19 pages • 38-minute read
The Lesson of the Moth
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Background
Literary Context
"the lesson of the moth” was published during a revolutionary time in English poetry. Modernism, a late-19th and early 20th-century movement in art and literature that shunned formal tradition, reached its apex during the 1920s and 1930s. “the lesson of the moth” draws heavily from modernist free-verse forms. One of modernism’s main issues with the clean poetic forms of the previous generations is that they struggle to depict the messy and chaotic nature of modern life. Perfect rhyming couplets and iambic pentameter are not fit to bear witness to the First World War.
The chaos of modern life was not limited to the battlefield, however. Early modernists like T. S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” were both published during the war, focused on the chaos inherent in the new urban metropolises. The new, faster news cycles in these large cities also contributed to the chaotic lifestyle. For the first time in Western human history, there was more information than one could process. Marquis’s work as an editor made him acutely aware of this surplus of information. The Evening Sun, where he began “The Sun Dial,” was the evening version of The Sun. Together, The Sun ran two 16-page newspapers every day to keep up with the influx of information. These problems with modern civilization are likely what the moth refers to when he states that “human beings [...] became / too civilized to enjoy themselves” (Lines 40-42).
Large urban populations also brought the problem of urban pests such as Archy the cockroach. Just as the modernist aesthetic questioned traditional forms, it also questioned traditional notions of what is fit for art. Many modernist works feature characters and symbols not previously considered dignified. Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella, The Metamorphosis, for instance, features a narrator who is understood to have been turned into a cockroach.
Cultural Context
In 1927, particularly in large metropolises like New York, where Marquis’s “The Sun Dial” ran as a regular column, the newspaper industry was one of the main sources of information. Since the newspaper industry relied on customers to subscribe to or to purchase issues of their newspaper, it was in the editor’s best interest to keep their writing accessible and easily consumable.
Unlike many modernist poets, who often had independent means and used their work as a mode of self-expression, Marquis wrote professionally. While he may have had other, particular aims with certain works, he wrote to make money. This means that Marquis’s writing had to have broad appeal among the reading public—otherwise, his column would not have run for 11 years.
The success of Marquis’s column (which included works like “lesson of the moth”) indicates the popular taste in New York at the time. The average reader of the daily newspaper, for instance, would likely be aware of the forms and conventions of modernist poetry. However, they would not necessarily be the type to seek that poetry out. Therefore, the toned-down version of modernist experimentation in “the lesson of the moth” would be palatable to a contemporary audience, especially considering the poem’s straightforward narrative. The comic, unpretentious explanation for the poem’s form (that Archy is unable to press two keys at once) also signifies that the poem is not mistaken for a work with high literary aims.
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