Abstract
Through participation in a 1914–1915 Bible class taught by the Rev. E.H. Kellogg, Moore discovered new facets of her own poetic calling. In this essay Leader reveals how Moore was profoundly influenced by a group of Reformed moderates, including P.T. Forsyth, who came to be known as “believing critics.” Moore’s subsequent development of the in-between spaces of her poetry, the “part terrestrial and part celestial” overlay between the material, the ethical and the aesthetic realms that is characteristic of much of her verse, is linked to her embrace of the believing critics’ hermeneutical practices. Leader examines Moore’s development of her own poetic hermeneutics via her notebooks, marginalia, early prose, and her poems “Novices,” “In the Days of Prismatic Color,” and “The Hero.”
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Works Cited
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Leader, J.L. (2018). “The Teacher Was Speaking of Unrhymed Verse”: Marianne Moore, E. H. Kellogg, and the Poetry of Modernist Hermeneutics. In: Gregory, E., Hubbard, S. (eds) Twenty-First Century Marianne Moore. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65109-5_7
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