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"Still Leafing": Celebrity, Confession, Marianne Moore's "The Camperdown Elm" and the Scandal of Age

The essay argues that Marianne Moore's "The Camperdown Elm" (1967) employs a form of confession, to the scandal of being an elderly woman, as part of her ongoing exploration and deployment of the evolving dynamics of celebrity culture, to benefit Moore's activist causes, her own poetic longevity, and her relationship with her fans. This exploration occurs in dialogue with her contemporaries the confessionals, her modernist peers (Eliot and Loy) and her environmentalist precursors — specifically the Hudson River School painters Thomas Cole and Asher Durand and the meditative, environmental poet William Cullen Bryant, all named in the poem — to construct its own meditation on influence, authority and mortality. The poem explores the scandal of age with reference to the tradition of ekphrastic meditations on the poet's own death, but concludes by turning away from meditation toward direct action (saving a real tree) and collaborative relationship with Moore's fans.