Introduction

This chapter examines the poetry of Marianne Moore as it is shaped by and responsive to the experience of being a modern woman, of living in the aftermath of the First World War, of being interpellated as a modern consumer and writing in the age of mechanical reproduction. Moore's textual collages and syllabic sculptures are based on the cultural clutter or debris of modernity, on textual extracts and reproductions, on the phantasmagoria of city life revealing something modernism worked hard to conceal; its relation to modernity, more specifically its relation to the new emerging and expanding mass consumer culture. The chapter aims to contribute the understanding of the cultural history of modernity; a history that has been all too often represented and theorised in predominantly masculinist terms. In Questions of Authority Christanne Miller explains the doubleness of Moore's poetic practice.