A Reading Of Marianne Moore's Animal Poems In Light Of Laozi's Ecoethicism

Marianne Moore, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is an outstanding American poetess in 20^th century. Her public and private exchanges with Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot establish her centrality in the high modernist community. What she concerns in her life is, apparently in relevance with animals, so that 110 of 129 pomes in her Complete Poems, to some degree, deal with animals, featured uniqueness and innovation. In tradition, the relationship between people and nonhuman animals is codified in social culture as hierarchical and fundamentally impermeable and epistemologies of the world fortify the rift between people and animals. In the circle of western poets, most poetry about animals induces a brief, simple, and predominantly anthropocentric moment of contemplation of our fellow creatures. However, Moore writes about animals as if they were people minus the traits of overweening human preoccupations, to find human qualities freed and uncommitted, as a result, awakening to reconsider and interrogate the relationship between them to seek a connection between people and animals that runs counter to a culturally pervasive segregationist mind.Moore is a kind of "Marco Polo detained at home." Through her spiritual travel, Moore is versed in Chinese paintings, mysterious animals, and especially in profound and abstract philosophy- Taoism. Laozi, an ancient sage of China, the man most closely associated with Taoist belief and being eminent for his Tao Te Ching, which laid great emphasis on the laws of nature and embedded in rich and diversified thoughts, dedicated his whole life to seeking the links in the cosmic chain that bound the Heavens and the Land. In her exploration and experimental writing, Moore seems to pursue a balance and harmonious chain between inside and outside family, nature and man, and private and public image. Therefore, the perspective of Laozi's ecoethicism is taken to appreciate Moore's animal poems from three levels. The premise is that "Dao as mother of all thing," that is man and nature are brothers and sisters and they should concern and respect each other; based on mutual respect, Laozi put forward the principle to protect nature, "Dao according to Dao"; thus the final goal will be arrived at, "Oneness between man and nature". At the outset, Moore's animals are almost remote and mythological, signified her reverence for them. To show dissatisfaction to the old-fashioned ecological view, Moore advocates that both nature and man habit in their own context and man is immoral to do harm to them. The final goal is to achieve scientific and rational harmony between man and nature.