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"Humor Saves Steps": Laughter and Humanity in Marianne Moore
- Journal of Modern Literature
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 35, Number 3, Spring 2012
- pp. 121-138
- 10.2979/jmodelite.35.3.121
- Article
- Additional Information
Marianne Moore treats humor as a means of both recognizing commonality and creating mutual understanding between individuals. In two comparatively minor poems, "A Prize Bird" (1915) and "The Wood-Weasel" (1942), Moore uses humor as a test of friendship, and suggests that sympathetic laughter constitutes a distinctively American approach to collaborative artistic creation. Humor in "The Pangolin" (1936), like the artists' tools Moore discusses in the poem, is both an end in itself and a means to ever-greater things: it becomes the marker of shared humanity and a medium for uniting the human with the divine. Throughout Moore's work, her humor can be read as a kind of ars poetica, modeling the synthesis of diverse components that she performs in her poetry.