“Visible, invisible”: Dickinson and Disappearance in Marianne Moore’s “A Jellyfish”

Abstract:Marianne Moore was largely silent about Dickinson, especially in her poems, where there are as yet no documented quotations or allusions. But we know that Moore read Dickinson, first in her senior year of college and more extensively by the early 1930s, and that she came to admire Dickinson’s work. “A Jellyfish,” one of Moore’s earliest published poems, contains parallels to Dickinson that are—initially—most likely unintentional, but they are parallels that Moore would have likely recognized years later. Considering “A Jellyfish” in light of Moore’s decision to revise and reprint the poem in her final collections, I suggest that this late inclusion—a marked exception to Moore’s famous omissions—functions as a tacit, retrospective acknowledgement of what she and Dickinson have in common and exposes Moore’s interest in and ambivalence about disappearance, as related both to her own career and reputation and to affective experiences of loss and disappointment. “A Jellyfish,” thus, also exemplifies how the complex work of allusion is not always bound by intentionality.