Marianne Moore was one of the most famous poets of the modernist era, appreciated in both social and literary spheres, yet differed from other poets of her time because of how her language was condensed and precise, capable of suggesting a variety of ideas. Her ability to combine multiple associations into a single, compact image allows her characters to be conveyed intricately, as seen in her poems “Radical,” “Poetry,” “Silence,” and “The Fish.” Within the poems I have chosen to analyze, through the use of her imagery and syntax, Moore demonstrates the challenges humans have to comprehend emotions and detect truth while encouraging her readers to uncover the underlying, principle meaning beneath everything. Imagism was a movement popular
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Moore is suggesting that in order for poetry to be good, each details must be functional to what is being said. She was a critic of poetry herself and believed that humans could not decipher the difference between good and bad poetry. This example supports my assertion that although Moore portrayed humans as incoherent to comprehension, she is establishing advice within her own views of poetry. Another one of her poems “The Fish” is written in a syllabic verse with eight five-line stanzas with the syllabic pattern of 1, 3, 9, 6, 8. This organization supports the poems visual shape of the sea it describes. With this form of syntax, the movement of the poem is emphasized as “one keeps/ adjusting the ash …show more content…
Nature is very evident within Moore’s poems as she frequently uses animals as a connection to humans thoughts and actions. In “Silence” an illustration of a cat and mouse introduce a new idea to benefit human experiences. We are given the image of “the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth” to demonstrate restraint (7). The father is telling the child that sometimes silence is the key to understanding the world around him/her. Listening rather than overtaking the situation through speaking can give us better insight and knowledge. Moore believed that humans live in danger and by our inability to comprehend what is best for us we cannot express what we actually believe. But in response to this “We all have to choose whatever subject-matter allows us to the most powerful and most secret release; and that is a personal affair” where a minor subject could quite possibly show the highest extent of our emotions (Eliot 336). Further extending the effect of Moore’s imagery, in “Poetry” the animals are portrayed as acting in an incoherent way to represent humans trying to accurately figure out what we feel. The way we look trying to figure out things happening around us is shown through “elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a/roll” (23-24). These lines offer the creatures to be examples of the
Moore is suggesting that in order for poetry to be good, each details must be functional to what is being said. She was a critic of poetry herself and believed that humans could not decipher the difference between good and bad poetry. This example supports my assertion that although Moore portrayed humans as incoherent to comprehension, she is establishing advice within her own views of poetry. Another one of her poems “The Fish” is written in a syllabic verse with eight five-line stanzas with the syllabic pattern of 1, 3, 9, 6, 8. This organization supports the poems visual shape of the sea it describes. With this form of syntax, the movement of the poem is emphasized as “one keeps/ adjusting the ash …show more content…
Nature is very evident within Moore’s poems as she frequently uses animals as a connection to humans thoughts and actions. In “Silence” an illustration of a cat and mouse introduce a new idea to benefit human experiences. We are given the image of “the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth” to demonstrate restraint (7). The father is telling the child that sometimes silence is the key to understanding the world around him/her. Listening rather than overtaking the situation through speaking can give us better insight and knowledge. Moore believed that humans live in danger and by our inability to comprehend what is best for us we cannot express what we actually believe. But in response to this “We all have to choose whatever subject-matter allows us to the most powerful and most secret release; and that is a personal affair” where a minor subject could quite possibly show the highest extent of our emotions (Eliot 336). Further extending the effect of Moore’s imagery, in “Poetry” the animals are portrayed as acting in an incoherent way to represent humans trying to accurately figure out what we feel. The way we look trying to figure out things happening around us is shown through “elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a/roll” (23-24). These lines offer the creatures to be examples of the