| The 1913 New York Armory Show presented the first opportunity for many Americans to witness the radical developments in the European visual arts which had begun during the Impressionist era. The show caused at once anger and excitement, for it dramatically demonstrated how the standards of realism in the arts were changing into a concern with purer abstraction. Whether or not they actually saw the Armory Show, the American poets of the early twentieth century responded to these shifts in the visual arts. Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound, among others, wrote poems using the techniques and philosophies of the Futurists, Cubists, and Post-Impressionists. My dissertation traces Moore's relation to the developments shown by the Armory Show by examining her poetic techniques and philosophies, and by looking for signs in her work of the radical evolutions in the literary and visual arts which affected the other modern poets. Although Moore did not in fact see the Armory Show, she kept an extensive scrapbook of articles on it--a collage, in fact, of the new collage techniques. By using the Armory Show as a touchstone, then, I consider Moore's "modern-ness" by examining in her work techniques of collage, cubism, Pound's "make it new" philosophy, and general modern aesthetic theory, and explore the extent to which Moore adopted in her poetry the technical and philosophical innovations of the visual arts. |
