Marianne Moore and the Eyewitness Bind

As an American woman and a civilian, Marianne Moore was at two degrees of remove from the events of World War II and would seem to have had little footing from which to write about war. The issue of gender intensifies the exclusions of an epistemic framework in which physical experience of combat is understood as the ultimate warrant for knowledge of war. This chapter argues that receiving mediated information ultimately proved generative for Moore, fueling her 1930s and 1940s poetics of self-deprecation, understatement, and self-distrust. Her World War II–era poems spotlight civilian literary and moral authority precisely as a way to convey the difficulty of writing based on news of war. Uncovering Moore’s interest in the material supports of war information shows that she was far more self-conscious about her own subject position than she is conventionally held to have been.