Taking the Potomac Cowbirdlike

History through Space in Marianne Moore

Abstract

Since her college years at Bryn Mawr, where she majored in both History and Politics, Marianne Moore was always extremely conscious of contemporary society and deeply immersed in history. In this essay I focus on Moore's relation to American history through the analysis of two poems, "New York" and "Virginia Britannia," that I consider as parallel both for their theme and communicative strategy. Although one is short and the other rather long, one is centred in the New York area and the other in Jamestown and Virginia, one was published in 1921 and the other in 1935, both works offer an overview of the development of the United States from the colonial years to Moore's day, most interestingly using space as a tool to present and relate the past