The “Concentric Crushing Rigor” of the Mountain: The Destabilization of the Human Poetic Voice in Marianne Moore’s "An Octopus"

University Hall, Rm 134

This paper is an exploration of the ecopoetics of Marianne Moore’s “An Octopus,” beginning from a question of the poet’s historical position following the often egocentric environmentalism of the Romantic tradition and within the Modernist conversation uniquely concerned with the symbolic significance of the environment. Because Ecocriticism is a relatively underdeveloped branch of literary criticism, the extent to which the environmental aspects of Moore’s poetry have been explored is generally limited to either an analysis of her poetics or to a preoccupation with her historical context. This essay purposes to be a bridge connecting Moore’s place within literary history, as it pertains to her environmental perspective, to the scholarship concerned with her manipulation of form towards the end of ecological perceptivity. “An Octopus” is primarily a poem of destabilization. Moore subverts Romantic and Modernist Anthropocene through her moments of incoherent and untrustworthy human voice and her treatment of historic and environmental allusions and themes. Moore’s poetic techniques, particularly her use of collage, serve to disorient the reader, their effect being that “An Octopus,” as a whole, lacks any one poetic voice, perspective, or resolution. Where a reader may search for narrative touchstones, they are conspicuously missing. By compounding poetic technique on detailed description, deriving her metaphorical elements almost exclusively from nature, Moore succeeds in creating a phonetically beautiful and descriptively detailed, nevertheless value-neutral description of Mount Rainier. In doing so she disrupts a hierarchy in which human means of making sense of the world are privileged.