[MUSIC] Other writers associated with the New York circle around Alfred Kreymborg's magazine Others, which ran from 1915 to 1919 included William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. The group was co-founded by Kreymborg and the famous modernist sometimes surrealist photographer Man Ray, and would include multimedia artist Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp's painting Nude Descending a Staircase was probably the signal painting in the armory exhibit. Marianne Moore's first poems had very conventional stanzaic forms, but she soon returned to the same poems introducing prototypically modernist indentation and dislocation. The Fish was first published in a fixed four line stanza format in The Egoist in 1918, the same year Moore moved to New York. But when she published the poem and others the following years, its lines ebbed and flowed in a much more radical use of the page and then we'll show you both. Still Moore fundamental to her poetics, however was her disjunctive use of quotation and popular textual resources. She read popular magazines. She read tourist brochures. She read as widely as one could and borrowed things from all those kinds of documents, and worked them into her poetry. It's interesting, because the poet who's most famous for use of quotation in modern American poetry is T.S. Eliot and Moore's quotations are just as elaborate, but to very different purposes. Eliot tended to quote classic works of literature. Moore looks everywhere in ordinary culture. So Elliot's quotations his illusions have a kind of magisterial quality reaching out to high culture. Marianne Moore aim for something more complex and I think more subversive. She recreated the broad cultural construction of knowledge and understanding by showing us how basic ideas are reflected widely in a culture and how all those cultural references help shape what we know and what we think. At their most ambitious, her poems sort of braid multiple sources of social and philosophical investigation. All the while reaching out to popular text, much more readily than major artistic achievements. Two of her long poems, Marriage from 1923 and then Octopus from 1924 are perhaps her inter-textural triumphs. Her greatest poems that are tapestry of quotation and reference. Marriage functions in a dual way, because of that. First of all, she wants to demolish in an even handed way, the illusion that either party to a marriage can divest himself or herself of self-absorption and self-interest, so as to make a perfect union possible. So her picture of how people relate to one another is that, it's very much influenced by their own narrow self-interests. Quote, he loves himself so much, she writes. He can permit himself no rival in that love, but the poem is much more than an analysis of the pitfalls in gender relations. It actually moves centripetally and centrifugally at the same time. Treating marriage not just as a site in which individuals and the culture as a whole act out their contradictory investments, independence, and community But also as a kind of figural resource that informs all compromised institutions in the culture. Thus, the poem is at once about the marriage two people can make and also the marriage that all of the states form to create one country, quote liberty and union now and forever. Both require quote public promises of one's intention to fulfill a private obligation and both can never be more than an interesting impossibility. Marriage is an institution constructed by contractual idealization and a model for comparably problematic institutions of other sorts. Marriage in the poem is thus effectively both a victim of illusions within the culture and a purveyor of those illusions, something that spreads the illusions worldwide. So it's about marriage between people and it's about a marriage that the states make to create a country, and it's about those two things at the same time.
