Arts and Grafts: Marianne Moore’s Poetry and the Culture of Exception

Abstract

Moore is certainly best known for her oddly meticulous plant and animal descriptions, which the phrase “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” has sometimes come to synthesize. This article reexamines some of these peculiar specimens in light of the tensions they engage between exceptionality and representativeness. Relying on processes of selection and inclusion, the poetics of grafting at work in her botanical pieces seem to entail the assimilation of heterogenous elements—whether vegetable or literary scions—into one organism and single habitat, which could thereby be made to represent the space for a democracy of species and voices. But while Moore’s integration of diversity does evince a growing participation in the arena of public discourse, her idiosyncratic writing also resists synthesis and keeps cultivating exception. More than the specimens of a common species, her hybrid creatures are staged as composite singular cases, whose poetic and political mode of existence is that of the “melee” rather than the “melange” (Nancy).

Keywords

• Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
• exception
• poetry
• poetics
• grafting
• quotation