ABSTRACT
This chapter situates Moore’s presentation of animals in her long poem “An Octopus” within the context of Mt. Rainier National Park to demonstrate how Moore constructs a commodifying human gaze that falls upon consistently illusive animal bodies, an act of frustrated viewing fostered by the rhetoric of park guides. Through a combination of animal studies and textual analysis, this chapter links frustrated acts of animal tourism in the public green of this simulated wilderness designed for city-dwellers with a modernist poetics of non-mastery, where speaker and reader must abandon attempts to master the creatures in the poem and the creature of the poem.
