A Variety of Hero: Marianne Moore’s Romance

The idea of romance, as exemplified by the Provencal troubadours’ gai savoir, is of central importance to Marianne Moore’s poetry of the 1930s. The code of chivalry is a recurring figure in Moore’s work for the potential of language to realize self-transforming experience. The apotheosis of Moore’s engagement with this code occurs in the largely unknown 1932 version of “The Student,” and in 1950’s “Armour’s Undermining Modesty,” which is the direct successor to “The Student’s” meditation on the language of chivalry. Those poems trace the arc of Moore’s interest in romance, beginning with its Provencal inspiration and extending to its latter-day versions in Emerson and Henry James.