SOURCE: “Marianne Moore and a Psychoanalytic Paradigm for the Dissociated Image,” in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 30, Summer, 1984, pp. 366-71.

In the following essay, Lourdeaux finds in Marianne Moore's animal imagery an example of the modernist “dissociated image.”

A hallmark of modernist poetry is the dissociated image—the evening sky once Eliot has compared it to a patient etherized on a table—as opposed to images with more conventional shared relations of time, or place, or logical type.¹ The modernist basis for the reader's intuitive perception of similarity-in-difference, to use Aristotle's criterion for a good metaphor, is a likeness typically limited to psychological and cultural connotations. Given this focus on psycho-cultural meaning, critics should consider carefully the psychoanalytic history of dissociated images in a poetic canon, if only to understand better in modernist poetry the complex crucial relation between autobiography and cultural criticism. By explaining the key stylistic developments...