Marianne Moore and the Environmental "Octopus" of Modernist Collage

Abstract: While critics have praised Marianne Moore's "An Octopus" for its scientific precision, ecocritics have been troubled by the environmental obfuscation of modernist collage. Moore's appropriation of language from the National Park Service, mountaineering guides, as well as popular scientific articles not only critiques the commodification of nature as an aesthetic, scientific, and bureaucratic commodity in the early twentieth century—but also reflects what Donna Haraway calls "tentacular thinking" of ecological assemblages that cut across the nature-culture divide. Moore's collage technique thus historicizes and prefigures contemporary ecocritical discourse by offering a "tentacular" approach to ecopoetics that records and complicates the many discourses that impinged upon nature during the period of high modernism. What ultimately emerges in "An Octopus" is a post-anthropocentric construction of nature.