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Notable Poets Marianne Moore Born: Kirkwood, Missouri; November 15, 1887 Died: New York, New York; February 5, 1972 Poetry: Poems, 1921; Observations, 1924; Selected Poems, 1935; The Pangolin and Other Verse, 1936; What Are Years, 1941; Nevertheless, 1944; Collected Poems, 1951; Selected Fables of La Fontaine, 1955 (translation); Like a Bulwark, 1956; O to Be a Dragon, 1959; Tell Me, Tell Me, 1966; The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, 1967, 1981 Achievements If she had lived longer she would have sympathized with the aims, if not with the more fervid rhetoric, of the revived feminist movement; but in her day Marianne Moore sought recognition without regard to gender. Her daring paid off, since her work impresses most critics, male or female, as that of a major figure among poets of modernism; she is considered to be an artist on a par with Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound.Praised by T. S. Eliot as “one of those few who have done the language some service,” Moore quickly made a reputation among other poets. She won the Dial Award in 1924, and in 1925 was the object of discussion in five consecutive issues of The Dial. Her work, however, long remained little known to the public. The “beauty” that she sought was the product of an individualistic decorum, a discipline of self and art that yielded the quality she admired in the poem “The Monkey Puzzle” (Selected Poems, 1935) as “porcupine-quilled, complicated starkness.” The quilled and stark imagery is slow to attract admirers other than the cognoscenti, but by the 1950’s her work was receiving wide recognition. She had, indeed, a year of wonder in 1952, receiving the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. Since that time, some of her poems have appeared in every reasonably comprehensive anthology of modern verse. Either the 1935 or the 1967 version of “Poetry” is almost always included. Other choices vary: “The Pangolin,” “What Are Years?,” “Virginia Britannia,” and “A Grave” are among those poems most frequently anthologized. Biography The relaxation in Marianne Moore’s later verse and the rise of public acclaim demonstrate that late in her life the poetic self that had begun in a reticence that approached diffidence, that had armored itself as much against temptation from within as against threat from without, had burst through its early encasements to take on the role of moralist and even of sociopolitical adviser. A degree of tolerance for the self and the world perhaps made her choices easier, although it did not always benefit her art. Moore seems to have had an inborn disdain for the self-indulgent. After a girlhood in Missouri and Pennsylvania and an education at Bryn Mawr College, she taught commercial subjects at the United States Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for three and a half years while perfecting her art as a poet. Her verse began to appear in The Egoist (London), Poetry, and other journals of the new poetry. By 1918, she had settled in Manhattan and become a member of the literary circle that included William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Alfred Kreymborg. Her first volume, Poems (1921), was brought out in London. The period of the Dial Award was followed by her appointment in 1925 as an editor—soon to be editor-in-chief—of The Dial. She guided the journal through its heyday as the premier American periodical of literature and the arts. The work excited her, demonstrated her firm taste, and made her acquainted with most of the prominent writers of the time. After The Dial was discontinued in 1928, Moore never again worked at a salaried job. Although she earned occasional small checks for verse and reviews, her career as a writer, according to Driver, was subsidized by the former backers of The Dial. In the same year that the publication ended, Moore and her mother—a close adviser until her death in 1947—moved to Brooklyn, where the poet’s brother John, a Navy chaplain, was stationed. Useful though it was, the period with The Dial was an interruption. Moore had published Observations (1924) before going to work on the journal; her next book, Selected Poems, did not appear until 1935. This volume reprinted several pieces from earlier books and also some more recent work from magazines. The slim The Pangolin and Other Verse appeared in 1936. Moore lived quietly for the next two decades, publishing additional thin volumes. In the 1950’s, the growing acceptance of modernism and the approval indicated by her numerous awards helped bring public attention; she became, indeed, something of a celebrity. Doubtless interest was furthered by her darting and witty conversation with interviewers, as well as her shrewd adoption of a three-cornered hat as a badge of eccentricity. It became routine to see a photo story in Life magazine on Moore’s trip to the zoo, to read of her as unofficial hostess for the mayor of New York, and to find The New Yorker printing the hilarious exchange of letters that resulted from the request in 1955 that she think up names for a new model from Ford. (The final choice—not one of her suggestions—was “Edsel.”) When in 1965 she left her Brooklyn apartment for one in Manhattan, the move was recorded on the front page of The New York Times. Yet Moore could never be accused of self-importance. She enjoyed attention, but was wary—“I am often taken advantage of,” she said—and continued to work at essays, reviews, and poetry. In some of her late verse she is sententious or playful. In other pieces she continues to focus on an object, a “thing” that provides her with observable fact that she can carpenter into an aesthetic stairway, a means of rising to discovery. Readers will frequently find in the work of her early and middle decades, and sometimes even in her late poems, the delight, the quilled beauty that is her legacy. Analysis In Marianne Moore’s best work the imagined and the perceived are interdependent; she merges the two to create her usefully idiosyncratic reality. Often she finds in her universe suggestions of ethical principle. When she integrates statement of principle with sufficient circumstance, she makes the presentation seem not merely a lesson but also a fundamental component of the aesthetic structure of her world. That “we”—speakers of English, one supposes—have not successfully integrated the world of imagination with that of the senses is part of the closing observation in her best-known poem, the 1935 version of “Poetry.” This piece unfortunately has been the victim of ill-advised revision. Its argument was clear in the 1921 printing; after publishing a much-altered version in her 1924 book, Moore in 1935 returned to the 1921 version. The 1935 printing, however, introduced an ambiguity that illustrates how much may depend on so supposedly trivial a device as a punctuation mark. The 1935 version, the one that became well-known, opens with a first line that seems to dismiss poetry as “all this fiddle.” This is best taken as a bit of rueful humor about Moore’s own dedication, since she clearly was in no way contemptuous of her art. The poetry she likes is that which contains the “genuine,” a quality that she shows by example and then by assertion to be equivalent to “useful.” In what is perhaps a caution against the dangers of her own frequent practice of working from pictures or written descriptions rather than from first-hand experience, she remarks that the too “derivative” may become “unintelligible,” and adds that people do not admire “what they cannot understand.” In the 1921 version, a period followed “understand,” making it clear that the next several examples that the poem gives are included in the “phenomena” mentioned in line 18. But after “understand” in the 1935 version, Moore puts a colon, seeming to indicate that the content of the following lines is to be taken as examples of objects that, because they are unintelligible, are not admired. This material, however, consists of several notations of the sort of exact reality that Moore likes to use—a “tireless” wolf, a “twitching critic”—and lines 16 to 18 accept the usefulness of such detail by declaring that, together with other matter, all such “phenomena” are important. The reader not deterred by the apparent contradiction will next find a warning that mere specification of “phenomena” does not make art, followed by the observation that real poetry is not yet with “us,” that it will arise only when poets become “literalists of the imagination” who produce “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” This much-discussed phrase is a careful statement of her own intention: to disclose the universe (“imaginary gardens”) suggested by t objects perceived by the senses (such as “real toads”). The ending remark is that “in the meantime” the reader will have to be satisfied with one or the other of the two components of true art: raw material in “all its rawness” and “the genuine.” The real poet, it appears, will be the one who merges these elements. “Poetry” is uncharacteristically broad in its interests. Moore’s usual stance in her early work is that of one on guard against threat, controlling and armoring the self. She sees humankind as living in danger, as though over an abyss, an emptiness largely composed of people’s ignorance of purpose or significances, together with a suggestion that the universe, insofar as it may heed humankind at all, is indifferent or hostile. One must be rock-hard, alert, wary. In “The Fish” (Poems) she portrays the dark colorations, the lack of hiding places, the “iron edge” of the forces that impel life forms into seemingly chaotic motion. Yet these life forms represent the intelligence, the consciousness of an enduring cliff of reality and of spirit that withstands all “abuse” and “accident.” The view is ultimately optimistic; but the optimism is sparse, the opponent determined, grim, almost victorious. The sense of threat, of a necessary caution in attempts to profit from or even to understand the oceanic indifference that surrounds man, is emphasized in “A Grave” (Observations). Here the “sea,” the abyss of, perhaps, the universe, society, or self-indulgence, offers the incautious nothing but a grave; it subdues the rapacious with its own superior rapacity; it lies under all activity of human and bird and shell, and, though men may at times create a harmony that seems to deny its power, in the end it extinguishes all that is “dropped,” that thoughtlessly stumbles into it. One protection is decorum, a discipline that keeps focus on the essential, that avoids all gluttony and greed. Moore frequently celebrates objects, creatures, and places that exemplify this spare rectitude. Thus, she presents as an appropriate home for man the town that has an abundance of delights but no excess, the town of “The Steeple-Jack” (Selected Poems). The excess that Moore criticizes is that of the artifice that is too clever, too luxuriant in ornament and ingenuity. In “The Jerboa” (Selected Poems), stanzas headed “Too Much” condemn the wealth of Egyptian courtiers who accumulated luxuries while poverty and drought afflicted the common people; stanzas headed “Abundance” celebrate the true wealth of the jerboa, the self-sufficient rodent that, unlike the pharaoh’s over-indulged mongoose, knows a natural “rest” in its desert home. In such early poems, Moore finds in the relatively uncomplicated lives of animals, usually exotic ones that have no traditional symbolism in the English-speaking world, and occasionally in examples from the worlds of flora and of human craftsmanship, the delight that arises from the primary values she recommends. These are the values that make for survival in a world of hard requirements: honesty in function and behavior, modest simplicity in bearing, and courage. The combination of discipline and excitement, of decorum and ardor, is supported by Moore’s style. Instead of using the accentual-syllabic measure that determines the length of lines in most poetry in English—a repetitive arrangement of stressed syllables which gives verse a sound quite different from prose—Moore counts syllables. This gives her the freedom to use the syntax normal to prose. Her syntax is at times exotic, but this results from her fondness for ellipses and abrupt juxtapositions that require of the reader some of the dexterity of her own perception. The syllabic measure enables her to use feminine rhyme, which puts the stress on syllables other than those that rhyme. She commonly parallels line lengths from stanza to stanza. In “The Jerboa,” for example, the first and second lines of each stanza have five syllables, the third lines each have six, the fourth lines have eleven, and similar parallelism is maintained throughout. She also indents to put together those lines which rhyme. Internal correspondences of sound are frequent. Despite this workmanship, however, the effects are almost entirely visual: Read aloud, a Moore poem sounds like thoughtful prose. Yet the suggestion of verse is there; and it is strengthened by Moore’s obvious delight in accumulating specific, colorful detail. Fastidious, seemingly reticent, avoiding the glaring and the grotesque, gaining impact by conveying the sense of tightly controlled, unsentimental emotion, the style suggests possibilities for a verse that English has not yet fully exploited. The theme of most of Moore’s early work is summed up in “An Octopus” (Selected Poems) as “relentless accuracy.” Although in the poetry that she published in mid-career she continues to emphasize need for discipline and heroic behavior, she begins to relent a bit, to add to her exposition an emphasis on love and spiritual grace. She always gives particulars, grounding cautionary generalization firmly in sensory reality. She no longer limits her typical poem to one “thing,” one animal or object, however, and she more often considers directly the human behavior that is the underlying subject. The broadening of range shows in the great poem “The Pangolin” (The Pangolin and Other Verse), an admiration of the interrelationships of grace as that quality is seen in the observed features of the animal, the architecture and stone ornamentation of a cathedral, and the behavior of men when “kindly” toward one another. In such “splendour” Moore finds a suggestion of the spiritual. The poem is a marvelous interweaving of delighted observations of the animal, appreciative examination of the cathedral, recognition of humankind’s “vileness” but also of its “excellence,” and intimation, by question and by assertion of renewal, of the existence of a grace beyond the mundane. Other poems from The Pangolin and Other Verse show similar acceptance of a world beyond the self. Intricate and skillful interweaving of detail and unobtrusive comment makes “Virginia Britannia” a celebration of the possibilities of the American continent, leading to the question: “How could man ignore and destroy?” In “Smooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle”—the title hints at paradox—the poet ends with a rueful “Alas!” for humankind, the creatures who in artifice honor the peace, plenty, and wisdom, the friendship and love, that they do not in fact allow to direct their behavior. In “Spenser’s Ireland” (What Are Years), a gentler humor accepts certain peculiarities as native to the Irish (among whom the poet lists herself), even while the poem renews Moore’s frequent assertion that one is never really free until or unless one is “captive” to a “supreme belief.” The poem “What Are Years?” is Moore’s most direct presentation of her values. Perhaps too direct for some tastes, it appeals to others by its accessibility. After noting that people cannot understand the nature of their guilt or innocence, but that all are “naked” to the dangers of existence, the speaker moves on to define courage as “resolute doubt,” the strength of spirit to remain strong even when defeated. The chief exponent of such strength is the one who “accedes to mortality,” who accepts the fact of death and yet struggles to live, keeps returning to the struggle even though imprisoned in a world of mortality. An ambiguous “So” begins the last stanza: one who feels strongly, who is intensely aware of mortality, “behaves,” keeps the ego disciplined. The pattern is that of the caged bird who, though captive, continues to sing. Despite his lack of “satisfaction,” presumably of desire for flight and freedom, he knows “joy,” the spiritual strength to go on living and to triumph over circumstance. This joyous discipline, it appears, “is” mortality, is knowledge of death, yet also “is” eternity, awareness of something beyond the mortal. Survival calls, above all, for fortitude, the quality honored in “Nevertheless” (Nevertheless, 1944). Here the speaker’s admiring delight in the way plant life manages to survive, not by withdrawing but by reaching out, by extending its growth, leads to the observation that to achieve “victory” one cannot be merely passive; one must “go/ to it.” Two of Moore’s most delightful poems are “A Carriage from Sweden,” applauding the “unannoying/ romance” of the decorative yet functional cart that the speaker has seen in a museum; and “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing” celebrating the play of the human mind that is both “trued” by belief and complex enough to experience “conscientious inconsistency.” “In Distrust of Merits” praises the sacrifices of Allied soldiers in World War II; the speaker contrasts hate and love, declares that the worst of enemies is the self, and, vowing never to hate people of other skin-colors or religions, decries the error of hate and egocentrism. The speaker then backs up: presumably those who love are “not competent” to make such vows until they have replaced with “life” the scene of death that has resulted from their neglect of others. The guilt is shared by everyone, for wars are “inward.” The speaker must learn to live for the beauty that arises from patient (that is, thoughtful and loving) action, not as the “dust,” the human being who lives in arrogance. Moore wrote no long poems. Although in her work of the 1950’s she appears to have moved away from reticence, she still often prefers to attribute declarative or striking statements to someone else: few poets have been as given to the indirect, sometimes oblique, view of experience afforded by use of quotations, photographs, and other products of someone else’s observation. Moore likes to approach at second-hand, so to speak, to comment on and to expand the significance that she finds suggested or confirmed by others. Most such material she takes from her reading, but in some cases one may suspect that she puts quotation marks around a phrase of her own that she wants to hold up for inspection without seeming to impose herself on the reader. This fondness for operating at one remove from the subject that she would find work as a translator congenial. It is not surprising to note that in 1945, after W. H. Auden proposed to a publisher that she translate the Fables choisies, mises en vers (1668-1694) of the French poet Jean de La Fontaine, she began what became an eight-year labor of translation, amounting to two and a half times as much verse as she printed in the Collected Poems (1951). Moore’s approach is not the literal translation often demanded by the language teacher, but it remains closer to the original than do most of the translations of, for example, Ezra Pound or Robert Lowell. She was attracted to the task because of La Fontaine’s craftsmanship and, one may assume, because his skeptical, world-weary examples of competitive behavior in a sophisticated world of affairs provided vicarious experience of a world with which Moore had little direct contact. Thorough critical assessment of Moore’s translation is yet to come. Hugh Kenner praises her for discovering “a badly needed idiom, urbane without slickness and brisk without imprecision”; and Donald Hall finds that her versions have a “fire of visual imagery” that is lacking in the originals. Laurence Stapleton observes that, good as they are, Selected Fables of La Fontaine (1955) took her on “a detour from her own best work.” The translations, however, await extended study by someone who knows both French and English well enough to be aware of nuances and who has a firm conception of what a translation should be. Whatever her hopes that Selected Fables of La Fontaine might expand her scope, Moore’s last three volumes continue to explore her familiar themes: resistance to threat and intrusion, admiration for the disciplined and delightful. She adds, however, much of what used to be called “occasional” verse, prompted by some event of the moment. The poems of Like a Bulwark (1956) show these late tendencies. The title poem admires one “firmed” by the assault of fate, leaned and strengthened by his sturdy resistance. Delight in a certain complexity in existence appears in “Then the Ermine”: In a quotation that Moore may have devised, she describes the ermine’s color as “ebony violet.” In “The Sycamore,” this pleasure in the parti-colored expands to glorification of “anything in motley.” Too often overlooked is “Apparition of Splendor,” wherein works of art, the forests of the earth, and traditional fairy tales all contribute to celebrate the courage of the porcupine, which defends itself without aggression. Observation of particulars in skating, tennis, dancing, music, canoeing, pomology, and painting lead in “Style” to an exclamation of joy as the speaker rapturously contemplates artistry wherever it occurs. Several poems make direct use of Christian tradition, although their intention is not to argue specific doctrine but to use this tradition as a vehicle for values. In “Rosemary,” Moore represents beauty and love as enwreathed to form “a kind of Christmas-tree,” a celebration of Christ’s birth. “Blessed Is the Man” may be viewed as a version of the beatitudes, Moore’s metrical objections to the intemperate and her praise of the “unaccommodating” man who has faith in the unseen. In some poems of Tell Me, Tell Me (1966), Moore’s last book made up primarily of new poems, ardor is as warm as ever. “Arthur Mitchell,” a brief admiration of a dancer, shapes its stanzas to imitate the twirl of the performer. The closing imagery of “Sun” (a poem first published in 1916) implies comparison of the power of the sun—standing, one deduces, for courage of spirit—to a work of spiritual art, a gorgeously wrought hour-glass. The poem is almost a prayer: The speaker appeals to “Sun” to eradicate the “hostility” found in “this meeting-place of surging enmity,” this world, or, even, one’s own soul. The reprinting of “Sun” implies a continuity of thought and feeling. Moore seems, however, to have been conscious of a lessening of her powers. “The Mind, Intractable Thing” is, despite its seemingly playful title, a saddening poem when compared with the sprightly dance of feeling in the earlier “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing.” In the late poem, the speaker still exclaims over her subject, but the details are autumnal, the delight colored by near despair as she complains that the “mind” does not help her, that she does not know how to “deal with” terror and wordcraft. One need not take the poem too literally for, as the several good poems in the volume show, Moore retained great abilities to the end of her life. Following the discovery in the 1960’s that Moore’s work is not after all impenetrable, book-length studies are accumulating, and the school anthologies that give most Americans the only experience they have with good poetry regularly print some of her poems. The proselike surface of her art is now understood to be supported by a skill with diction and metrics that, as she put it, is “galvanized against inertia.” Most poet-critics have continued to be admiring. Randall Jarrell declared that Moore had discovered “a new sort of subject” and “a new sort of connection and structure for it,” and John Ashbery speculated that she would eventually be ranked as the best American modernist poet. Moore has had detractors, of course. In her early years such traditionalists as Louis Untermeyer and Margaret Anderson denigrated her work because it does not have the marked rhythm and heightened language that their Romantic taste demanded. Somewhat later, such middle-of-the-road critics as Oscar Cargill and Babette Deutsch gave her writing only carefully qualified praise. Feminists have struggled to accommodate Moore in their systems. Emily Stipes Watts declares that her reputation is “evaporating” because she follows what are in Watts’s view masculine standards. Helen Vendler and Bonnie Costello admire her greatly and are rather possessive about her as a fellow member of what they see as their beleaguered gender; but they are bothered by male critics’ applause, suspicious that such praise is only another tactic for putting a woman on a pedestal. Moore’s work will survive the obtuse and the silly. Quilled beauty may put off the timid, but it will nevertheless prevail, because by its rigor, grace, and artistry, it achieves aesthetic triumph. Other Literary Forms Marianne Moore left a voluminous correspondence with literary figures in America and England, work that demonstrates that she was as original-minded in personal and critical prose as she was in verse. She wrote occasional reviews and lectured on campuses and at poetry centers. This work, too, shows her imaginative daring, the “idiosyncrasy and technique” that she valued. A sampling of her prose as well as of her verse was published as A Marianne Moore Reader (1961). A selection of essays, Predilections, appeared in 1955.The words “collected” and “complete” in a title may promise more than the book delivers; in Moore’s case, the contents are only those examples of her work that she wished to keep in circulation. Because she frequently revised extensively, a genuinely complete edition must be variorum. The best available selection is The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. Most of Moore’s manuscripts and correspondence, as well as a collection of her furnishings and personal items, are housed in the museum of the Philip H. and A. S. W. Rosenbach Foundation, Philadelphia. The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (1986) includes all of Moore’s published prose work, from her early stories to her mature essays and reviews; as editor of The Dial from 1921 to 1929, and later, as her poetic reputation grew, she had the opportunity to write on a broad range of twentieth century poets and fiction writers. Select Works Other Than Poetry DRAMA: The Absentee, pb. 1962. NONFICTION: Predilections, 1955. MISCELLANEOUS: A Marianne Moore Reader, 1961; The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, 1986. Bernard F. Engel BibliographyDonald Hall, Marianne Moore: The Cage and the Animal, 1970, is a good biographical study. Among the important critical works are Bernard R. Engel, Marianne Moore, 1964; George Nitchie, Marianne Moore: An Introduction to the Poetry, 1969; and Charles Tomlison, ed., Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1969. Other important book-length studies of Moore include Jonathan Baker, Marianne Moore, 1988; Patricia Willis, Marianne Moore: Women and Poet, 1990; and Christine Miller, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority, 1995. Moore’s poetry has also been the subject of many articles. Elizabeth Gregory, “Stamps, Money, Pop Culture, and Marianne Moore,” Discourse 17, no. 1 (Fall, 1994), discusses links between Moore and popular culture. Marilyn Brownstein, “The Archaic Mother and Mother and Mother: The Postmodern Poetry of Marianne Moore,” Contemporary Literature 30, no. 1 (Spring, 1989), examines the unconventional mother images found in Moore’s poetry. For a feminist reading of Moore’s poetry see Charles Altier, “The Powers of Genuine Place: Moore’s Feminist Modernism,” Southern Humanities Review 22, no. 3 (Summer, 1988). |
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