ABSTRACT
This chapter refers to the poetry Marianne Moore published between 1915 and 1918 not only to signal a particular stage in Moore's own development as a poet but also to relate these poems to the material circumstances of their production and consumption. The distrust of the concept of a unified and coherent identity becomes most evident in Moore's portrait poems. It is in these poems, where Moore is either addressing another writer or where she is dissecting the subject in language, that the discursive mechanisms of identity are disassembled. Moore's mechanized lyric voice is troublingly ambiguous suspended as it is between the subjective and the objective, the human and the non-human. She stages a hesitancy, a moment of undecidability that signals both a modernist desire to deconstruct the sovereign subject together with a feminist recognition that such dissection methods may well be premature and destructive.
