Observations Above and Within the Sea

Marianne Moore releases her poetry collection Observations in December of 1924. Prominent throughout the collection are images of the sea in particular. The sea frames Moore's poetic and philosophic project, but looking at the timing of this publication, she is not alone in this interest. The most popular film of the year is The Sea Hawk, an adventure story in which a man is enslaved at sea and goes on to become a pirate king and win back the life stolen from him. These two visions are very different on the surface, but seen as a double vision, we understand how they both understand the same long history at this same moment in time.