'Black Obsidian Diana': Moore, Pound, and the Curation of Race

Abstract

This essay concerns the entangled relationship between modernist experiment and race in the late teens and early 1920s. Taking its focus from an exchange of letters between Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore in 1918-19, it argues that Pound's urge to access pure thought conceives racial embodiment as a thickened medium that intrudes between ‘intelligences’ in conversation. Moore's indirect response, the essay suggests, is a citational practice that attends to the provenance and curation of textual objects, and especially to the cultural and commercial traffic between ‘orient’ and ‘occident’. This case is made in a new reading of Moore's 1923 poem, ‘Marriage‘, which identifies, along the way, Sarojini Naidu, John Cournos, and a five-inch Egyptian statue as mediators between Moore and Pound.