The “Concentric Crushing Rigor” of the Mountain: The Destabilization of the Human Poetic Voice in Marianne Moore’s "An Octopus"

This paper is an exploration of the ecopoetics of Marianne Moore’s “An Octopus,” beginning from a question of the poet’s historical position following the often egocentric environmentalism of the Romantic tradition and within the Modernist conversation uniquely concerned with the symbolic significan