Marianne Moore and Ac-/cident

Abstract

Moore’s use of precision is complicated by her religious outlook. On the one hand, her poetry shows she has a sharp eye for precise detail in the natural world. On the other hand, her precision often leaves readers puzzled by the presence in her poems of ambiguity, paradox, and mystery. A useful way of approaching Moore is to invoke the Aristotelian distinction between substance (the essential being of an object) and accident (the inessential features). Moore’s poems celebrate the human ability to perceive the substance beneath the accidental qualities, while at the same time cautioning that we live in a fallen world where human perceptions are flawed. Unalloyed precision can exist only on a supernatural plane.