Abstract
In this essay Finch contributes to the growing wave of scholarly interest in the late work of Marianne Moore by performing a close reading of the underexamined poem “Tell me, tell me.” By situating this poem within the context of Moore’s increasing literary celebrity of the 1950s and 1960s, Finch demonstrates how the rich intertextuality of “Tell me, tell me” fabricates a most “telling” response to the public’s rapacious appetite for insight into her personal life. Moore complicates facile understandings of a writer’s private biography by promoting an inextricably social, dialogical and collaborative model of artistic subjectivity, one whose many facets are revealed only through the co-constituting labor of her readers.
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Finch, Z. (2018). “Passion for the Particular”: Marianne Moore, Henry James, Beatrix Potter, and the Refuge of Close Reading. In: Gregory, E., Hubbard, S. (eds) Twenty-First Century Marianne Moore. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65109-5_13
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