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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.
Keywords: Marianne Moore / "An Octopus" / modernist collage / National Park Service / ecocriticism
INTRODUCTION
hen one thinks of poems about mountain peaks and high alpine landscapes, one probably would not include Marianne Moore's "An Octopus" next to Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mont Blanc" or the work of Gary Snyder. And for good reason. "An Octopus" is a challenging modernist long poem that seems to resemble T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in its fragmented and seemingly psychological emphasis-particularly the inclusion of its less-than-helpful endnotes.? Eliot's 7he Waste Land was published in the October 1922 issue of The Dial and set the standard for high modernist aesthetics, while "An Octopus" was published in the later 1924 issue of The Dial to mixed reviews. The former evoked the alienation of modernity through an erasure of nature's regenerative qualities (beginning The Waste Land with the now infamous lines "April is the cruelest month"); the latter conjured an earthly and seemingly ecological modernity through the lively nonhuman environment of Mount Rainier National Park.
"An Octopus" does not present the environment in Romantic purple language, either. The poem has a botanist's eye for the park's vegetal life and a biologist's precision for identifying its alpine fauna. In Eliot's introduction to the 1934 edition of Mooress collection Observations, which included "An Octopus," he praises Moore's "gift for detailed observation, for finding the exact words for some experience of the eye" and compares her poetry to "a high-powered microscope" (Eliot x). William Carlos Williams also championed Moore's Observations, like...