“Words Cluster like Chromosomes”: Marianne Moore and Poetic-Genetic Origination

Abstract

In 1963, Marianne Moore tells an interviewer, “I never ‘plan’ a stanza. Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.” Six decades earlier, when Moore first learned about chromosomes, the concept was relatively new. Her education at Bryn Mawr from 1905 to 1909 placed her at the forefront of the understanding of heredity for her time, among those who knew that embryos inherited chromosomes equally from each parent. As her early poetry placed embryonic origins in tension with religious, national, and poetic origins, she posed the embryo both as disruptive to Western origin stories—like the Christian story of the fall—and as generative for her poetics, offering a model for a poetics of iterative and continual origination. Heather Cass White has suggested that the future of Moore criticism depends on recognizing how two schools—“the scientific Moore” and “the Protestant Moore”—are ultimately united around “her pursuit of an aesthetically and ethically tenable ‘original’ poetics.” Moore’s attention to embryos suggests that she was also performing a study of origin itself.