"The web of friendship": Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens.

Abstract

Current reappraisals of Modernist literature rarely associate the names Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. Yet, Moore and Stevens had a long-lived literary relationship, a well documented give and take that lasted over thirty years. Tracing the poetic and personal interaction between Stevens and Moore, my study revises accepted views of Modernist literary history and challenges accepted paradigms of poetic influence. Over the course of their professional lives, Moore and Stevens significantly affected each other's literary production. They reviewed each other's books, studied each other's poetry, offered advice about each other's projects, and helped each other in the practical business of publishing poems. Marianne Moore acknowledged Wallace Stevens's work as an important source of poetic inspiration, citing both a personal and poetic affinity that she did not claim with any other Modernist poet. Stevens was in turn convinced of Moore's importance and directly influenced by her work. Using a host of published and unpublished archival sources--letters, marginalia, manuscripts--my study of the Moore/Stevens relationship reveals the surprising extent to which Stevens and Moore were involved in each other's poetic development and highlights Moore's role as an editor and codifier of Modernist poetic practice. As well as centering Moore in the Modernist canon, Moore's mutually supportive relationship with Stevens raises interesting challenges to accepted views of poetic influence based on male-male conflict, as in Harold Bloom's Oedipal model and male-female conflict, as in Gilbert and Gubar's extension of the Bloomian model to include the female poet's struggle against male hegemony. Moore's relationship with Stevens clearly constitutes a third kind of poetic influence--a supportive model of cross-gender cooperation that challenges both Bloom's and Gilbert and Gubar's antagonistic models of rejection. Moore's dialogue with Stevens offer a fresh picture of cross-gender poetic influence that questions the gender-essentialist tendencies of the paradigms that loom large in our current critical apparatus.