As her notebooks show, Marianne Moore was a voracious reader of a wide variety of texts. Collected here are selected primary sources that Moore quoted in her notebooks and poems.

Contents

1. Mount Rainier National Park Brochure (Moore's annotated copy)

2. Excerpts from the Illustrated London News quoted by Moore

Mount Rainier National Park Brochure (Moore's annotated copy) 

Marianne Moore and her mother travelled to the state of Washington to visit her brother Warner in both 1922 and 1923. In July of 1922, she spent two days on Mount Rainier and hiked with her brother to the Nisqually Glacier. These trips to the Northwest, and in particular her time on Mount Rainier, become the basis for her poem, “An Octopus.” This national park brochure of the “Rules and Regulations: Mount Rainier” (1922) is among her several sources for the poem, and of particular interest because it contains extensive marginalia showing Moore at work on her poem—including places where she uses cross-outs and interlineation to rewrite sentences of the brochure,

Click the icon in the top right corner of the frame to download the brochure as a PDF.

Excerpts from the Illustrated London News quoted by Moore

Moore frequently took notes from her reading of the Illustrated London News. Below is the scan of an article to which she refers in one of her reading notebooks. Click the icon in the top right corner of each frame to download the file as a PDF. By 2020, an edition of 1930-1943 Reading Notebook (07.02.02) will go online, and we will add additional references to this Sources page.

Quoted in Reading Notebook 07_02_02 (1930-1943), starting p. 48v: Davis, Frank. “A Page for Collectors: More About The Unicorn.” Illustrated London News (4 April 1931): 572.