"Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt"
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A good theory should leave you with fewer mysteries, not a smug sense that every human twitch has been filed into a cabinet. Marianne Moore’s line skewers a certain kind of “psychology” as overconfident storytelling: the system that can account for every outcome after the fact, precisely because it’s elastic enough to fit anything. When an explanation expands to cover all possibilities, it stops being an explanation and becomes a vibe - a rhetorical fog machine.
Moore, a poet with a naturalist’s eye for detail and a moralist’s allergy to cant, is pushing back against the early 20th century’s hunger for totalizing frameworks. Freud is in the air, behaviorism is rising, and modern life is getting sorted into diagnoses, drives, and charts. Her sentence functions like a logical trap: “explains everything” sounds like intellectual victory, then the second clause snaps shut. If it can’t be wrong, it can’t be right in any meaningful way. What’s left is “doubt,” not as a failure but as an honest remainder.
The subtext is also a defense of particularity, which is central to Moore’s poetry. Human motives aren’t just hidden mechanisms to be decoded; they’re lived, contradictory, and often resistant to neat causality. She isn’t anti-psychology so much as anti-prestige: suspicious of explanations that soothe the explainer more than they clarify the world. The line lands because it’s austere, almost scientific in its phrasing, yet it protects something poetic - the irreducible mess that keeps experience from becoming a closed case.
Moore, a poet with a naturalist’s eye for detail and a moralist’s allergy to cant, is pushing back against the early 20th century’s hunger for totalizing frameworks. Freud is in the air, behaviorism is rising, and modern life is getting sorted into diagnoses, drives, and charts. Her sentence functions like a logical trap: “explains everything” sounds like intellectual victory, then the second clause snaps shut. If it can’t be wrong, it can’t be right in any meaningful way. What’s left is “doubt,” not as a failure but as an honest remainder.
The subtext is also a defense of particularity, which is central to Moore’s poetry. Human motives aren’t just hidden mechanisms to be decoded; they’re lived, contradictory, and often resistant to neat causality. She isn’t anti-psychology so much as anti-prestige: suspicious of explanations that soothe the explainer more than they clarify the world. The line lands because it’s austere, almost scientific in its phrasing, yet it protects something poetic - the irreducible mess that keeps experience from becoming a closed case.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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