious and somewhat heavenly union between man and woman. Moore calls marriage an “enterprise” in which people are assured that they do not need …show more content…
Throughout the poem, Eve’s time in Eden seems to be romanticized while simultaneously her part at the center of the Fall of her and Adam is held in contempt. Moore sets up contrasting emotions between Eve’s love and appreciation for Eden’s beauty against the temptation and “poison” of the fruit of