The Poet’s Room as Archive

In 1972, the Rosenbach Museum & Library opened “The Marianne Moore Room.” Featuring items the poet bequeathed to the institution prior to her death, the room preserves Moore’s Greenwich Village apartment to offer “a remarkably close recreation of the poet’s environment” (“The Moore Collection”). Indeed, Elizabeth Bishop found it an eerily accurate representation of the room she had often visited. Taking seriously the uncanny effects of the poet’s preserved living space, this chapter explores the value of this room by considering its placement alongside the poet’s literary papers—which Moore had sold to the Rosenbach in 1968. After tracing the history of Moore’s self-archiving, the essay puts forward that the Moore Room constitutes its own sort of archive—one that fulfills the expansive archival promise that Moore outlined in her poetry. Yet in comparing the Moore Room to other preserved author’s studies, the essay also shows how the miscellany of such domestic spaces complicates the carefully curated totality upon which the archive is premised. In the end, the chapter seeks to mediate this tension by using the Moore Room to advance the concept of the para-archive, an adjacent archival space from which the institutional archive can be critiqued.