Moore's Sources
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. Click the icon in the top right corner of each source's frame to download the file in PDF format.
Poetry Notebooks
Mount Rainier National Park Brochure (Moore's annotated copy)
Reading Notebooks
Starting p. 30v: Fraser, Maxwell. “The West Country.” Illustrated London News (21 June 1930): 30.
Starting p. 55r: “The Road to Culture.” The Literary Digest (14 March 1931): 16-17.
Staring p. 119v: Eisenstein, Sergei M. “An American Tragedy.” Close-Up (June 1933): 109-124.
Sources for 07.02.02 (1930-1943)
An edition of 1930-1943 Reading Notebook (07.02.02) will go online later in 2020.
Starting p. 30v: Fraser, Maxwell. “The West Country.” Illustrated London News (21 June 1930): 30.
Starting p. 55r: “The Road to Culture.” The Literary Digest (14 March 1931): 16-17.
Staring p. 119v: Eisenstein, Sergei M. “An American Tragedy.” Close-Up (June 1933): 109-124.
Sources for 07.04.04 (1922-1930)
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.