ABSTRACT
The early poems published between 1915 and 1918 were poems concerned primarily with the shape and contours of the new poetic language Marianne Moore was trying to produce. This was Moore's "Age of Hard Trying" in which the poem became a formal means of responding to the creative and destructive aspects of modernity. Marianne Moore arriving in Greenwich Village in 1918 responded to what Walter Benjamin referred to as the "phantasmagoria" of city life. Thus the objects, places and artefacts Moore observes in her poetry are displayed using similar strategies to those being developed by commercial artists, museum curators, fashion designers and advertisers. Moore's birds, beasts, flora and fauna, her art objects and artefacts are cited from a variety of textual sources. The speaker's preference for pictures inspired by "spiritual forces" intersects with contemporary modernist debates relating to aesthetic theory. Both Roger Fry and Alfred Stieglitz attempt to describe art in terms of the spirit or inner life.
