In The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer argues that contemporary science, while evolving from magical and religious attempts to understand and control the natural world, eclipses these structures[1 ]. For Frazer, “magic” in the 20th century “is a spurious system of natural law as well as a fallacious guide to conduct; it is a false science as well as an abortive art.”[2] Frazer had a significant impact on early modernism, particularly on TS Eliot who stated that his work “has profoundly influenced our generation”[3]. The poetry of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, in its precision and careful description of the natural world, has been characterized as reflecting a supposed modernist obsession with scientific ways of understanding the world. Paradoxically both poets achieve a “mysterious” and otherworldly effect through their commitment to precision; in Moore's writing this manifests itself mainly in an excessive use of defamiliarization, while in Bishop he also explores the dreamscape, linked to an existential anxiety. While some critics have examined Torodov's "fantastic" literature and his relationship with Moore, and others have examined Bishop's surrealist influences, none have considered the possibility that their works exhibit qualities indicative of "magical realism". Although the term is often associated with the explicitly fantastical works of Latin American authors such as Garcia Márquez, in its initial iteration “magical realism” described “a way of discovering the mystery hidden in ordinary objects and everyday reality”[4] – a modality that does not it is limited to a specific time or place. By liberalizing and expanding the definition, critics such as William Spindler have produced a “typology” for the genre. Using Spindler's typology, I will argue above all that in their precision and hyperrealism, Moore and Bishop repeatedly elicit this “magical” effect; rather than being “false science,” this “magic” actually comes from a hyper-realistic, quasi-scientific analysis of the world. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In an interview with the Paris Review, Moore said that studying the sciences had a profound impact on his art: “I found the biology courses… exhilarating . I thought, in fact, about studying medicine. Precision, economy of statement, logic used for disinterested purposes, design and identification, liberate – at least impact – the imagination”[5]. they are treated as if they were scholarly sources and - unlike modernists such as Eliot and Joyce - these sources are enclosed in quotation marks and typically cited in his notes. For example, the poem 'Silence' is almost entirely structured around quoting his father narrator – my father said” – and perhaps rightly the voice of the narrator is itself marginalized and silenced. In the same way, the poet tries to silence attempts to read her own biography in poetry, since these words cannot be those of Moore's father, who died when she was 6 months old. In fact, in his notes he is credited to the father of “Miss A. M. Homans, Professor Emeritus of Hygiene, Wellesley College.” Distorting the provenance of this quote, the penultimate line “make my house your inn”, spoken as if it were still Mr Homan's, is attributed to the philosopher Edmund Burke. Despite this conflation of identities, critics such as John Charles Hawley argue that “these irregularities are not troubling” since “clearly Moore's intention is to create two composite archetypal figures: father andDaughter…. [the] father figure is explicitly constructed starting from Mr. Homans and Edmund Burke”[6]. While this last argument may be true, I would dispute that the effect of this is “not concerning”. Moore creates a sense of verisimilitude in the use of quotations: there is no reason not to trust the narrator when she says: “my father said”. Furthermore, the poet uses a logical approach to her topic, an argument that can be summarized through the combination of the first and last lines – “my father said” “inns are not residences” – the main body acts as a series of logical justifications for this view; “superior men never pay long visits”; “sometimes they enjoy solitude”. Thus, when the father, through the examination of Moore's notes, reveals himself to be "an archetype", the precise, scientific "indexicality"[7] actually has the effect of dislocating the character from a particular time or place. Natalia Cecire sees this dislocation as symptomatic of Moore's precision as a whole, arguing that she "reproduces the overwhelming quality that precision techniques are intended to manage, revealing a poetics whose very commitment to knowledge as such gives it a dimension darkly unknowable." [8] In his devotion to scientific accuracy, Moore paradoxically opens up the possibility of the uncanny through his poetry. Indeed, at times this “relentless accuracy”[9] of Moore's work has a distracting effect, particularly in poems dealing with animals and the natural world. For example, "To a Snail" includes the line "the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn"; the familiar eyes of a snail are made unfamiliar through neuroscientific lexicons such as “occipital” and the unusual use of “horn.” As in 'Silence', the precision and value of what is not said is emphasised: “contractility is a virtue // just as modesty is a virtue”. In Moore's poetry a didactic model emerges; the emphasis on "virtue" - repeated twice in two subsequent verses in 'To a Snail' - derives from a careful examination of the natural world, which on the one hand is presented as a container of moral teaching and on the other defamiliarized through its precision. The observed virtues act as objective properties within the snail itself – the modesty exhibited in the ability to contract at will is an example of the “principle that is hidden // in the absence of feet.” The same virtues admired in the typically unromantic animal are exhibited throughout Moore's poetry. Indeed, he would spend years creating a single poem, and the final product would be achieved through a long process of erasure; for example, the appropriate name of "Poetry" was reduced from 38 to 4. Inspired by Pound's statement that "we live in an age of science" and his suggestion that contemporary literature should take a scientific approach to its representation of the world , Moore's poetry is indicative of the clear and precise style of Imagism. But while careful description of the snail – and of the natural world within his poem as a whole – may reveal Moore's general and editorial values, it is by no means purely an allegory of these values, as the critic Schulze argues" Moore's animals remain animals"[ 10]. The snail acts as an almost literal metaphor, suggesting that through scientific analysis of the natural world itself - producing a mysterious and defamiliarizing effect - objective and applicable moral instructions can be discovered. Moore, as Bishop's mentor, had a considerable impact on her poetry, as such even the younger poet favors a precise and scientific style, so much so that in a letter to Moore she writes "you and I see what others overlook withcarelessness”[11]. However, although she suggests that morality can be observed in the natural world, she appears less convinced than Moore about the human capacity to interact with these values. In 'Sandpiper', for example, the value of precision is seen in the movement of the ocean: --Observing, rather, the spaces of sand between them, where (no detail is too small) the Atlantic flows rapidly backwards and downwards. The juxtaposition of the enormous with the tiny of the natural world, shown here through the spaces between grains of sand alongside the Atlantic Ocean which – despite its size – “drains” into every pore. Bishop, through observation of the ocean, evokes the need for precision, a value that is underlined in brackets for the reader “(no detail is too small)”. In the final stanza the reader distances himself from the narrative human voice, which takes on a pleased tone as he observes the bird searching among the grains of sand: “Poor bird, he is obsessed!”. Yet, despite the speaker's inability to understand the sandpiper's motivations, the validity of the bird's research still exists: the "millions of grains" of sand mingle with the luxurious, almost decadent "grains of quartz, rose and amethyst." . As Bishop stated, “there are many moral principles in animal life” and, crucially, “they must be studied by devoutly and minutely observing the animal”; as Moore argues that morality exists in the animal kingdom, yet the ability to appreciate it is reduced to the ability to observe “devoutly and minutely”. The potential failure to extract these values ​​from the natural world is an anxiety that recurs throughout Bishop's poetry, as critic Bonnie Costello suggests: "Moore continually placed value on facts, while Bishop placed desire, fear, uncertainty"[ 12]. In "The Armadillo" the "illegal fire balloons" appear to "rise towards a saint" from a human perspective, yet they wreak havoc comparable to hellfire in the animal kingdom "splattered like a fiery egg"; “the ancient owl's nest must be burned”. Furthermore, the anxiety towards the search for value in the outside world comes into crisis in 'In the Waiting Room''. Here Bishop's precision is alien, but unlike Moore this is the result of existential angst: the narrator's description of “shadowy gray knees” is a reaction to a perceived lack of values ​​(“why should I be my aunt, // or me or anyone”), the result of a precise analysis of the world around him carried out after closely observing a National Geographic magazine. This anxiety manifests itself in a dream sequence in which the narrator feels that the waiting room is slipping “under a great black wave”; truthful perception is questioned and scientific precision is dismantled, although this crisis is probably a consequence of precision itself. Before examining Bishop and Moore's elements of magical realism, I will turn to critical responses to the supposed discrepancy between their scientific precision and the mysterious, arguably magical, quality of their poems. First, Jeanne Heuving argues that much of Moore's poetry is indicative of a 20th-century version of Torodov's fantasy, defined as “that hesitation experienced by a person [the reader] who knows only the laws of nature, of faced with an apparently supernatural event"[13 ][14]. Explicit use of the supernatural occasionally occurs in Moore's poetry. For example, in the first piece “Diligence is to magic as progress is to flying” the distinction between language and thing blurs: “In his mind speed is not inseparable from carpets”. This inseparability is indicative of Torodov's fantasy; the reader is unable to distinguish between the description of thoughtsof the narrator and the supernatural entity of the “magic carpet”. However, the mysterious “darkly unknowable dimension” of Moore's poetry cannot be limited to the few poems in which he incorporates the supernatural, and Torodov's fantasy – which requires at least the suggestion of the supernatural – fails to encompass a poem like “At a snail". ”. Instead, critics have attempted to approach Bishop from a surrealist point of view, understandable for a poet who once stated: "Dreams... capture a peripheral vision of whatever can never be seen in full, but this seems enormously important"; many of his poems read like verbal reconstructions of dreams. For example, "The Weed" begins with the impossible, the act of imagining the feeling of being dead, as Bishop states "I dreamed that dead, and meditating, // I lay upon a grave, or bed." Throughout the poem the vivid images of the “rooted heart” are constantly linked to the psychology of the narrator, whose thoughts – just like the narrator of Moore's “Diligence is to Magic as Progress is to Flying” – become physical: he has the head all wet // (with my thoughts)”. Max Ernst once described how flipping through a catalog was enough to induce sensory overload in its saturation of images and photographs, similarly “The Weed” flicks from place to place while maintaining the photographic precision characteristic of surrealism. Despite his precision, Bishop presents "a landscape foreign to the objects depicted," in which "his poems contain much of the magic, strangeness, and displacement associated with the works of the Surrealists." However, Bishop's “magic” cannot be confined entirely to the realms of human psychology, as critic Richard Mullen points out “His landscapes may well possess qualities of dreamscapes, but at the same time they are marked by an unusually rich appreciation of the world natural"[15]. We cannot forget that, unlike the Surrealists who argued that "there were no objects, but only subjects" and possessed little interest in the external world outside the inner psychological life of human beings, Bishop's work is dominated by the presence of the world natural exterior. Mullen sees limitations in reading Bishop as a surrealist poet, perhaps the work as a selling point for a magical realist analysis of his and Moore's poetry. Coined in the 1920s by German artist Franz Roh, the initial movement stemmed from a fascination with psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious. However, unlike the surrealists, magical realism was not interested in depicting the inner mind of human beings, rather the "magic" resided in the external world itself and could be revealed through precise analysis. In Roh's words, «the mystery does not descend into the represented world, but hides within the world itself»[16]. Furthermore, unlike the fantastic, magical realism in its broadest definition is not limited to a play between the supernatural and the uncanny, rather through a sufficiently careful analysis of reality the wonderful and the uncanny reveal themselves in the external world. For example, in Bishop's 'The Fish' the oil spill – a typically unromantic image – becomes an object of beauty as the refraction of light transforms it into “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow”. The scene is at once vivid and hyper-realistic, emphasized through emphatic repetition. Similarly, the presentation of animals as literal metaphors is indicative of Roh's conception of magical realism, Moore's snail cannot be confined to an allegory for the editorial process: morality is evident in the animal kingdom and can be revealed through precision. In his