Acts of Containment: Marianne Moore,

Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure

Jennie-Rebecca Falcetta
University of Connecticut

S
urveying the poetics of Pound, Williams, and other modernists of the
lyric in a 1996 interview, poet Donald Revell observed, “Marianne Moore,
like Joseph Cornell, has this trouvere mentality that is wonderful. But
then they put it into boxes. They somehow panic at the critical moment and
seek to contain. Marianne Moore containing it through her numbers, counting
syllables; Cornell literally containing it in boxes” (Marshall 31). Working in
different disciplines and mediums, Cornell and Moore nonetheless deployed
a similar aesthetic, one based on enclosure and containment. To construct
the boxes for which he is best known, Cornell selected, arranged, and sealed
behind glass relics of childhood, the ballet, nature, and the cinema, all accord-
ing to a private and particular symbology. Moore parallels Cornell’s acts of
assembling and preserving objects of diverse origin through her unique poetic
practices: borrowing phrases from many sources, verbally cataloguing collec-
tions of objects or animals, and confining it all through syllabification inside
the “box” of the stanza.
Revell offers an astute comparison of the similar “boxing” enacted by
Moore and Cornell. However, his words suggest that their common practice
of containment undercuts the spontaneous “found” quality of their work and
stems from a misguided impulse to exert a rigid control over their material. On
the contrary, the modes of selecting and arranging practiced in their art result
in eloquent examples of the collection, which Susan Stewart calls “a hermetic
world [. . .] a world which is both full and singular, which has banished repeti-
tion and achieved authority” (152). Thus, a piece like Cornell’s 1943 Museum, a
hinged box containing fifteen sealed bottles, each filled with a different object,
becomes a world unto itself — one which can be closed and hidden away, but
Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure 125

one which also invites interaction and inspection, as the bottles can (theoreti-
cally) be removed and their contents examined. However, the type of museum
Cornell intended is not indicated by the title, and the contents of the bottles lie
hidden below the visible layer of the box-lining. What the bottles hold is not as
important as the fact that their contents have been deemed worthy of preserva-
tion and enclosure. The possibility of a personalized museum, a set of objects
gathered according to one’s own sense of their value — expressive, monetary,
moral, or otherwise — is Cornell’s subject here. Similarly, what I call Moore’s
“catalogue poems” — that is, poems like “Those Various Scalpels,” “Virginia
Britannia,” or “People’s Surroundings” — inventory sets of objects, varieties of
species, or types of people according to the poet’s own system of classification
as a way of metaphorically evoking a larger field of possibility. In this category
of Moore’s poetry I locate the deepest affinities between her mode of amassing,
arranging, and containing and Cornell’s.
What is not always acknowledged or even understood is that the work of
both Moore and Cornell results from specific a priori ideas of moral fitness held
by their creators. Both Moore and Cornell worked out their unusual artistic
aims against the ground of a strong religious sensibility. In a climate of mod-
ernism often marked by raucous formal experimentation, transgressive social
behavior, and leftist politics, Marianne Moore and Joseph Cornell embraced
a radicalness of a different sort. After a conversion to Christian Science (from
a Protestant upbringing) in 1925, Cornell devoted himself to living by the
precepts set out by founder Mary Baker Eddy in the sect’s central text, Science
and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Eddy’s book teaches the supremacy of
the mind over the body and its weaknesses — especially illness, which Eddy
attributes directly to sin. Her teachings also repudiate the power of the material
world, emphasizing instead faith and spiritual insight.
Focused as he was upon the physical ramifications of moral health, Cornell
must have found the overt sexuality of the Surrealists frankly disconcerting. In
1936, concerned that while appearing alongside the Surrealists at the Museum
of Modern Art, his work would be lumped in with the explicit eroticism of
Dali, Ernst, and Co., Cornell wrote to museum director Alfred Barr, Jr. to
explain, “I do not share in the subconscious and dream theories” of the group,
adding, “I believe Surrealism has healthier possibilities than have been devel-
oped. The constructions of Marcel Duchamp who the surrealists themselves
acknowledge bear this out, I believe” (qtd. in Solomon 84). Cornell, who never
married, chose a celibate lifestyle (a few documented instances of oral sex aside)
and sublimated his sexuality into his art via a heavily coded symbolism and an
imaginative mode of containment.
For her part, Moore, the granddaughter and sister of Presbyterian minis-
ters, quietly adhered to a Calvinist Christianity all her life. Andrew J. Kappel
argues compellingly that Moore’s Christian faith contributed to the success of
126 Journal of Modern Literature

her particular flavor of modernism. While she employed means common to

“the poets of skepticism” (Pound and Yeats in particular), such as the emphasis
of intellect over emotion, Moore turned her experimental sights to the poetry
of belief, Kappel suggests, making “the Protestant idea of struggle as means of
salvation” her central theme (47). Kappel broadly sketches the lineaments of
the faith and morality embedded in Moore’s oeuvre, paving the way for future
exploration by suggesting areas for investigation — including “how her attitude
toward nature, as God’s second book, is recognizably Protestant, especially in
its attention to animals” (50). Moore’s fondness for unusual creatures, one of
the traits that attracted Cornell to her verse, dovetails with her moral sensibility
most notably in her 1954 translations of La Fontaine’s Fables, in which animal
fabliaux illustrate ethical truths humans would do well to heed.
Moore and Cornell both made inspired use of bounded microcosms as
metaphors for their real-world ideals. Perhaps it was a mutual recognition of
this strain of likeness that preceded and precipitated their friendship. In 1943,
Marianne Moore wrote a letter to the editors of View magazine, full of praise
for Joseph Cornell’s feature, “The Crystal Cage,” in the January issue devoted to
Americana Fantastica and largely overseen by Cornell. Emboldened by Moore’s
kind words for his work, the shy artist wrote her and there began a lively cor-
respondence of many years’ duration. By the time of the first letter, Moore
had already seen Cornell’s first box construction, Soap Bubble Set, in the 1936
“Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art,1 as
well as subsequent Cornell exhibits at the Julien Levy Gallery in Manhattan.
Certainly Cornell knew of The Dial and of Moore’s celebrated tenure at its
helm from 1925 to 1929 — not to mention her own poetic career, in full flour-
ish by 1943. Despite Cornell’s somewhat inaccurate reputation as a reticent
homebody, he and Moore traveled in relatively overlapping circles of the New
York avant-garde. Common acquaintances included Marcel Duchamp, Robert
Motherwell, Elizabeth Bishop, photographer George Platt Lynes, and the
editors of View, Parker Tyler and Charles Henri Ford. Moore’s and Cornell’s
similarities of circumstance are noteworthy: neither married, living instead with
their mothers for most of their lives and at a short distance from Manhattan
in the boroughs (Moore in Brooklyn and Cornell at 3708 Utopia Parkway in
Flushing, Queens).
Far more striking than the biographical parallels, however, are the like-
nesses in method. Their common aesthetic of moral order through contain-
ment rendered them more simpatico with one another than with many of the
painters or poets working along ostensibly similar lines. As Cornell’s biographer
Deborah Solomon notes of her subject and his fellow “arch-modernist” Moore,
“Both sublimated sensuality into dispassionate, nearly taxonomic precision
in their work, and over time would come to stand for the artistic power of
reticence” (165). The object quality and texture carefully enclosed within both
Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure 127

the wooden box and the poem — and thus at a remove — nonetheless create a

sensory delectation for the viewer / reader. Incompatible as precision and sen-
suality may seem, the unlikely nexus between them, and the importance of that
paradoxical relationship for both Cornell and Moore, justifies a comparison of
their compositional methods.
That Marianne Moore and Joseph Cornell shared an active and animated
correspondence from the early 1940s to the early 1960s is no new information,
but as yet no sustained critical consideration has been given to common ele-
ments in their work. Observations like Donald Revell’s are frequent but never
spark more than surface comparisons. The Moore-Cornell correspondence has
long been regarded as a footnote to the separate careers of each; it is a truth
universally acknowledged but its aesthetic implications have been all but over-
looked.2 Curiously, it is the Cornell scholars rather than the Moore critics who
speculate substantively upon the significance of Moore’s role as Cornell’s friend
and fellow artist. In Joseph Cornell’s Theatre of the Mind, Mary Ann Caws includes
generous selections from the Moore-Cornell correspondence, along with a few
diary entries in which Cornell refers to Moore. Dickran Tashjian provides a use-
ful narrative overview, and the most thorough treatment to date, of the cordial
letters between the two in Joseph Cornell: Gifts of Desire (63–77). Caws’s and
Tashjian’s work documents the specifics and circumstances of the friendship,
laying the groundwork for sustained analysis of their creative affinities.
Studies of Moore and Cornell as individual artists emphasize their respec-
tive methods of composition and resulting artistic production. In life as well as
in art, Moore and Cornell were inveterate collector-cataloguers, and each left
behind a large body of source material. Moore’s living room is now preserved
intact at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, along with
a staggering collection of clippings, articles, clothing, sketches, LP records,
notebooks, letters, etc., which at this writing have still not been completely
inventoried.3 At Cornell’s death in 1972, his house in Queens was found to
hold hundreds of boxes heaped on dozens of shelves bearing such labels as
“sea shells,” “old fash. marbles,” and “spiders & salamanders.” Cornell had also
assembled comprehensive files of pictures, letters, clippings, and magazine and
newspaper articles on themes ranging from Hans Christian Andersen to the
cryptically titled “Center of a Labyrinth.” In these “dossiers,” as Cornell called
them, much of the material bears extended notations in Cornell’s handwriting,
indicating a profoundly personal organizational and associational sense. Out of
this vast supply of images, letters, phrases, quotations, ephemera, news items,
and advertisements emerged Cornell boxes and Moore poems — marvels of
compression, considering their diverse sources of origin, and inviting analogical
comparison of their skilled mode of enclosure.
Articulating the eloquent tension of Cornell’s boxes in The Surrealist Look,
Mary Ann Caws writes,
128 Journal of Modern Literature

Innocence mingles with desire, invention with collection [. . .]. Such a surrealist
impulse toward confrontation meets a symbolist will to suggestion and a romantic
nostalgia for what can only be the past. All of those desires converge in Cornell’s
absolute passion for meetings arranged and moments preserved. What he found
was a way to keep. (216)

While Moore may be less concerned with the deferral of desire than the
Christian Scientist Cornell, the elements of arrangement and preservation
cited above have a decided resonance for her work as well. Her insistence
on precision, the impetus for her relentless revision, means that her poems
enact and achieve an accuracy of cataloguing, “a way to keep,” in a mode
that parallel’s Cornell’s exacting boxed arrangements. Moore was a lover of
variety — in nature, in people, in places, in created objects — an affinity she wed
to a razor-sharp precision. Just like “the lemur-student,” Moore could “see /
that an aye-aye is not / / an angwan-tíbo, potto or loris,” as she writes in “Four
Quartz Crystal Clocks” (CP 115). While distinguishing among these large-
eyed nocturnal mammals, Moore at the same time collects them into one or
two lines of verse, disciplining the syllables of their exotic nomenclature into
poetry. Including these creatures in a poem about time and accuracy, Moore
invites her readers to be lemur-students all, distinguishing and celebrating
subtle differences, and making a strong case for the moral power of engaged
critical intelligence.
In their arrangement of elements, Moore’s “box” poems and Cornell’s visu-
ally poetic boxes reveal a shared aesthetic of simultaneous suspension and order.
The musical definition of suspension proves helpful here: when a note contained
in one chord is held over into the next, it creates dissonance and tension and
then, in the subsequent chord, resolution. Neither tension nor resolution could
occur without precisely placed notes. In any art, tension is impossible without
order, and order without tension brings stasis. Despite its often childlike aspect,
Cornell’s system of ordering is not accidental, but a product of his genius for
composition and visual rhyme. In making his boxes, Cornell experimented with
placement and the visual language of sequence until the made work conveyed
the desired effect — a result he may have understood only intuitively. One need
look only so far as Cornell’s first ever box construction, Soap Bubble Set of 1936,
to witness the importance of arrangement. The construction features various
juxtapositions: an egg with a child’s head; fantastically depicted planets with
a detailed scientific map of the moon; the grain of wood with the smoothness
of glass. Furthermore, Cornell has positioned a clay pipe in front of the “Carte
Géographique de la Lune,” playfully suggesting that the moon is merely a giant
soap bubble. Lindsay Blair’s extended reading of the piece argues that “Through
the placing of objects or images, through the kinds of objects chosen from dif-
ferent worlds (scientific, domestic, cartographic, artistic, decorative) Cornell
Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure 129

created a complex synthesis in his presentation of reality that also indicates the
limitations of two and three dimensions and points us toward the possibility
of a fourth dimension — time” (Blair 188). This “pointing toward” results from
Cornell’s inspired sense of combination in which the objects, hung in suspension
and acting in concert, become more than they are singly.
Thanks to photographer George Platt Lynes we are able to see the special
singularity of Cornell’s method. Lynes disassembled the elements of Soap
Bubble Set, added images of planets and faces not in the original, reassembled
them, and photographed the result: a jumble of objects that jostle but do not
speak to each other, grouped without rigor or logic. Lynes’s lackluster rear-
rangement fails because, as Blair writes, “When Cornell’s formal arrangement
and encasement is altered, the metaphysical dimension is removed” (Blair 191,
my emphasis). Moore, too, creates conditions favorable for the frisson between
object-words in her work. As she wrote to Samuel French Morse in 1934,
“With regard to form, I value an effect of naturalness and feel that the motion
of composition should reinforce the meaning and make it cumulatively impres-
sive” (SL 320). “Cumulatively” holds a particular resonance for the lists of
objects appearing in Moore’s poems, which gather momentum and signification
as the collection grows.
As an example of methodical similarity, let us pair “The Jerboa” (1932)
with a 1940 work by Cornell, L’Egypte de Mlle Cléo de Mérode cours élémentaire
d’histoire naturelle (Fig. 1). Both works employ Egypt as a symbol; both serve as
the repository for the material riches of that ancient kingdom. Additionally, the
two sets of objects illustrate Stewart’s assertion that “The collection seeks a form
of self-enclosure which is possible because of its ahistoricism. The collection
replaces history with classification, with order beyond the realm of temporality”
(151). Here, under the classification “Egypt,” “The Jerboa” and L’Egypte de Mlle
Cléo de Mérode locate and compress ancient and modern history, geography, and
material culture into a representative metaphorical assemblage.
Cornell assembled the elements of his box in honor of Cléopatra de
Mérode, a famous Parisian dancer (and rumored courtesan) admired by Bel-
gium’s King Leopold II — and by a member of the Egyptian royalty, who
offered her a great sum if she would make a trip to his country. Cornell’s fasci-
nation with ballet and with cadeaux led him to imagine and construct his own
particular version of this Egyptian’s reward worthy of a beloved ballerina: a box
of stoppered bottles variously containing sand, water, bone, rock — a country’s
“histoire naturelle” in miniature. The bottles’ labeled specimens conflate science
with story and the dancer with her namesake, the fabled Egyptian queen.
A brief unpacking of the Cléo de Mérode chest provides substantial insight
into Cornell’s associative visual language. The contents of the gift include “the
reptiles of the islands of the Nile,” represented by a pair of paper serpents;
crystals in a blue-lined bottle labeled “Cléo de Mérode’s gift of emeralds”; and
130 Journal of Modern Literature

Fig. 1: Joseph Cornell, L’Egypte de Mlle Cléo de Mérode cours élémentaire d’histoire naturelle (1940).
Box construction
4 11/16 × 10 11/16 × 7 1/4 in.
Collection Richard L. Feigen, New York
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure 131

an apparently dried-up colored liquid representing water, the “Nileometer.”4

Another bottle holds a “meteorological” sample of pearls, called “Cleopatra’s
rain of hail.” In another container, a needle through a piece of wood, designated
“Cleopatra’s needle,” creates a visual pun and evokes Egypt’s colonial past via
the pair of ancient obelisks taken from Alexandria and re-erected in London
and New York during the late 19th century. (Cornell would have seen the obe-
lisk in Central Park on his frequent Manhattan wanderings.) One bottle, a col-
lection of sequins, tulle, and rhinestones labeled “A Thousand and One Nights,”
conjures Scheherazade, the subject of a ballet by Rimsky-Korsakov — and
ballet, of course, leads back to Mlle. de Mérode.
The spell cast by such an object may cause the viewer to forget the deliber-
ate sequence of tasks required by the work’s material construction: creating the
contents for each glass phial, filling and stoppering the bottles, handwriting the
labels, cutting slots for the bottles, gluing the marbled paper into place, and so
forth. The crafting and assembling of the work’s individual components are the
less visible but necessary preludes to the symbolic acts of collecting, catalogu-
ing, and arranging. In much the same way a scientist or archaeologist would,
Cornell preserves the material fragments of his imaginatively constructed
Egypt as evoked by Mlle. Cléo. The resulting work of art, a precursor to the
later Museum series, comments upon the subjectivity of any collection; at the
same time, it demonstrates the ability of carefully chosen pieces to combine
into a highly evocative whole.
Although both “Egypt” pieces vividly demonstrate what Linda Leavell
calls “the mysteriousness of a miscellany,” Marianne Moore presents the ancient
culture in lavish detail in order to critique it (7). For her, Egypt serves as the
lesson, not the model. Among the most famous of Moore’s poems, “The Jerboa”
devotes several lines to an inventory of the animals used and objects created
by the ancient Egyptians, including such lovely trinkets as “locust oil in stone
locusts” and “basalt serpents and portraits of beetles.” The cumulative effect of
the items’ richesse is one of surfeit, as in the following lines:
They looked on as theirs,
impalas and onigers,

the wild ostrich herd

with hard feet and bird
necks rearing back in the
dust like a serpent preparing to strike, cranes,
mongooses, storks, anoas, Nile geese;
and there were gardens for these —
132 Journal of Modern Literature

combining planes, dates,

limes, and pomegranates,
in avenues — with square
pools of pink flowers, tame fish, and small frogs.
(CP 10–11)

Grammatically speaking, the items in the inventory outlined here are objects
of the verbal phrase “looked on as theirs,” which clearly denotes possession.
Humanity, exemplified by the ancient Egyptians, has harnessed nature for
its own purposes, a slightly sinister amalgam of aesthetic, agricultural, and
commercial uses. The poem lists the wonders of the Nile valley in all their
variety — making a very Mooreish distinction among “antelopes, dikdik, and
ibex” — and yet, the section of the poem describing all this Egyptian plenty
and artifice is entitled “Too Much.” Thus, the poet indicts the imposing forces
in this segment of the poem, in particular the proprietary use of the animals
and land and the replacement of natural beauty with artifice.
“The Jerboa” is composed of several six-line stanzas, each of the same dis-
tinct shape and structure. The first and second lines end-rhyme, as do the fifth
and sixth; these are like the edges of the box holding in the third and fourth
lines, of an uneven-feeling six and eleven syllables, respectively. So Revell is
right: although Moore is not averse to enjambment or to the occasional extra
foot, she does count syllables and hold faithfully to her rhyme scheme. But
panic? On the contrary, Moore uses her act of rigorous poetic containment as
the vehicle for casting cool aspersion on the Egyptians’ containment of nature.
The accusatory section of the poem has its antidote in the second half, titled
“Abundance.” Here, Moore adulates the jerboa, “the small desert rat, / and not
famous” for its thriftiness, its instinct, its right living in nature which “honors
the sand by assuming its color” (CP 13–14).
The larger aims manifested in Cornell’s and Moore’s respective uses of
Egypt differ: Moore takes to task its treatment of nature while Cornell forges
an associative link between one legendary beauty and another. However, both
use Egypt as a trope to suggest the exotic past and employ the similar descrip-
tive means of taking inventory, preserving and cataloguing. Both works inscribe
defined but transparent boundaries around the material contained within,
allowing for the collected set of objects to be put on display. Susan Stewart
offers a useful framework for understanding the metaphoric function of the
collection, which “is not constructed by its elements; rather it comes to exist by
its principle of organization” (155). In “The Jerboa” and L’Egypte de Mlle Cléo
de Mérode, the logic of organization depends heavily on moral logic: Moore
enumerates precisely the material sins of ancient Egyptians, then offers a
comparable set of right practices as a corrective for misuse. Cornell creates a
self-contained and richly evocative small-scale world which doubles as a safely
contained expression of desire. In both works
Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure 133

[. . .] the threat of infinity is always met with the articulation of boundary. Simul-
taneous sets are worked against each other in the same way that attention to the
individual object and attention to the whole are worked against each other. The
collection thus appears as a mode of control and containment insofar as it is a
mode of generation and series. (Stewart 159)

By filling the vessels of poem and wooden chest with a series of fascinating
objects, Moore and Cornell evoke infinite variety even as they manage and
delimit excess and cupidity.
Cornell’s piece for Mlle. Mérode, part of the Homage to the Romantic Bal-
let series, is just one box among the many he made for an object of desire or
fascination. His career was marked by periodic obsessions with women, both
living and dead: Fanny Cerrito, Lauren Bacall, Emily Dickinson, Marilyn
Monroe, Allegra Kent, and Hedy Lamarr, to name only a few. His diary jot-
tings relate the ways he linked these women with certain moods or images
and imbued their very names with fantastic associations. Cornell’s heroines
frequently appeared in his work, sometimes named directly, but more often
encoded symbolically. He generally incorporated these female icons into his
own kind of fantasy world, seeing them as girlish or fairylike and possessing an
otherworldly quality. Witness, for example, his idealizing treatment of a certain
sultry film siren in the 1946 Untitled (Penny Arcade for Lauren Bacall) in which
he consciously attempted to strip Bacall’s image of its Hollywood varnish (Blair
143). A more symbolic homage such as A Swan Lake for Tamara Toumanova
(1946) merely evokes the dancer by depicting a swan and the trappings of one
of her ballet costumes.
Cornell’s “gifts of desire,” as Tashjian aptly calls them, were not made
exclusively for women of stage and screen, however. Women of intellect, such
as Lee Miller, Susan Sontag, and Leila Hadley, became icons as well, although
Cornell considered them beautiful as well as intelligent. Perhaps they fed his
mental, erotic, and aesthetic needs simultaneously. While an in-depth exami-
nation of Cornell’s artistic response to these women cannot be undertaken
here, it is vital to note that he always imaginatively reconstructed the object
of his affection — even when he knew her well, as in the case of Leila Hadley.
Susan Sontag, with whom the artist corresponded briefly, has testified that
Cornell’s interest in her “seemed to be something that was going on in his
own imagination” (qtd. in Blair 163–64). For Cornell, whose Christian Science
principles complicated his sexuality, enclosing in boxes the idealized versions
of the women he admired allowed him to “possess” them safely while keeping
his virginity intact.
After all, it was the enclosure of a fictional girl that began the Moore-
Cornell correspondence in the first place. A feature of several pages, “The
Crystal Cage” includes a number of elements: a concrete poem of the same
134 Journal of Modern Literature

name, photos, news clippings, and collage. The heroine is an imaginary little
girl named Bérénice, who appears in the final offering of the sequence with
her back to the viewer, looking through a window “into her own past and pres-
ent,” according to the photograph’s caption (Cornell 16). “The Crystal Cage” is
interesting among Cornell’s works for the glimpse it provides into the artist’s
dossier system. Lynda Roscoe Hartigan has noted that, as a selection from a
larger compendium of source material, “The Crystal Cage” is something of a
dossier itself. However, she adds, “Compared to Cornell’s encased and filed
stashes of loose materials, the mélange that he selected for View is balanced,
even sparse, and conveys a sense of finish” (228). Despite a near-mania for
amassing material, Cornell clearly possessed the discernment needed to cull
out the elements for any particular creation.
Although Moore possessed a keen appreciation of images, she was very
likely drawn to the poem, a tower-shaped arrangement of words enclosing the
image of a little girl (Fig. 2). Bérénice, in her beloved tower, surrounds herself
with words ascending to the skies and capped with the upward-pointing “lamps
Mozart.” Like Moore’s own poems, “The Crystal Cage” lay upon the page in a
distinct shape and housed an inventory of words, such as:
[h]abitat groups under glass voyages celestas Watteau irese velvet uge [sic].

Curiously, all of the terms above carry specific resonances pertaining to Cor-
nell’s work. At the time “The Crystal Cage” was published, he happened to be
at work on “habitat groups under glass,” such as the Aviary series. Certainly the
other words evoke the stylized Romantic nostalgia immanent in many of his
boxes and collages. Nor is this relevance a fluke, as a second line reveals:
[M]adame Blanchard silk cord Milky Way

Constellations and silk cords seem Cornellian enough, and when one knows
that Madame Blanchard was an 18th century balloonist admired by Napoleon,
her presence in the pantheon seems merited. Like Cornell’s boxes and col-
lages, the terms of association are not made plain; words on the margins are
often fragmented, requiring the reader to supply missing elements. Thus, “oral
islands” are probably “coral islands,” and “Kub” is likely “Kubla Khan.” Other
treasures secreted in the tower include “Taglioni,” “Giorgione,” “sirens,” “owls,”
“Edgar Allen Poe,” and “sunken Cathedral of Ys” among a host of others. In
short, Cornell built Bérénice’s Pagode de Chanteloup out of the wonder stuff
of his particular universe, carefully selecting and combining words to make a
different kind of assemblage.
In Moore’s comments to View, she praised Cornell’s “detaining tower” — a
phrase which apparently delighted him, since he repeated it back to her in his
letter (Caws, JCTM 82). Perhaps Moore, who had seen Cornell’s work exhib-
ited, recognized his favorite themes in the words of the pagoda. Quite possibly,
Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure 135

Fig. 2: Joseph Cornell, The Crystal

Cage (Portrait of Berenice) from View
magazine series 2, no. 4 “Americana
Fantastica” (1943)
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell
Memorial Foundation/Licensed by
VAGA, New York, NY

she also noticed the first word of the very last line: pangolins. Did Cornell know
of the pangolin only because of Moore’s 1936 poem? In the very first address
he made, Cornell used the figure of the pangolin as his ambassador. A cutout
of the animal is pasted below the text of the letter. It is difficult not to read an
oblique reference to Moore into Cornell’s use of a word so out of the common
parlance and yet so closely associated with her poetry.
If Cornell’s tower did include a sly allusion to Moore, it would fit a pattern.
Almost across the board, Cornell’s preoccupation with a person (from Juan Gris
and André Breton on the one end to Tilly Losch and Lee Miller on the other),
revealed itself in the work. Cornell usually paid direct tribute to the cast of
characters who illuminated his imagination, such as incorporating his brother
Robert’s drawings of rabbits into a number of pieces following Robert’s death
in 1966. With such a precedent for Cornell’s idealizing, sublimating treatment
of the people important to his imaginary and actual lives, it seems logical to
look for work made in homage to or under the influence of Moore. Cornell’s
letters to her indicate a genuine if formally expressed warmth, as well as an
informed admiration for her work. The letters are the most promising source of
clues to Moore’s possible influence on Cornell’s contemporary work, especially
136 Journal of Modern Literature

if, as Deborah Solomon sees it, the friends “were too reserved to cheer each
other in person. They did better in writing” (166).
How did Joseph Cornell see Marianne Moore? He began the friendship
by writing somewhat out of the blue to a poet of significant standing, but only
after seeing Moore’s favorable comments to the editors of View. By 1945, he
felt secure enough in their relationship to ask Moore to recommend him for a
Guggenheim fellowship (which he did not receive, despite her endorsement).
Their exchanges, as well as other mentions he makes of Moore, indicate that
he approached her with a great deal of respect. His interest genuinely appears
to lie in her imaginative and creative powers, not in her physicality or ability
to evoke larger notions of female purity. Somehow, Moore managed to escape
Cornell’s tendency toward iconization of women he admired. Granted, she was
nearing sixty in 1943, although Kenneth Burke once referred to the virginal
poet as “one of the most sexual women he ever met” (Molesworth xxii). I do not
mean to suggest, however, that Cornell did not romanticize Moore at all — as
Caws reminds us, like Emily Dickinson, another of his favorite poets, Moore
was “unmarried and thus idealizable” (Caws, JCTM 66). Cornell constructed
at least two pieces in homage to Dickinson, one unambiguous in its reference
(Toward the Blue Peninsula, 1951), and one more heavily coded, (An Image for
Two Emilies, around 1954). But no box or collage appears to refer to Moore
even symbolically.
There are, however, a number of direct references to Moore in Cornell’s
papers. Not long after the first exchange of letters, in the dossier of mate-
rials known as GC 44 (i.e., Garden Center, 1944, after Cornell’s place of
employment at the time), Cornell describes seeing a “tiny insect like a minia-
ture darning needle.” While he cannot identify it, he muses, “maybe Miss M.
Moore will know its name” (qtd. in Blair 79). On another occasion, a letter to
Moore describes Cornell’s daily trip to work at a defense plant, a job he held
for several months in 1943. Revealing his dislike of the factory, he demeans it as
a place “where all that was ever thought or spoken was ‘plain American which
cats and dogs can read!’ ” Cornell’s statement also reveals something else: his
familiarity with Moore’s poetry. The quotation he applies to his job derives from
Moore’s lyric “England,” which Cornell most likely encountered in the 1935
Selected Poems. One can imagine an amused or even delighted reaction from
Moore upon reading Cornell’s playful inclusion of one of her own lines.
Cornell’s letter continues on to relate how the tedious ride to and from
work was lightened for him by a glimpse from the train of a “private zoo.”
Writing in June 1944, nearly a year after the experiences he describes, he shares
with Moore his notion that she was “the only other person in the world who
could ever appreciate the birds and animals of a zoo to such an extent” (Caws,
JCTM 104, Cornell’s emphasis). Describing the zoo’s salutary effects on him,
Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure 137

Cornell writes, “How mental it all was.” Dickran Tashjian suggests that the zoo
may have been an invention, with the qualification that “Whether or not this
‘private zoo’ actually existed is rendered moot by the importance it assumed
in Cornell’s imagination” (73) — and, I would add, by the singular connection
with Moore it facilitated. Both references to Moore exemplify the extent to
which the poet had entered Cornell’s consciousness as a kind of natural history
enthusiast and authority.
The pangolin-intermediary being a notable example, Cornell’s allusions to
Moore and her writing often revolve around the animal kingdom. However,
Cornell refers directly to Moore’s work on more than one occasion. Writing to
thank her for a gift copy of the newly published Nevertheless in 1944, Cornell
offers a series of what he calls “staccato or ‘newsreel’ reactions” to each of the
six poems included in the collection (Caws, JCTM 112). In nearly every case,
Moore’s lyrics have triggered memories and associations for Cornell, and he is
able to incorporate her work into his own vast web of evocation and suggestion.
In his estimation, Moore’s lyrics supply connective hooks onto which he can
hang his own set of associations, such as his remarks
RE: “A Carriage From Sweden”
The sense of transcendent craftsmanship brought out in this poem is so much
what I need at the moment. An old portfolio of Swedish architecture of the
Renaissance recently acquired has made it easier for me to appreciate its fragrant
forest aroma and satisfying sturdiness. (Caws, JCTM 113)

“A Carriage From Sweden” first appeared in the March 11, 1944 issue of
The Nation. A few months later Moore included it with the other poems of
Nevertheless, where Cornell read it thanks to her gift. His remarks above echo
the language the poem employs to celebrate the Scandinavian nation. Moore’s
lyric begins with the carriage of the title, and by the poem’s midsection, has syn-
ecdochically evoked an entire country. Moore’s process of association, coupled
with a highly precise and patterned rhyme, would have made a great deal of
sense to Cornell.
Mary Ann Caws, among others, places significant emphasis on the bound-
aries of Cornell’s boxes. The tight structure of Moore’s lyric replicates a similar
creative margin: the border around the imaginative associations grouped rig-
orously inside. Like a Cornell box, which ostensibly tempts the viewer with
sensuous texture and color, connotation and movement, rather than with its
(less obvious) painstakingly achieved order, the bedrock structure of a Moore
poem does not immediately assert its presence. In the case of both poem and
box, the ordering principles of symmetry, rhyme, balance, and movement lend
a deeply satisfying quality. Each of the twelve stanzas of “A Carriage From
Sweden” holds to the same rhyme scheme begun in the first five lines:
138 Journal of Modern Literature

They say there is a sweeter air

where it was made, than we have here;
a Hamlet’s castle atmosphere.
At all events there is in Brooklyn
something that makes me feel at home.
(CP 131)

Like “The Jerboa,” this poem holds to a distinctly shaped stanzaic pattern: four
lines of regular iambic tetrameter, plus one line (the fourth) of nine syllables.
The first line rhymes its third and last syllables; the second and third lines end-
rhyme; and the first and last syllables rhyme in the fifth line. Meanwhile, the
fourth and irregular line contains no rhyme, but sometimes Moore makes it
alliterative. Like the middle two lines of each stanza in “The Jerboa,” the “erratic”
fourth line is bounded by the rigor of the other lines’ structure — a shorter or
longer line here or there notwithstanding. Frequent enjambment, especially
between stanzas, propels the poem forward. That Moore imposes such stricture
of form upon the poem but still manages a breadth of vision is a testament to
the careful balance with which she composed. The Sweden she evokes — clearly,
for Cornell, with the requisite sensory accompaniment — is one of astringent
pine air, sure-footed deer, and discernible integrity. The poem becomes a treasure
box containing Sweden’s attractions, conjuring its natural beauties via a created
one, i.e., “this country cart / that inner happiness made art.”
Even more worthy of adulation than the country’s natural resources, how-
ever, is Sweden’s brave moral act of sheltering a large percentage of Denmark’s
Jewish population from the Nazis. Moore’s poem showcases the Swedes’ war-
time heroism within a larger inventory of the country’s material culture and
legend. Following closely behind the Danish Jews are such wonders as “puzzle-
jugs,” vessels with holes or with many mouths from which to drink, and the
“Dalén / light-house” powered by acetylene gas and requiring no lighthouse
keeper. The poem cites the material innovations and achievements of the Swed-
ish people, of which the carriage is the most compelling example, as material
metaphors for the nation’s integrity and compassion. As Robin G. Schulze
writes, the poem aims to “offer up past product[s] of a hopeful aesthetic intel-
ligence that pushes back against the current pressure of hate and destruction”
(169). Cornell’s positive reaction to the poem indicates the success of Moore’s
attempt.
A various inventory evoked by one object is a commonplace in Marianne
Moore’s work, as is the circling back to the original visual impetus. Attempt-
ing to answer the question put to the country, “what makes the people dress
that way / and those who see you wish to stay?” the speaker lights on a symbol
pointing back to the carriage and encapsulating all of the country’s virtues in
a single image:
Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure 139

— the bed
of white flowers densely grown in an S
meaning Sweden and stalwartness,
skill, and a surface that says
Made in Sweden: carts are my trade.
(CP 132–33)

The ending sibilance reinforces the poetic themes by aurally uniting the coun-
try’s name with its virtues; the final line’s rhyme of “made” with “trade” empha-
sizes craftsmanship and integrity. Having begun with the enticing carved
surface of the cart, Moore ends her extended lyric of praise by returning to
it — exhibiting indeed the “transcendent craftsmanship” Cornell praises in the
poem.5
A glimpse into Moore’s inspirations for “A Carriage From Sweden” helps
to connect her associative working method with Cornell’s. A note in the Mari-
anne Moore Newsletter cites four background sources for the poem (her “dossier”
of materials, if you will). Three were print sources, one each about the Swedish
landscape, Swedish folk art, and a Swedish runner named Gunder Hagg (Wil-
lis 10–12). The fourth, the actual genesis of the poem, was the Swedish carriage
Moore noted having seen in the Brooklyn Museum over a decade earlier in
1931 — hence, the “something” in Brooklyn “that makes me feel at home.”
By writing about the cart thirteen years later, after it had been sold off by the
museum, Moore preserves within the receptacle of her lyric the lineaments of
the cart, her memory of those lineaments, and all of the associations evoked by
the cart’s qualities. Like Cornell, Moore meticulously recorded her experiences
and observations over the course of several years. To these she added a variety
of texts, objects, and images through which she had sifted, arranging all to her
satisfaction inside the compartment of the poetic line. Encountering a poem
born of Moore’s verbal and pictorial connections, Cornell intuitively recognized
a process of distillation similar to his own method. From his reading, he derived
his own association, thus continuing the chain of evocations.
Perhaps the most evocative symbol Cornell used during the period of his
frequent contact with Moore was the bird. Already at work on the Habitat
and Aviary series when the two met, Cornell would continue to use birds as
metaphor and motif in the Hotel and Juan Gris series of the ‘50s, although his
treatment of them shifts in the later pieces. Cornell’s bird-fascination is well-
documented. A glimpse at the contents of G.C. 44, Cornell’s most expansive
dossier, reveals many colored photographs of birds — including several repro-
ductions of the same image of a small yellow-headed bird perched on a nest
of hungry chicks.6 Numerous diary entries detail Cornell’s observation and
feeding of pigeons and jays, in his own yard and elsewhere. This fascination
resulted in a prolific output of “bird boxes.”
140 Journal of Modern Literature

When the Aviary series was exhibited at New York’s Egan Gallery in
December of 1949 and January of 1950, Cornell “wanted very badly to ask”
none other than Marianne Moore “to consider doing a foreword for the AVI-
ARY exhibition of my bird boxes,” as he revealed to her in a letter from Feb-
ruary, 1950. He feared he had waited too long, as the exhibit was due to open
soon. Ever hesitant, Cornell claims, “I had also the consecrated nature of your
present work in mind and the consideration of a tedious trip even should the
idea have meant anything to you” (Caws, JCTM 168). Still, he invited her to
see what of the Aviary remained at the Egan.
Joseph Cornell considered Marianne Moore the right person to help
introduce and frame his Aviary series. Can we be certain, then, that she was
not on his mind as he assembled certain of his boxes? In the 1930s and early
‘40s, Moore was constructing and refining a series of poems Catherine Paul
calls “habitat groups,” work with startling parallels to Cornell’s output dur-
ing the same approximate period. In an innovative examination of what she
calls Moore’s “curatorial methods,” Paul connects several animal poems from
What Are Years (1941) to the dioramas Moore saw on her frequent visits to
the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) near Central Park. In
such pieces as “He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron,’ ” “The Pangolin,” and “Virginia
Britannia,” Moore’s familiar combination of animals and moral examination
works “like many educational exhibits” in that it “asks its visitors to look with
renewed and more responsible vision at the world around them than they had
before entering” (Paul 192). Additionally, Paul argues, Moore problematizes
the collection of animals even for educational purposes by contrasting human
consumption of ostriches’ brains, eggs, and feathers in “He ‘Digesteth Harde
Yron,’ ” with the lively autonomy of the “The Pangolin.”
One poem holds particular resonance for the Moore-Cornell link: “Half-
Deity,” inspired by the Monarch butterfly diorama at the AMNH (Paul 187).
Composed in the mid-1930s and published originally in The Pangolin and
Other Verse (1936), “Half-Deity” fell under Moore’s rigorous editorial hand
before it reappeared in What Are Years.7 The poem of 1941 differs markedly
from the poem of 1936, most obviously in terms of verse structure. The run-
together stanzas of 1936 have been arranged for better “viewing” and separated
into distinct if not discrete containers of verse (Moore still enjambs between
stanzas). Tracing the flight of a swallow-tail butterfly pursued by a curious
nymph, Moore likens the insect to horses and zebras. The moving creature is
so uncapturable (literally and metaphorically) that the speaker can describe its
“majesty” only with an accumulation of adjectives: “Equine irascible / unworm-
like unteachable butterfly — / zebra!” (Poems of Marianne Moore 220). The
overall effect of the poem is one of reverence for a living, moving creature, not
a preserved specimen.
Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure 141

If Cornell’s awareness of Moore’s work were as detailed and thorough

before their correspondence began as it was during and even after, his habitat
groups of the 1940s could very well have been influenced by Moore’s. Cornell’s
Untitled (Butterfly Habitat), c. 1940, and Untitled (Parrot and Butterfly Habi-
tat), c. 1948, in particular, complement “Half-Deity.” The first work features
six paper cutouts of butterfly specimens (including a monarch), combined
with elements of the peepshow: the viewer is encouraged to peer at the insects
through cutouts in the glass partition. “Habitat,” then, is a misleading title, as
the insects here are clearly pinned and mounted. Not so with the second piece:
like the dioramas at the AMNH, Parrot and Butterfly Habitat recreates the
natural environment. The butterflies and a caterpillar or two alight on flowering
plants, while the parrots perch on a branch to the right and appear to examine
the butterfly group with quizzical interest. Within the diorama / habitat group
format, Cornell enacts the same two possibilities for animals as, in Catherine
Paul’s estimation, Moore does: the animal collected, and the animal free.
If the fact of this common use of animals merits examination, so does the
mode of that use. In both instances, the animals assume roles of metaphorical
significance in the moral struggles of artist and poet. According to Deborah
Solomon, “Both were drawn to poetic portraits of animals — the pangolin for
instance, in Moore’s case; the bird, in Cornell’s — as a form of self-portrait”
(165). On the one hand, the caged bird might stand in for the artist’s own
feelings of constriction brought about by living with a disabled brother and a
possessive mother. Conversely, the bird boxes function as safe repositories for
Cornell’s conflicted feelings of sexual desire — but using a different dynamic
than the ballet works. Homage to the Romantic Ballet allowed Cornell the safety
to exalt and at the same time to seal behind glass the ethereal, feminine appeal
of the dancers he admired; a work such as Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery
of 1943 with its cockatoos, parrots, broken glass and spattered paint, articulates
Cornell’s “anger with the cock, with his own sexuality” according to Caws
( JCTM 42). Clearly, one can chafe against boundaries while at the same time
feeling a little bit grateful for them.
While Cornell employed the symbolic animal self-portrait to express both
negative and positive aspects of containment, Moore tended to use animals as
models or as object lessons for moral and theological truths. The pangolin’s
plated exterior exemplifies the theme of armor and self-protection in the face
of struggle so common in Moore’s poetry. Similarly, the jerboa, with his instinc-
tive sense of contentment, “has / happiness” and “a shining silver house / / of
sand” (CP 13). Moore identified with these unusual animals, perhaps because
she saw them making their way through the world in a manner similar to her
own. Perhaps she wished to possess more of their admirable qualities. In any
case, she always collected and documented her chosen creatures with affection
and respect.
142 Journal of Modern Literature

***
The Moore-Cornell letters coincided with periods of fruitful artistic pro-
duction for both writer and artist against the backdrop of the war and the early
postwar years. Although the two continued to write to one another, the most
charged portion of their exchange had ended by the early 1950s, with sporadic
correspondence continuing until 1961. In 1972, the cultural world suffered
the losses of these two remarkable figures, just ten months apart. Marianne
Moore died in early February, and Joseph Cornell just five days after his 69th
birthday, on December 29. Following a stroke in 1969, Moore’s health had
declined drastically. Her poetic production had ceased, and the two friends had
not corresponded in years. And yet, a diary entry from 1970 records Cornell’s
“dream of Marianne Moore & Coney Island and refreshment stands abutting
into the water high up” (Caws, JCTM 453). Rendered in Cornell’s inscrutable,
telegraphic style, this notation must have meant something to him. Whatever
its symbolic significance, it shows that for Cornell, old acquaintances and past
correspondences could always contain fresh associations.

Notes
1. Moore wrote a review of the MoMA exhibit, “Concerning the Marvelous,” which remained
unpublished. Her remarks do not mention Cornell.
2. The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, edited by Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodridge, and Cristanne
Miller, reprints one letter from the run of the correspondence, an early missive from Moore to Cornell
(431–32). In Charles Molesworth’s biography, Marianne Moore: A Literary Life, Cornell receives pass-
ing mention as a single star in the constellation of Moore’s acquaintances. Linda Leavell’s thorough
and useful study, Prismatic Color: Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts, sketches a brief picture of the
friendship and credits the correspondence with “revealing a deep, aesthetic intimacy” between the older
poet and the younger artist (50).
3. For an overview of the wealth of materials in the Rosenbach Moore archive, particularly in rela-
tion to Moore’s knowledge of and engagement with the New York avant-garde (Cornell included), see
Feldman and Barsanti.
4. Naturally, Cornell labeled the bottles in French for his Parisian dancer, but they are rendered in
English here. All translations are my own. Descriptions of the work’s contents are derived from
McShine 282.
5. A letter to her brother Warner, dated two days before “A Carriage from Sweden” appeared in The
Nation, shows Moore’s attentive craftsmanship at work. She notes that she has revised the poem and
wonders if “it seems like burlesque to name the Jews so abruptly after the folk dance” but she stands by
her emendation despite the displeasure of the editor at Macmillan (SL 445).
6. Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp [. . .] in resonance offers a great deal of insight into Cornell’s dossier
system, including a full-color centerfold of G.C. 44 (194–95). Another section of the catalog includes
both a pictorial and a descriptive inventory of the 100+ items in Cornell’s Duchamp Dossier.
7. Although not chosen by Moore for the CP, the revised “Half-Deity” reappears in The Poems of
Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman (219–21). Schulman also includes the poem’s original
1936 version in the editor’s notes (426–28).
Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure 143

Abbreviations
CP The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore
SL The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore

Acknowledgements
My thanks to Margaret Higonnet, Glen MacLeod, and the readers at jml for their assistance with the
final stages of this article.

Works Cited
Blair, Lindsay. Joseph Cornell’s Vision of Spiritual Order. London: Reaktion, 1998.
Caws, Mary Ann, ed. Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind. New York and London: Thames and Hudson,
1993.
———. The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.
Cornell, Joseph. “The Crystal Cage (portrait of Bérénice).” View 2.4 (1943): 10–16.
Feldman, Evelyn, and Michael Barsanti. “Paying Attention: The Rosenbach Museum’s Marianne Moore
Archive and the New York Moderns.” Journal of Modern Literature 22.2 (Fall 1998): 7–30.
Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe. “Joseph Cornell’s Explorations: Art on File.” Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp
[. . .] In Resonance. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Cantz, 1998. 221–45.
Kappel, Andrew J. “Notes on the Presbyterian Poetry of Marianne Moore.” Marianne Moore: Woman
and Poet. Ed. Patricia C. Willis. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1990. 39–51.
Leavell, Linda. Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
UP, 1995.
Marshall, Tod. “Donald Revell: An Interview.” The American Poetry Review 25.4 (1996): 31–36.
McShine, Kynaston, ed. Joseph Cornell. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980.
Molesworth, Charles. Marianne Moore: A Literary Life. New York: Atheneum, 1990.
Moore, Marianne. Complete Poems. New York: MacMillan/Penguin, 1994.
———. Complete Prose. Ed. Patricia C. Willis. New York: Viking, 1986.
———. The Poems of Marianne Moore. Ed. Grace Schulman. New York: Viking, 2003.
———. The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore. Ed. Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodridge, and Cristanne
Miller. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Paul, Catherine. Poetry in the Museums of Modernism. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002.
Schulze, Robin G. The Web of Friendship: Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens. Ann Arbor: U of Michi-
gan P, 1995.
Solomon, Deborah. Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell. New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 1997.
Tashjian, Dickran. Joseph Cornell: Gifts of Desire. Miami: Grassfield Press, 1992.
Willis, Patricia C. “A Carriage From Sweden.” Marianne Moore Newsletter 4.2 (1980): 10–12.
144 Journal of Modern Literature

Marianne Moore and artist Joseph Cornell, most famous for his box constructions,
shared a lively correspondence between 1943 and 1961. They also shared a similar
working method of collection, selection, and containment, driven by moral impulses
to enclose and preserve. The correspondence between them serves as a lens for exam-
ining thematic and formal similarities in artistic production, for example, the use
of Egypt in Cornell’s L’Egypte de Mlle Cléo de Mérode cours élémentaire
d’histoire naturelle and in Moore’s “The Jerboa.” Furthermore, the letters reveal a
mutual respect for and interest in one another’s work, such as Cornell’s responses to
Moore’s collection Nevertheless — in particular his praise of the anti-war poem “A
Carriage From Sweden.” The discussion culminates in an examination of Moore’s
animal poems in What Are Years, linking “Half-Deity,” inspired by the Monarch
butterfly diorama at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, to Cornell’s
Habitat series of the same period.

Keywords: Marianne Moore / Joseph Cornell / “The Jerboa”