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136 Chapter 4 tain that Moore’s poetics of excision, which is always present in her thinking from her earliest poems, becomes central to her work and thinking in the early 1950s and through the end of her life. I offer an alternative,though complementary,explanation for Moore’s epigraph and aesthetic philosophy. Moore’s intellectual and practical thoughts about collections in museums and libraries were clearly equally strong forces, driving her thinking about the process of revising earlier work. In Collected Poems the idea of “collection” is foregrounded not only in the title but in the fact that the recent death of her mother (while the event might have made Moore cling to the ideals of compression and concision that her mother advocated ,as Kappel and Schulze suggest) also certainly caused her to reflect on the practical aspects of death that directly involve issues of collection. What does one keep and what does one throw away when someone dies? The idea behind a collection,which had always been both an intellectual and aesthetic issue for Moore, became during this period a very personal and practical one as well. In 1965, during the period between Collected Poems and Complete Poems, Moore also finally moved out of her longtime residence in Brooklyn to a new apartment in Manhattan. At the same time, Moore was courted by various university libraries before finally selling her archive in 1968 to the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia.58 This significant period helps to characterize her inclusion of the epigraph “omissions are not accidents” in Complete Poems quite differently than the statement has generally been read. In viewing Moore’s revisions in Complete Poems, critics have leapt on the word omission as the important term of her final epigraph. Although her revision practice clearly had a great deal to do with the term omissions, as Kappel and Schulze have discussed, her thinking about collections, acquisition, and the organization of ideas and things suggests that the term accidents was equally, if not more, important to her intellectual and aesthetic principles.59 The idea of a collection coming together through a series of “accidents” was one that Moore was already flirting with early in her career when she wondered whether miscellany might be the most apt term to describe an ideal collection. In pointing to her future archive in Complete Poems, Moore’s focus on “accidents” suggests the incompleteness and unexpectedness of even an archive—undercutting and ironizing that title for her final edition of her poems. The term accidents connects her early work with her final archive in other ways as well. In a 1929 interview she admitted disliking “acquisitiveness.”60 In a Women’s Wear Daily 1965 article, “Dress and Kindred Subjects,” however , she finds a way to resolve this crisis when she writes that “I am not a collector, merely a fortuitous one.” The idea of “accidents” is here connected Marianne Moore’s Native Habitat 137 to her denial of her role as a collector, a comment that she feels is true since most of the objects that she has amassed are not the result of purchase but of accident—gifts from friends,hand-me-down clothes,things she has made and not purchased. Through the term accidents Moore is able to supply herself with a term that suggests that her life as a collector is not in conflict with her moral principles concerning acquisition,a tension that she had always felt anxious about. Complete Poems points both forward to the creation of her archive at the Rosenbach Museum and Library and backward to her early work in museums and libraries in order to understand Moore’s aesthetic philosophy at this point in her career. Kappel sees Complete Poems as ending Moore’s career very much as Eliot wanted her to end it, and he reads Eliot’s gesture (in rearranging Moore’s poems so that “Silence” is the last poem in the 1935 Selected Poems) as having reshaped Moore’s thinking about the meaning of her poetic output, emphasizing concision and compression as premier modernist terms: “[Eliot] makes the silence that follows the last poem speak feelingly. It was a brilliant editorial gesture that Moore was never to forget. She was to repeat it on her own, as we shall see, to an even greater moment at the end of her career, when of course silence would perforce be more resounding.”61 By focusing on the word omissions in the epigraph, Kappel sees...

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