Abstract: American modernist poet Marianne Moore’s 1959 poetry collection, O to Be a Dragon, was created under the influence from the Chinese American artist Mai-mai Sze’s book, The Tao of Painting, which explicates the aesthetics of classical Chinese painting. Moore’s collection delivers, implicitly, her poetic response to the ferocious ideological struggle during the Cold War. With the American Cold War propaganda as the foreground of this poetic collection, one may see from the perspective of the idea of “territoriality” in anthropogeogoraphical studies that the borrowing of the classical Chinese aesthetics in O to Be a Dragon is, in essence, Moore’s calculated counterattack and resistance against the concept of “territoriality,” a concept that was deliberately highlighted in the Cold War propaganda.

Key words: O to Be a Dragon, Cold War, territoriality, Marianne Moore