Marianne Moore and China

Marianne Moore's consistent ingenuity in employing Chinese models makes her work a particularly fruitful source for investigating orientalism and its contribution to modern poetry. Cynthia Stamy explores how Moore used the Far East to express her own dissatisfaction with contemporary trends in the writing of poetry, and how she embraced the more ancient culture of China as a means of resisting the American habit of looking to Europe as a singular source of cultural tradition 'at home'.