Marianne Moore and the Hidden Persuaders
Marianne Moore and the Hidden Persuaders
This chapter analyses the ‘Ford Motor Correspondence’ along with the characterization of the poet Marianne Moore. It asks whether the poet is as remote from the modern world as the letters indicate, or if she is the savvy performer of a Chaplinesque dance through the cog wheels of midcentury consumerism. In bringing out certain continuities between modernist Moore — sometime contributor to and editor of The Dial — and ‘preposterous’ Moore — one time naming consultant at Ford marketing, the chapter offers a close up on the complex relations between modernist poetry, the commercial sphere, and periodical culture in the first half of the twentieth century. This analysis brings the Ford letters into correspondence with the elements of style that are everywhere felt, yet nowhere seen, in The New Yorker, and which serve as the magazine's most enduring self promotional device.
Keywords: Marianne Moore, Ford Motor Correspondence, consumerism, modernist poetry, periodical culture, The New Yorker, The Dial
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