« The raw material of poetry » : Marianne Moore à l'examen de la vérité

Résumé 0

“True,” “precise,” “exact,” “genuine,” “original,” “raw” or “natural”—the words which qualify Marianne Moore’s work are recurrent as well as ambiguous. It would seem that her epistemological quest keeps wavering between two poles: Is truth to be seized in the object under study or in the way conscience(s) perceive(s) the world? Indeed the precision of the scientific method—whose purpose it is to observe, collect, describe, classify—often conceals, behind multiplying details and quotations, the essayist’s voice confronting various perspectives. Between the accuracy of sight and the authenticity of the voice, objective “observation” and subjective conversation, Marianne Moore’s poems are all the more impossible to classify as she herself refused to attribute them to a specific genre. And her texts are endlessly remodeled, expanded or condensed, as Moore’s truth searches for its true form, between prose and prosody.