| This dissertation examines the early poetry of Marianne Moore through the critical lens of Russian Formalism according to Victor Shklovsky's 1917 essay "Art as Technique," which theorizes that art is a method of perception in which an individual assumes new, unfamiliar perspectives toward an object of perception in order to "make it new" and interesting. In practicing the technique of art, a perceiver combats habituation and familiarity that would otherwise rob him of conscious, attentive perception in life. Thus, art is a method by which to utilize the full potential of the human perceptive faculty. Moore expresses a theory much like Shklovsky's in her early poetry while stressing the importance of growth, development, and innovation in the human mind, as well as the material world. Her poetry discusses art and also exemplifies what art is, and does, by offering a mixture of specifically configured objects and general meditations upon those objects to fortify her notion of art, to reveal the supreme moral purpose in practicing art, and to provoke reader awareness and re-imagination of the various objects of perception in our material world. |
