Marianne Moore: “Flies in Amber”

Abstract

Marianne Moore wrote dozens of poems about animals, once referring to them as her “animiles” (which “means literally ‘pertaining to animals,’ ” writes Margaret Holley, “but it is also loosely perhaps an echo of something like ‘Anglophile,’ the form of affinity” [79]). Composed throughout her career, the poems appear copiously amid her oeuvre with no particular ordering or arrangement.