{"id":8739,"date":"2025-11-15T08:00:42","date_gmt":"2025-11-15T13:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=8739"},"modified":"2025-11-15T09:49:47","modified_gmt":"2025-11-15T14:49:47","slug":"the-books-the-norton-anthology-of-modern-and-contemporary-poetry-marianne-moore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=8739","title":{"rendered":"“Omissions are not accidents.” — poet Marianne Moore"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n“I disliked the term ‘poetry’ for any but Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s or Dante’s.” — Marianne Moore<\/big><\/p>\n

T.S. Eliot felt Moore’s poetry was probably the “most durable” of all the greats writing at the time.<\/p>\n

Sadly, I have no idea how to recreate what Moore’s poems LOOK like. WordPress irons out her jagged beginning lines. Half of the fun of Moore is what her poems look like on the page. The start of each line is staggered, like little steps, and so the reading of the poem becomes something almost experiential.<\/p>\n

Moore was great friends with people like H.D. (more on her here<\/a>) and Ezra Pound (more on him here<\/a>) and she had many admirers. You can see her critical mind at work in her poems. She wanted to let images talk to one another through the verse. Her poems have been compared to Cubist paintings, they are puzzles to decipher. Poetry is not meant to reveal all. What you leave out is as valuable as what you include. <\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The structure of her life was narrow. She lived with her mother. She worked at a library. She never married. Or, to uncurious outside eyes, it looks “narrow”. Where is all the travel, where are all the love affairs? And yet … it’s such an outlaw move to opt OUT of the mainstream in the way she did. I speak from experience. Also: she wore tricorn hats with little veils and fur stoles. She was hip<\/i>. Sleeping with everybody in Greenwich Village is not the only way to break society’s rules. Actually, you break rules by NOT doing that, because EVERYbody does that. <\/p>\n

Nobody used language like Marianne Moore. I have to really concentrate. I have to slow down, otherwise I skip off the surface. She used annotations, explaining her references. There are times when you have to know the reference in order to understand. If you’re not willing to do that work. Moore’s work will be a closed door. One of her most famous poems, “Marriage”, is a collage of quotes, references spanning from Shakespeare to newspaper clippings from the day before. Modernists worked with detritus, scraps, montage, juxtaposition, things put together to make sense of a senseless world. <\/p>\n

In “The Past is the Present” she has this to say on the act of writing poems: <\/p>\n

Ecstasy
\naffords
\nThe occasion and expediency determines the form.<\/big><\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nThe story of the meeting above is one of my favorite Marianne Moore anecdotes. Full story here<\/a>. They wrote a poem together:<\/p>\n

A Poem on the Annihilation of Ernie Terrell<\/h3>\n

by Muhammad Ali and Marianne Moore<\/i><\/p>\n

After we defeat Ernie Terrell
\nHe will get nothing, nothing but hell,
\nTerrell was big and ugly and tall
\nBut when he fights me he is sure to fall.
\nIf he criticize this poem by me and Miss Moore
\nTo prove he is not the champ she will stop him in four,
\nHe is claiming to be the real heavyweight champ
\nBut when the fight starts he will look like a tramp
\nHe has been talking too much about me and making me sore
\nAfter I am through with him he will not be able to challenge Mrs. Moore.<\/p>\n

Moore’s poetry, with its breathless rhythms and counterintuitive juxtapositions, shows that the enormity of life does not exist in outward events, but in how we see<\/i> things, how we make associations. Plenty of people lead interesting lives, filled with scandals and sex and drugs or living in a tent in Tunisia, but this doesn’t necessarily add up to being a good writer. <\/p>\n

The Brooklyn Dodgers were Moore’s team. Her presence at games was so well-known she was asked to throw out the first pitch in the 1968 World Series. <\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nShe went to all the games, a little old lady wearing a black hat with netting over her face, keeping her scorecard up to date. The people around her, who had no idea who she was, would patiently explain to her what was happening on the field. She would then decimate them with an insightful observation about the batting average of so-and-so, and her issues with the effectiveness of the pitcher\u2019s breaking ball, and etc. <\/p>\n

Here’s her wonderful poem “Baseball and Writing.” <\/p>\n

Baseball and Writing<\/h3>\n

(Suggested by post-game broadcasts)<\/p>\n

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting
\nand baseball is like writing.
\n You can never tell with either
\n how it will go
\n or what you will do;
\n generating excitement\u2014
\n a fever in the victim\u2014
\n pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.
\n\tVictim in what category?
\nOwlman watching from the press box?
\n\tTo whom does it apply?
\n\tWho is excited? Might it be I?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a pitcher\u2019s battle all the way\u2014a duel\u2014
\na catcher\u2019s, as, with cruel
\n puma paw, Elston Howard lumbers lightly
\n back to plate. (His spring
\n de-winged a bat swing.)
\n They have that killer instinct;
\n yet Elston\u2014whose catching
\n arm has hurt them all with the bat\u2014
\n\twhen questioned, says, unenviously,
\n \u201cI\u2019m very satisfied. We won.\u201d
\n\tShorn of the batting crown, says, \u201cWe\u201d;
\n\trobbed by a technicality.<\/p>\n

When three players on a side play three positions
\nand modify conditions,
\n the massive run need not be everything.
\n \u201cGoing, going . . . ” Is
\n it? Roger Maris
\n has it, running fast. You will
\n never see a finer catch. Well . . .
\n \u201cMickey, leaping like the devil\u201d\u2014why
\n\tgild it, although deer sounds better\u2014
\nsnares what was speeding towards its treetop nest,
\n\tone-handing the souvenir-to-be
\n\tmeant to be caught by you or me.<\/p>\n

Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral;
\nhe could handle any missile.
\n He is no feather. \u201cStrike! . . . Strike two!\u201d
\n Fouled back. A blur.
\n It\u2019s gone. You would infer
\n that the bat had eyes.
\n He put the wood to that one.
\nPraised, Skowron says, \u201cThanks, Mel.
\n I think I helped a little bit.\u201d
\n\tAll business, each, and modesty.
\n Blanchard, Richardson, Kubek, Boyer.
\n\tIn that galaxy of nine, say which
\n\twon the pennant? Each. It was he.<\/p>\n

Those two magnificent saves from the knee-throws
\nby Boyer, finesses in twos\u2014
\n like Whitey\u2019s three kinds of pitch and pre-
\n diagnosis
\n with pick-off psychosis.
\n Pitching is a large subject.
\n Your arm, too true at first, can learn to
\n catch your corners\u2014even trouble
\n\tMickey Mantle. (\u201cGrazed a Yankee!
\nMy baby pitcher, Montejo!\u201d
\n\tWith some pedagogy,
\n\tyou\u2019ll be tough, premature prodigy.)<\/p>\n

They crowd him and curve him and aim for the knees. Trying
\nindeed! The secret implying:
\n \u201cI can stand here, bat held steady.\u201d
\n One may suit him;
\n none has hit him.
\n Imponderables smite him.
\n Muscle kinks, infections, spike wounds
\n require food, rest, respite from ruffians. (Drat it!
\n\tCelebrity costs privacy!)
\nCow\u2019s milk, \u201ctiger\u2019s milk,” soy milk, carrot juice,
\n\tbrewer\u2019s yeast (high-potency\u2014
\n\tconcentrates presage victory<\/p>\n

sped by Luis Arroyo, Hector Lopez\u2014
\ndeadly in a pinch. And \u201cYes,
\n it\u2019s work; I want you to bear down,
\n but enjoy it
\n while you\u2019re doing it.\u201d
\n Mr. Houk and Mr. Sain,
\n if you have a rummage sale,
\n don\u2019t sell Roland Sheldon or Tom Tresh.
\n\tStudded with stars in belt and crown,
\nthe Stadium is an adastrium.
\n\tO flashing Orion,
\n\tyour stars are muscled like the lion. <\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nShe was not just a well-known figure. She was a star. The galleries were packed when she gave readings. She didn’t care about current fashions\/political trends. She maintained a friendship with Ezra Pound, even after he was persona non grata<\/i>. Moore visited him in the mental hospital, wrote to him, spoke about him often. She didn’t get caught up in ideological battles. People made pilgrimages to her house in Brooklyn. She “picked out” younger poets to mentor, people like Elizabeth Bishop. <\/p>\n

When one is
\nfrank, one’s very
\npresence is a compliment.
\n— Marianne Moore, “Peter”<\/big><\/p>\n

I “got to know her” through her contemporaries, all of whom spoke vividly about meeting her. She looms over the literary landscape of multiple generations like a sui generis monolith. She lived a long life. She was still out and about well into the 1960s. <\/p>\n

The Mind is an Enchanted Thing<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\n

is an enchanted thing
\nlike the glaze on a
\nkatydid-wing
\nsubdivided by sun
\ntill the nettings are legion.
\nLike Gieseking playing Scarlatti;<\/p>\n

like the apteryx-awl
\nas a beak, or the
\nkiwi\u2019s rain-shawl
\nof haired feathers, the mind
\nfeeling its way as though blind,
\nwalks along with its eyes on the ground.
\nIt has memory\u2019s ear
\nthat can hear without
\nhaving to hear.
\nLike the gyroscope\u2019s fall,
\ntruly unequivocal
\nbecause trued by regnant certainty,<\/p>\n

it is a power of
\nstrong enchantment. It
\nis like the dove-
\nneck animated by
\nsun; it is memory\u2019s eye;
\nit\u2019s conscientious inconsistency.<\/p>\n

It tears off the veil; tears
\nthe temptation, the
\nmist the heart wears,
\nfrom its eyes, \u2014 if the heart
\nhas a face; it takes apart
\ndejection. It\u2019s fire in the dove-neck\u2019s<\/p>\n

iridescence; in the
\ninconsistencies
\nof Scarlatti.
\nUnconfusion submits
\nits confusion to proof; it\u2019s
\nnot a Herods oath that cannot change.<\/p>\n

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QUOTES:<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Marianne Moore, preface to A Marianne Moore Reader<\/em>: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Why an inordinate interest in animals and athletes? They are subjects for art and exemplars of it, are they not? minding their own business. Pangolins, hornbills, pitchers, catchers, do not pry or prey–or prolong the conversation; do not make us self-conscious; look their best when caring least.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry<\/em>: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore is devoted to the quirkiness of animals, to their stubbornness or flexibility, their dignity or lack of it. Unlike D.H. Lawrence, she offers no depth psychology of the jerboa or the fish, and she makes no attempt–she would consider it futile, in view of the distinctness of each creature–to share its fundamental drives. Unlike Jean de La Fontaine, whose fables she translated, Moore draws lessons from nature obliquely, as if to say more would be embarrassing for both author and reader. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In a famous essay of the same name, Marianne Moore said the three qualities she most admires in poets are:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Humility, Concentration, and Gusto.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Robert Lowell:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Terrible, private, and strange revolutionary poetry. There isn’t the motive to do that now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets<\/em>: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Poets turn to her now as they always have done to learn about syllabics, about syntax (she is the late<\/em> Henry James of verse). Her syllabics are straightforward. Instead of the verse being “free” or governed by meter or regular stress patterns, she chooses to build a stanza in which the lines have a predetermined number of syllables. Indentation underlines the parallels. The shape of the stanza indicates the syllabic disposition. With the addition of rhyme, this is one of the most restrictive measures a poet can deploy. It is her chosen measure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n

If we compare her with her major poetic contemporaries–Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Aiken, Random, Cummings, H.D., Hart Crane–she is clearly the most original American poet of her era, though not quite of the eminence of Frost, Stevens and Crane. A curious kind of devotional poet, with some authentic affinities to George Herbert, she reminds us implicitly but constantly that any distinction between sacred and secular poetry is only a shibboleth of cultural politics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, May 30, 1948: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh–Marianne has a very nice, old-fashioned steel-engraving of [Robert] Burns in the front hall. I admired it; said I hoped sometime to write something about him, & didn’t he look nice. She replied, “But he couldn’t have looked that nice, really, of course.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

T.S. Eliot, 1923, early in Moore’s career:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I can only think of five contemporary poets – English, Irish, French and German – whose works excite me as much or more than Miss Moore’s.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Introduction to Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry<\/em>: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Like the other New York modernists, Moore took seriously the challenge of avant-garde artist to fashion a new relationship to the artistic medium and to the world. Her insistent use of quotation can be seen as a poetic corollary to the synthetic phase of Cubism, in which various media were brought together in pictorial and sculptural conglomerations that radically questioned the relation of part to whole, of representation to reality…Moore was a sharp observer, and upholder, of the physical world; but where [William Carlos] Williams’s world is familiar, hers includes not only steamrollers and baseball players but also unusual creatures, such as the anteater called a pangolin and the mollusk called a paper nautilus–animals faithful, like her poems, to their individualizing quirks and idiosyncracies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, December 11, 1964<\/strong><\/p>\n

Marianne’s saying the ballad was my “best” makes me a bit uneasy! I think she likes the message: “Crime does not pay” too well!…Once I wrote an ironic poem about a drunken sailor and a slot-machine–not<\/em> a success–and the sailor said he was going to throw the machine into the sea, etc., and M congratulated me on being so morally courageous and outspoken.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Poet Peter Jones on “Bird-Witted”: <\/strong><\/p>\n

It appears on analysis to have a ridiculous syllabic scheme: six ten-line stanzas with a firm rhyme scheme (a-b-a-b-c-a-d-e-g-c), the lines of each stanza with, respectively, nine, eight, six, four, seven, three, six, three, seven and four syllables. Yet the poem develops naturally, the form does not brake it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, June 30, 1948: <\/strong><\/p>\n

I went to dinner with Marianne one night before I left, and then we had a confused day or two when we thought we might travel to Maine together. It is probably just as well that didn’t work out…She asked me to say grace and I had a minute’s dreadful black-out, then some thing out of the remote Baptist past mercifully came to me in perfect condition–the only trouble was that M liked it very much and made me repeat it until she knew it, too. She is up near Ellsworth now–I had a letter yesterday. Apparently she is having difficulties with her hostesses because they refuse to let her mow the lawn.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Michael Schmidt: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Elizabeth Bishop took her early bearings from Marianne Moore. They met, they corresponded, and Miss Moore’s approbation meant a poem could be let free into the world. For Bishop it was an invaluable apprenticeship, and she kept faith with Moore as long as she could, but her reticences and those of her master were different in kind. There is a clarity that the reader has to work for and a clarity that is, at least initially, less effortful, more enchanting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, October 25th, 1948<\/strong><\/p>\n

Miss Moore’s poems in the Quarterly<\/i> and her one in the Nation<\/i> strike me as clumsy trifles with good touches. With what envy though, one rereads her old good poems! We all (not you) seem such bunglers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is something of Blake and of the Christopher Smart of Jubliate Agno<\/em> in Moore, though the affinity does not result from influence, but rather is the consequence of election. Moore’s famous eye, like that of Bishop after her, is not so much a visual gift as it is visionary, for the bests in her poems are charged with a spiritual intensity that doubtless they possess, but which I myself cannot see without the aid of Blake, Smart, and Moore.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Randall Jarrell: <\/strong><\/p>\n

[Her poem’s forms] have the lacy, mathematical extravagance of snowflakes, seem as arbitrary as the prohibitions in fairy tales; but they work as those work–disregard them and everything goes to pieces…Her forms, tricks and all, are like the aria of the Queen of the Night: the intricate and artificial elaboration not only does not conflict with the emotion but is its vehicle.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

William Carlos Williams:<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Marianne Moore used to say, a language dogs and cats could understand. So I think she agrees with me fundamentally.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Marianne Moore: <\/strong><\/p>\n

In his book Ezra Pound<\/em>, Charles Norman was very scrupulous. He got several things exactly right. The first time I met Ezra Pound, when he came here to see my mother and me, I said that Henry Eliot seemed to me more nearly the artist than anyone I had ever met. “Now, now,” said Ezra. “Be careful.” Maybe that isn’t exact, but he quotes it just the way I said it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

T.S. Eliot, preface to Selected Poems<\/em> (1935):<\/strong><\/p>\n

[Marianne Moore is] one of the few who have done the language some service in my lifetime.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From the Marianne Moore entry in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry<\/em>: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Marianne Moore was one of the most original poets of her time, original in her mode of perception, in her kind of poetry, even in the way her stanzas appear on the page. She proceeds by acute, if often indirect, observation, commenting in an impersonal yet distinctive voice. She marvels at the peculiarities of animals and draws inferences from them, sometimes by ironically comparing lower with higher animals, though she may prefer either group… [Her poems] usually rhyme, although finding the rhyme may take some effort. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Glory for ashes” might be called Moore’s ethical motto, the basis for the drive of her poetic will toward a reality of her own particulars. Her poetry, as befitted the translator of La Fontaine, and the heir of George Herbert, would be in some danger of dwindling into moral essays, an impossible form for our time, were it not for her wild allusiveness, her zest for quotations, and her essentially anarchic stance, the American and Emersonian insistence upon seeing everything in her own way, with “conscientious inconsistency.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Marianne Moore: <\/strong><\/p>\n

In Henry James it is the essays and letters especially that affect me. In Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance<\/em>, his definiteness, his indigenously unmistakable accent. Charles Norman says in his biography of Ezra Pound that he said to a poet, “Nothing, nothing<\/em>, that you couldn’t in some circumstance, under stress of some emotion, actually say<\/em>.” And Ezra said of Shakespeare and Dante, “Here we are with the masters; of neither can we say, ‘He is the greatest’; of each we must say, ‘He is unexcelled.'”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oh Ezra. Calm down.<\/p>\n

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, October 24, 1956: <\/strong><\/p>\n

When I arrived at the 5th Avenue palace Marianne Moore was sprawled like some Boucher goddess in a print dress and black cartwheel hat on the huge marble disc of the huge marble banister. Next to her Louise Bogan looking a little stiff, proud and shocked. We went into the ballroom, a room a mile wide and long with a green carpet, nothing anywhere except a green carpet, little rickety iron chairs hugging the wall, and a green baize-covered lopsided ping pong table. We ordered into the elevator, a matchbox that would only scarcely hold me and Miss Moore… Moore sayings: Some one proposed Padraic Colum. “Well lately he has split apart.” She meant his poetry had. Referring to you, “Poor Elizabeth, she does her best to bear up and rejoice.” To W.C. Williams, “And his is sometimes ASTONISHINGLY RIGHT, sometimes!” To Mr. Warburg, who seemed on the point of proposing a second meeting for a second ballot, “But these meetings are death to me.” Someone said that he didn’t suppose she often undertook the trip in from Brooklyn. Miss Moore: “I am just back from California.” However, she was always small, gracious, mobile, and beautiful. I feel utterly in love with her. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Marianne Moore: <\/strong><\/p>\n

If emotion is strong enough, the words are unambiguous. Someone asked Robert Frost (is that right?) if he was selective. He said, Call it passionate preference. Must a man be good to write good poems? The villains in Shakespeare are not illiterate, are they? But rectitude has a ring that is implicative, I would say. And with no integrity, a man is not likely to write the kind of book I read.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From the Marianne Moore entry in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry<\/em>: <\/strong><\/p>\n

That her verse embraces many characteristics of prose was almost revolutionary, reconstituting the relationship of these two media and attracting to her many poets equally concerned to be matter-of-fact and anti-rhetorical. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, February 15, 1960: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Marianne adores jewels–and sure enough, in her letter about the friend she described the huge diamond rings she wears–<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, April 1, 1964<\/strong><\/p>\n

Her baseball is way over my head.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, May 20, 1948<\/strong><\/p>\n

All the animals and places are analogies (roughly) of Miss Moore and her art–so I take the Canadian mountain which you got me to really read for the first time [“The Octopus”]. What a massive overwhelming poem it is. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

William Carlos Williams on “Marriage”:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Marriage, through which thought does not penetrate, appeared to Miss Moore a legitimate object for art, an art that would not halt from using thought about it, however, as it might want to. Against marriage, “this institution, perhaps one should say enterprise”–Miss Moore launched her thought not to have it appear arsenaled as in a textbook on psychology, but to stay among apples and giraffes in a poem.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Robert Lowell<\/strong>: <\/p>\n

You wouldn’t see anyone as strange as Marianne Moore again, not for a long while. Conservative and Jamesian as she is, it was a terrible, private, and strange revolutionary poetry. There isn’t the motive to do that now. Yet those were the classics, and it seems to me they were all against the grain. Marianne Moore as much as Crane.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From the Marianne Moore entry in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry<\/em>: <\/strong><\/p>\n

She writes with a hard-edged, objectifying precision that confounds traditional categories of gender, as does H.D., and she upholds, like Pound, “direct treatment of the thing” and the exact word (le mot juste<\/em>).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n

As several critics have ventured, “Marriage” is Moore’s The Waste Land<\/em>, a mosaic of fragments from Francis Bacon, the Scientific American<\/em>, Baxter’s The Saint’s Everlasting Rest<\/em>, Hazlitt on Burke, William Godwin, Trollope, The Tempest<\/em>, a book on The Syrian Christ<\/em>, the Bible, Ezra Pound, and even Daniel Webster (from an inscription on a statue!), and twenty sources more. Yet it is a poem, and perhaps is more ruggedly unified than any other poem of such ambition by Moore.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Elizabeth Bishop, “A Sentimental Tribute,” Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin<\/em>, Spring 1962:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lately I have heard one or two poets and critics sound upset because they don’t think that the poem about Yul Brynner is as good as, say, The Pangolin<\/em>. How solemn can one get? Surely by now Miss Moore is entitled to write any old way, any new way, she wants to.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In 1955, Sylvia Plath sent Marianne Moore some poems. Anne Stevenson, in Bitter Fame<\/i>, described what happened next:<\/strong><\/p>\n

In July, to Sylvia’s surprise and keen distress, Miss Moore sent her in reply what Sylvia saw as “a queerly ambiguous spiteful letter… ‘Don’t be so grisly,'” she commented; “you are too unrelenting.'” And she added “certain pointed remarks about ‘typing being a bugbear.'” Sylvia concluded that Miss Moore was annoyed because she had sent carbon copies instead of fresh top sheets. That seems unlikely. While Marianne Moore usually admired Ted’s work, she never warmed to Sylvia’s, disliking the early traces of the very elements that later were to carry her to fame: macabre doom-laden themes, heavy with disturbing colors and totemlike images of stones, skulls, drownings, snakes, and bottled fetuses — hallmarks of Sylvia’s gift.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ted Hughes never forgave Moore for this slight, and wrote a poem about it – decades later – included in Birthday Letters<\/i>.<\/p>\n

A Literary Life<\/strong><\/big>, by Ted Hughes<\/p>\n

We climbed Marianne Moore’s narrow stair
\nTo her bower-bird bric-a-brac nest, in Brooklyn.
\nDaintiest curio relic of Americana.
\nHer talk, a needle
\nUnresting – darning incessantly
\nChain-mail with crewel-work flowers.
\nBirds and fish of the reef
\nIn phosphor-bronze wire.
\nHer face, tiny American treen bobbin
\nOn a spindle,
\nHer voice the flickering hum of the old wheel.
\nThen the coin, compulsory,
\nFor the subway
\nBack to our quotidian scramble.
\nWhy shouldn’t we cherish her?<\/p>\n

You sent her carbon copies of some of your poems.
\nEverything about them –
\nThe ghost gloom, the constriction,
\nThe bell-jar air-conditioning – made her gasp
\nFor oxygen and cheer. She sent them back.
\n(Whoever has her letter has her exact words.)
\n‘Since these seem to be valuable carbon copies
\n(Somewhat smudged) I shall not engross them.’
\nI took the point of that ‘engross’
\nPrecisely, like a bristle of glass,
\nSnapped off deep in my thumb.
\nYou wept
\nAnd hurled yourself down a floor or two
\nFurther from the Empyrean.
\nI carried you back up.
\nAnd she, Marianne, tight, brisk,
\nNeat and hard as an ant,
\nSlid into the second or third circle
\nOf my Inferno.<\/p>\n

A decade later, on her last visit to England,
\nHolding court at a party, she was sitting
\nBowed over her knees, her face,
\nUnder her great hat-brim’s floppy petal,
\nDainty and bright as a piece of confetti –
\nShe wanted me to know, she insisted
\n(It was all she wanted to say)
\nWith that Missouri needle, drawing each stitch
\nTight in my ear,
\nThat your little near-posthumous memoir
\n‘OCEAN 1212’
\nWas ‘so wonderful, so lit, so wonderful’ –<\/p>\n

She bowed so low I had to kneel. I kneeled and
\nBowed my face close to her upturned face
\nThat seemed tinier than ever,
\nAnd studied, as through a grille,
\nHer lips that put me in mind of a child’s purse
\nMade of the skin of a dormouse,
\nHer cheek, as if she had powdered the crumpled silk
\nOf a bat’s wing,
\nAnd I listened, heavy as a graveyard
\nWhile she searched for the grave
\nWhere she could lay down her little wreath.<\/p>\n

\nMarianne Moore, 1935: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Some feminine poets of the present day seem to have grown horns and to like to be frightful and dainty by turns; but distorted propriety suggests effeteness. One would rather disguise than travesty emotion; give away a nice thing than sell it; dismember a garment of rich aesthetic construction than degrade it to the utilitarian offices of the boneyard.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, November 22, 1964<\/strong><\/p>\n

I’ve just read through Marianne’s new Faber collection, and rather to my surprise think it’s as good as anything she’s ever written–a kind of wild, lyrical abandon, and four or five or her most serious poems, and almost everything good. Some of them made my eyes water. Oh me, she’s really so much better than Berryman or Roethke, our best this year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From the Marianne Moore entry in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry<\/em>: <\/strong><\/p>\n

She brings quotations from popular culture into poetry, like Eliot, but she welcomes instead of satirizes them. In the verbal collage of the ambitious long poem “An Octopus,” Moore juxtaposes various sources–travel guides, fashion magazines, science, journalism, literature, philosophy, even a remark “Overheard at the circus”–to suggest both the vastness of Mt. Rainier and its sublime ineffability, a massive and heterogeneous presence that outstrips all attempts at description. She takes the stance neither of critic nor of connoisseur, both roles being too peacock-tailed and dominating for her taste.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, December 23, 1960: <\/strong><\/p>\n

I’ve talked to Marianne Moore a couple times on the phone–“Robert, I am in eclipse.” Meaning she, poor thing, had been suffering from dysentery. About The Mid Century [that] gives her book and mine away together and our photographs have been combined into one–“Like Pompeii and Herculaeum.” We had a little contest saying how much we loved and mired you–Brooklyn accent, “Of course she venerates you.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Marianne Moore, interview with Donald Hall: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Precision, economy of statement, logic employed to ends that are disinterested, drawing and identifying, liberate the imagination.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Friend of Marianne Moore, 1987: <\/strong><\/p>\n

I remember she once began a story with ‘I was leaving Boston wearing two hats…’ I can’t remember the story itself, I was too much taken up with the preamble. The hats were obviously too big to pack. I think the tricorne was the first classic hat and the big flat-brimmed one was more often worn laters; she wore it when she came to tea with us in our London flat. She was about to go on a holiday in a canal boat in England, which I found difficult to believe. But one had to be ready to believe anything of Marianne.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, January 22nd, 1962:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I’ve been reading Mary McCarthy’s On the Contrary<\/em>–also Marianne’s Reader<\/em>, which I promised to review for the Bryn Mawr magazine. Strange contrast–Mary so sane and mean; Marianne so mad and good–which do you choose? And they both lie like rugs–at least I shouldn’t say lie<\/em>, but anything I know at first-hand of their impressions aren’t mine at all. Marianne admiring the Duke of Windsor’s style! Mary giving her poor dead 1st husband another beating still: “Notions of the superman and the genius flickered across his thoughts…” But Marianne can astound<\/em>, and there are always some of those marvelous poems.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, April 20, 1958:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Her reading, hard to hear and parse, was full of gentle and sharp things, as she complimented Rahv, Harry Levin, Cowley, put on her glasses, took them off, looked now like my grandmother, now like a clear-browed girl. She spoke of the “devious and interminable” introductions–this for John Ransom–to a Frost evening. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore<\/strong><\/big>
\nby Elizabeth Bishop<\/strong><\/p>\n

From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
\nplease come flying.
\nIn a cloud of fiery pale chemicals,
\nplease come flying,
\nto the rapid rolling of thousands of small blue drums
\ndescending out of the mackerel sky
\nover the glittering grandstand of harbor-water,
\nplease come flying.
\nWhistles, pennants and smoke are blowing. The ships
\nare signaling cordially with multitudes of flags
\nrising and falling like birds all over the harbor.
\nEnter: two rivers, gracefully bearing
\ncountless little pellucid jellies
\nin cut-glass epergnes dragging with silver chains.
\nThe flight is safe; the weather is all arranged.
\nThe waves are running in verses this fine morning.
\nPlease come flying.Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe
\ntrailing a sapphire highlight,
\nwith a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots,
\nwith heaven knows how many angels all riding
\non the broad black brim of your hat,
\nplease come flying.Bearing a musical inaudible abacus,
\na slight censorious frown, and blue ribbons,
\nplease come flying.
\nFacts and skyscrapers glint in the tide; Manhattan
\nis all awash with morals this fine morning,
\nso please come flying.Mounting the sky with natural heroism,
\nabove the accidents, above the malignant movies,
\nthe taxicabs and injustices at large,
\nwhile horns are resounding in your beautiful ears
\nthat simultaneously listen to
\na soft uninvented music, fit for the musk deer,
\nplease come flying.For whom the grim museums will behave
\nlike courteous male bower-birds,
\nfor whom the agreeable lions lie in wait
\non the steps of the Public Library,
\neager to rise and follow through the doors
\nup into the reading rooms,
\nplease come flying.
\nWe can sit down and weep; we can go shopping,
\nor play at a game of constantly being wrong
\nwith a priceless set of vocabularies,
\nor we can bravely deplore, but please
\nplease come flying.With dynasties of negative constructions
\ndarkening and dying around you,
\nwith grammar that suddenly turns and shines
\nlike flocks of sandpipers flying,
\nplease come flying.Come like a light in the white mackerel sky,
\ncome like a daytime comet
\nwith a long unnebulous train of words,
\nfrom Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
\nplease come flying.<\/p>\n

Marianne Moore:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gusto thrives on freedom, and freedom in art, as in life, is the result of a discipline imposed by ourselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, June 21, 1958:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last Sunday, Marianne Moore read before thousands on the Public Garden. I went rather fearing that neither her poems nor her delivery would carry. They didn’t very much, yet that seemed irrelevant. She entered with a black cloak and black jacket and a diamondy green dress. The cloak came off, then after slight hesitation, the jacket, then another pause and the cloak went on again. She had<\/em> her audience. Each obstruction fell into her hands: a whistle from the amplifier (“I see I have a rival”), trucks rumbling down Boylston Street, a mute bean-shaven young man, who kept pushing her back to the speaker, an unexquisite mass of red flowers, received with a disgruntled, admiring, “gorgeous?” Each epigram was cheered. Jack Sweeney’s Irish wife said in amazement, “Why, this is the only real American.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Poetry<\/strong><\/big>
\nBy Marianne Moore<\/strong><\/p>\n

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
\n all this fiddle.
\n Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
\n discovers that there is in
\n it after all, a place for the genuine.
\n Hands that can grasp, eyes
\n that can dilate, hair that can rise
\n if it must, these things are important not because a<\/p>\n

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
\n they are
\n useful; when they become so derivative as to become
\n unintelligible, the
\n same thing may be said for all of us\u2014that we
\n do not admire what
\n we cannot understand. The bat,
\n holding on upside down or in quest of something to<\/p>\n

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
\n wolf under
\n a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse
\n that feels a flea, the base-
\n ball fan, the statistician\u2014case after case
\n could be cited did
\n one wish it; nor is it valid
\n to discriminate against \u201cbusiness documents and<\/p>\n

school-books\u201d; all these phenomena are important. One must
\n make a distinction
\n however: when dragged into prominence by half poets,
\n the result is not poetry,
\n nor till the autocrats among us can be
\n \u201cliteralists of
\n the imagination\u201d\u2014above
\n insolence and triviality and can present<\/p>\n

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them,
\n shall we have
\n it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion\u2014
\n the raw material of poetry in
\n all its rawness, and
\n that which is on the other hand,
\n genuine, then you are interested in poetry.<\/p>\n

\n 
\n 
\nThank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account<\/a>. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0<\/a>, if you’d like to subscribe.<\/em> <\/small><\/p>\n