Marianne Moore's "Imperious Ox, Imperial Dish" and the poetry of the natural world

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1998 by Robin G. Schulze

While critics of both these camps have offered astute insights into Moore's animal poems, still a third group of scholars have pointed to the limits of the dominant paradigms. The sticking point for most dissenters is Moore's eye for complex natural detail. Moore's poems inevitably include well-informed discussions of the bodies and behaviors of the various critters she examines. If Moore is principally interested in fashioning her animals and plants into personal masks or religious emblems, then why, these critics wonder, does she introduce seemingly unrelated particulars of the biota she examines into the equation? Both Margaret Holley and Bonnie Costello, for example, agree that Moore's animals serve a symbolic function, but they also acknowledge that, somehow or other, Moore's animals remain animals.(4) Moore's well-informed discussions of the bodies and behaviors of various critters never quite resolve into simple religious emblem or autobiography.

To borrow a cliche from the animal kingdom, it seems to me that critics have been barking up the wrong trees. In their efforts to cast Moore as an impersonal modernist poet of masks, a feminist poet principally intent on writing (in however repressed a fashion) a poetry of women's experience, or a Puritan poet of moral emblems, critics have rarely stopped to consider what Moore's animal poems have to say about the relationship between humankind and the natural world. It may seem odd to suggest that Moore, a confirmed New York City dweller most of her adult life, should be considered a nature poet. Yet, much of Moore's verse (like her prose comments on the Komodo dragons) ruminates on the intersection between nature and culture, on the issue of human use and misuse of the natural world and the cost, to nature, of human ignorance and arrogance. Trained in the biological sciences and a passionate student of a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century naturalists, Moore spent much of her career pondering her relation to nature and the proper way to view and render the earth's creatures. She studied John J. Audubon's birds, Jean Henri Fabre's insects, Ronald Lyddeker's mammals, and Alphonse De Candolle's plants. She read works by the popular nature writers John Burroughs, Raymond L. Ditmars, W. H. Hudson, and Ernest Thompson Seton, and copied passages from the books of conservationist John Muir. She clipped pictures from National Geographic Magazine and Natural History and scrupulously studied articles written by naturalists J. Arthur Thomson and W. P. Pycraft that appeared in the science pages of the Illustrated London News. She read pieces about the instruction and social application of evolutionary biology by Henry Fairfield Osborn, J. B. S. Haldane, Edward Murray East, Leonard Darwin, and Havelock Ellis. She frequently graced the halls of the American Museum of Natural History and the grounds of the Bronx, Prospect Park, and Central Park zoos. She admired and pored over the scientific descriptions and evolutionary theories of the world's most famous "monkey puzzler," Charles Darwin.