Taking the Potomac Cowbirdlike’: History through Space in Marianne Moore’s Poems

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 at the same time. In this essay I wish to focus on Moore’s relation to American history through the analysis of two poems, “New York” and “Virginia Britannia”, that I consider as parallel poems 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 is 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 the contemporary period Moore lived in, most interestingly using space as a tool to present and relate the past.