The Tao of the non-human : ineffability, materiality, and ecosemiotics in Marianne Moore’s assemblage poetics

Azambuja, Enaiê Mairê (2025) The Tao of the non-human : ineffability, materiality, and ecosemiotics in Marianne Moore’s assemblage poetics. Journal of Modern Literature, 48 (2). pp. 96-111.

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Abstract

Through her engagement with the aesthetic and onto-epistemological principles of Zen and Taoism, Marianne Moore's poetic imagination develops assemblages that foreground the interdependence and entanglement between human and non-human agencies. Moore opposes traditional forms of anthropocentric writing by amplifying a poetics that decenters human subjectivity, acknowledges the limitations of language and reason, and elevates more-than-human agency beyond the recognition of its ineffability by human frameworks of knowledge. In particular, she enables this through the minimalism of her Zen/Tao-inflected later poems and through the drastic revisions of earlier works. The impact of Zen and Taoism on her work enables her to create a universal poetics that amplifies material-spiritual entanglements within heterogeneous assemblages of matter and meaning.