Picking and Choosing: Marianne Moore Among the Agonists

This essay locates Marianne Moore in relation to the spirit of critical agonism propagated by male modernist poet-critics like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams. Whereas these modernists openly celebrated the value of critique, Moore was much more comfortable with a nineteenth-century critical ethic founded on connoisseurship. Moore's ambivalence about direct confrontation and aggressive attack contributed to a trademark indirection in her critical and poetic styles that nonetheless reserves the capacity for expressing negative judgment. These tensions are finally resolved by Moore's embrace of the culture of connoisseurship over that of critical argument by becoming editor of The Dial.