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While the centennials of various modernist “monuments” are eliciting the paradoxes at work in “tradition of the new” (H. Rosenberg), which their authors and critics have contributed to create, Marianne Moore’s poetry invites us to reconsider the movement through alternative temporalities that radically complicate history and how it is written. Between her ephemeral publications in little magazines and the shaping of an ever-changing corpus of books, which has dissolved the significance of a falsely inaugural landmark, Moore’s first American collection, Observations (1924), evinces the poet’s interest for all forms of history (whether literary, human or natural), and how Moore sought to blur its designs, while historiography was under its critics’ first attacks. Her “observations” reject both the quest for origins and prophetic visions, and offer a montage of impure temporalities, a visual and textual dialectics whose anachronical power ultimately unravels and reshapes the very history of the modernist movement.