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 frameworks [1]. For Frazer, “magic” in the 20th century “is a fallacious system of natural laws 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 TS Eliot who claimed that his work "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, the two poets achieve a supernatural “mysterious” effect thanks to their concern for precision; in Moore's this manifests primarily through an excessive reliance on defamiliarization, while in Bishop's also explores the dreamscape, linked to an existential anxiety. While some critics have looked at 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”. While the term is often associated with the explicitly fantastical works of Latin American authors such as Garcia Marquez, in its first iteration, "magical realism" describes "a way of discovering the mystery hidden in ordinary objects and everyday reality" [4] – a fashion that is not limited to a specific time or place. By liberalizing and broadening the definition, critics such as William Spindler have produced a "typology" of gender. Using Spindler's typology, I will essentially argue that, in their precision and hyperrealism, Moore and Bishop repeatedly elicit this "magical" effect; Rather than being “fake science,” this “magic” actually stems from a hyperrealistic, almost scientific, analysis of the world. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"? Get an original essay In an interview with the Paris Review, Moore claimed that scientific studies had a profound impact on his art: "I I found biology classes... exhilarating. . Actually, I was thinking of studying medicine. The precision, the economy of statement, the logic used for disinterested, drawing and identifying purposes, liberates, at least has a certain impact on the imagination”[5]. It is impossible not to identify in Moore's works this exaltation for the scientist, even the inspirations for his poems are treated as if they were academic sources and - unlike modernists like Eliot and Joyce - these sources are placed in quotation marks and generally referenced in his notes. For example, the poem “Silence” is almost entirely structured around the narrator’s father’s quote – my father said: “ – and perhaps fittingly, the narrator’s voice is itself marginalized and silenced. Likewise, the poet attempts to silence attempts to read her own biography into the poem, because these words cannot be those of Moore's own father, who died when she was 6 months old. Indeed, in his notes he is attributed to the father of “Miss AM Homans, Professor Emeritus of Hygiene, Wellesley College.” In a distortion of the provenance of this quote, the penultimate phrase "make my house your inn", spoken as if also by Mr. Homan, is attributed to the philosopher Edmund Burke. Despite this fusion of identities, critics suchthat John Charles Hawley asserts that “these irregularities are not troubling” because “clearly Moore's intention is to create two composite archetypal figures: father and daughter…. [the] father figure is constructed explicitly from Mr. Homans and Edmund Burke”[6]. While the latter argument may be true, I would dispute that the effect of this is "not troubling." Moore creates a sense of verisimilitude in her use of quotes: there is no reason not to trust the narrator when she says, "my father said." Furthermore, the poet uses a logical approach to her argument, an argument that can be summarized by the combination of the first and last lines – “my father said” “inns are not residences” – the main body acts as a series logical justifications for this point of view; “superior men never make long visits”; “They sometimes like solitude.” Thus, when the father, through the examination of Moore's notes, reveals himself to be "an archetype", the precise and scientific "indexicality"[7] actually has the effect of dislocating the character from one moment or another. 'a particular place. Natalia Cecire sees this dislocation as symptomatic of Moore's precision as a whole, arguing that it "reproduces the overwhelming quality that precision techniques are meant to manage, revealing a poetics whose very commitment to knowledge as such gives a dark and unknowable dimension. [8] In his dedication to scientific accuracy, Moore paradoxically opens up the possibility of the mysterious through his poetry. Indeed, this "relentless accuracy"[9] of Moore's work sometimes has a defamiliarizing effect, particularly in poems that deal with animals and the natural world. For example, “To a Snail” includes the phrase “the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn”; a snail's familiar eyes become unfamiliar thanks to neuroscientific lexicon such as "occipital" and the unusual use of "horn." As in “Silence”, the precision and value of the unsaid are underlined: “contractility is a virtue // like modesty is a virtue”. A didactic model emerges in Moore's poetry; the emphasis on "virtue" - repeated twice in two successive lines of "To a Snail" - arises from a careful examination of the natural world, which is on the one hand presented as the container of moral teaching and of the other defamiliarized through its precision. The observed virtues act as objective properties within the snail itself – the modesty manifested in the ability to contract at will is an example of the "hidden principle // in the absence of feet". The same virtues admired in the typically unromantic animal are on display throughout Moore's poetry. Indeed, she would spend years writing a single poem, and the final product was achieved through an extensive process of erasure; for example, the aptly named "Poetry" was reduced from 38 lines to 4. Inspired by Pound's assertion that "we live in the age of science" and his suggestion that contemporary literature should adopt an approach scientific in its representation of the world. , Moore's poetry is indicative of the clear and precise style of Imagism. But while a detailed description of the snail—and of the natural world in his poetry as a whole—may reveal Moore's general and editorial values, it is by no means a simple allegory of those values, as critic Schulze maintains: “Moore’s animals remain animals.” 10]. The snail acts as an almost literal metaphor, the suggestion being that through scientific analysis of the natural world itself – while producing a mysterious and defamiliarizing effect – one can discoverobjective and applicable moral instructions. Moore, as Bishop's mentor, had a tremendous impact on her. poetry, as such, the young poet also favors a precise and scientific style, in fact in a letter to Moore she writes “you and I see what others carelessly overlook”[11]. However, although she suggests that morality can be observed in the natural world, she seems less convinced than Moore of the human capacity to interact with these values. In "Sandpiper", for example, the value of precision is seen in the movement of the ocean: --By observing instead the spaces of sand between them, where (no detail is too small) the Atlantic flows quickly backwards and downwards. The juxtaposition of the enormous with the tiny in the natural world, shown here through the spaces between grains of sand along the Atlantic Ocean which, despite its size, "flows" through all its pores. Bishop, through the observation of the ocean, evokes the need for precision - a value which is emphasized as an aside to the reader in parentheses "(no detail too small)". In the final stanza, the reader is alienated from the narrative human voice, which adopts a smug tone while observing the bird searching between 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 search exists regardless: the "millions of grains" of sand mix with the luxurious, almost decadent "grains of quartz, rose and amethyst. As Bishop asserted, “there are many morals in animal life” and, above all, “they must be studied by observing the animal with dedication and minuteness”; Like Moore, she argues that morality exists in the animal kingdom, but the ability to appreciate it comes down to being able to observe "with dedication and thoroughness." The potential inability to extract these values ​​from the natural world is an anxiety that recurs throughout Bishop's poetry, as critic Bonnie Costello suggests: "Moore continually attached value to facts, where Bishop attached desire, fear , uncertainty”[12]. In "The Armadillo", the "illegal fire balloons" seem to "rise to a saint" from a human perspective, and yet wreak havoc comparable to the fires of hell in the animal kingdom "they splash like an egg of fire”; “the old owl’s nest must have burned down.” Additionally, anxiety about finding value in the outside world turns into a crisis in “In the Waiting Room.” Here, Bishop's precision is defamiliarizing, but unlike Moore, it is the result of existential angst: the narrator's description of "gray, dark knees" is a reaction to a perceived lack of values ​​("why should I be my aunt, // or me or anyone") resulting from a precise analysis of the world around her carried out after careful observation of a National Geographic magazine. This anxiety manifests itself in a dream sequence where the narrator has the impression that the waiting room is sliding “under a great black wave”; truthful perception is challenged and scientific precision is dismantled, although this crisis is arguably a consequence of precision itself. Before examining Bishop and Moore's realist and magical elements, I will first turn to critical responses to the alleged 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, confronted with an apparently supernatural event”[13].][14]. Explicit use of the supernatural appears occasionally in Moore's poetry. For example, in her first piece “Diligence is to magic what progress is to flight”, she blurs the distinction between language and thing: “Speed ​​is not inseparable from carpets in her mind”. This inseparability is indicative of Torodov's fantastic; the reader is unable to distinguish between the description of the narrator's thoughts and the supernatural entity of the "magic carpet." Nevertheless, the mysterious "dark and unknowable dimension" of Moore's poetry cannot be limited to the few poems where she incorporates the supernatural, and Torodov's fantastical – which requires at least the suggestion of the supernatural – fails to encompass a poem such as “To a Snail”. ". In contrast, critics have attempted to approach Bishop from a surrealist angle, understandable for a poet who once said: "Dreams...capture a peripheral view of anything, you can never really see it face on, but it seems extremely important”; many of his poems read like verbal reconstructions of dreams. For example, "The Weed" begins with the impossible, the act of contemplating the feeling of being dead, as Bishop says: "I dreamed that dead and meditating, // I lay on a grave or a bed.” Throughout the poem, the vivid imagery of the “rooted heart” is constantly linked to the psychology of the narrator, whose very thoughts – much like the narrator of “Diligence is to magic as progress is to flight” by Moore - become physical: "He lifted his head is all wet // (from my own thoughts)". Max Ernst once described how flipping through a catalog was enough to induce sensory overload in its saturation of images and images, just as "The Weed" flips from place to place while maintaining characteristic photographic precision surrealism. Despite his precision, Bishop presents "a landscape foreign to the objects depicted", a landscape where "his poems contain much of the magic, strangeness and displacement associated with the works of the Surrealists". Nevertheless, Bishop's "magic" cannot be entirely confined to the realms of human psychology, as critic Richard Mullen points out: "His landscapes may possess qualities of dreamscapes, but at the same time they are marked by an unusually rich appreciation of the natural world”[15]. ]. We cannot forget that unlike the surrealists who claimed "there were no objects, only subjects" and who had little interest in the external world outside of the inner psychological life of humans, the work of Bishop is dominated by the presence of the external natural world. Mullen sees the limitations of reading Bishop as a surrealist poet, perhaps as a strength for a magical realist analysis of his and Moore's poetry. Invented 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 minds of humans, but rather in the "magic" that was found in the external world itself and could be revealed through careful analysis . In Roh's words, "the mystery does not descend into the represented world, but rather hides in the world itself"[16]. Furthermore, unlike fantasy, magical realism in its broader definition is not limited to a play between the supernatural and the strange, but rather through a sufficiently in-depth analysis of reality, the marvelous and the strange are revealed in the outside world. For example, in Bishop's “The Fish,” the oil leak –