Langdon Hammer's Modern Poetry lecture at Yale (ENGL 310) examines Marianne Moore's poetry through her engagement with gender, American culture, and nature. Hammer opens with the situation of women in modernist literary culture before turning to close readings of three poems. "A Grave" illustrates Moore's prose rhythms and discursive, unmetered style. "England" emerges as a defense of American culture against the Eurocentrism of Eliot, Pound, and other modernists. "An Octopus" shows Moore weaving in language lifted from pamphlets and other unliterary prose sources, arguing that poetic inspiration need not come from a single voice or literary tradition. The lecture is chaptered into these four segments and runs just over forty minutes, part of the Open Yale Courses series recorded in spring 2007.