“The First Grace of Style”: Marianne Moore and the Writing of Dancing

Abstract

Comments about Moore’s poetry have often equated it with, at best, a “dance of the intellect among words” (Pound), at worst, uneasy mental contortions. This essay aims at qualifying the critical emphasis on Moore’s “cerebral” poetry, through dancing. Although her fascination with animals’ physical features and her fetishist fragmentation of the human body have been recognized, more direct corporeal manifestations have received little attention. Yet dancing offered her writing a fertile challenge, as her later works particularly suggest. The performances she transcribed into text not only crystallize the subtle negotiations between tradition and modernity but also the poetic tensions between direct experience and mediated forms, the transient and the durable, the dynamic and the static, gesturing towards new manners of reading her verse.