Marianne
Moore (USA)
1887-1972
Born
near St. Louis, Missouri, Mariane Moore grew up in the house of her
Presbyterian minister grandfather, John Riddle Warner. Moore’s father, Milton,
was an engineer-inventor who had suffered a mental breakdown before her birth;
he had been committed to a psychiatric hospital, and Moore’s mother left him,
returning to her own father’s home in Kirkwood. Moore never met her father.
At age seven, Moore’s mother moved the
family to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she was to teach English at the Metzger
Institute, a preparatory school for girls, and it there that Marianne received
her education. In 1905, Moore began college at Bryn Mawr, near Philadelphia.
Denied entry into the English program, Moore majored in Law, History, and
Politics, and minored in Biology—an aspect that would be represented in her
knowledge and love of animals, often represented in her poetry. Although she
was not in English, she continued to write, becoming the editor of the college
literary magazine.
After graduation, Moore returned to
Carlisle, where she took a course in education at Carlisle Commercial College,
and after which, she taught stenography and typewriting at the Carlisle Indian
School. During the same period she worked for women’s suffrage, while beginning
to publish poems in various magazines such as Others, Poetry, and
The Egoist. When, in 1916, she and her mother moved to Chatham, New
Jersey, she began regular trips to New York, developing friendships with H. D.
and William Carlos Williams. In 1918 she and her mother moved to New York, and
Marianne began working at a branch of the New York Public Library.
Moore’s poetry, particularly, her earliest
work, which was collected without her knowledge by H.D. and Bryher in Poems
(1921), was highly modernist, embodying methods of collage and bringing
together various quotations and typological experimentation. In 1924 she
published a longer book, Observations, which won The Dial Award and led
to her being appointed, in 1925, as acting editor of that journal.
In 1935 she published Selected Poems,
but in this volume readers begin to see the results of her severe revisions and
rediting of her works. The poem “Poetry,” for example was cut transformed from
a poem of 31 lines, was republished as a three-line statement-like work, and
other poems, such as “The Fish” were utterly changed in with regard to
typography, spellings and line-breaks. Indeed, her constant reworking of her
poetry has led, over the years, to an outcry from several editors and critics
(including this one) as over the years she winnowed down the complexity of her
early works into brief, easily assimilated writings. Her popularity, however,
only increased with the years, and she won the Pulitzer Prize, the National
Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize for her Collected Poems, published
in 1951.
In the poems selected below, I have tried
to return to the earliest printed versions to demonstrate the nature of the
work in its original, more experimental form. Two of these poems did not make
it into her own Complete Poems of 1967.
BOOKS
OF POETRY
Poems (London: The
Egoist Press, 1921); Observations (New York: The Dial Press, 1924); Selected
Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1935/London: Faber and Faber, 1955); The
Pangolin and Other Verse (London: The Brendin Publishing Company, 1936); What
Are Years (New York: Macmillan, 1941); Nevertheless (New York:
Macmillan, 1944); Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1951/London:
Faber and Faber, 1951); Like a Bulwark (New York: Viking, 1956); O to
Be a Dragon (New York: Viking, 1959); The Arctic Ox (London: Faber and
Faber, 1964); Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics (New
York: Viking, 1967); Complete Poems (New York: Macmillan and Viking,
1967/London: Faber and Faber, 1968); Unfinished Poems by Marianne Moore
(Philadelpia: The Philip H. and A. S. W. Rosenbach Foundation, 1972)
[Please
note: because of the restrictions of blog formatting, line breaks in these
poems
follow
the left margin, while in the originals they appear in several indented
formats.]
To
a Steam Roller
The
illustration
is
nothing to you without the application.
You
lack half wit. You crush all the particles down
into
close conformity, and then walk back and forth on them.
Sparkling
chips of rock
are
crushed down to the level of the parent block.
Were
not '”impersonal judgment in aesthetic
matters,
a metaphysical impossibility,” you
might
fairly achieve
it.
As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive
of
one's attending upon you, but to question
the
congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.
(1915/from
Poems, 1921)
Black
Earth
Openly,
yes
With
the naturalness
Of
the hippopotamus or the alligator
When
it combs out on the bank to experience the
Sun,
I do these
Things
which I do, which please
No
one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am
sub-
Merged;
the blemishes stand up and shout when the
object
In
view was a
Renaissance;
shall I say
The
contrary? The sediment of the river which
Encrusts
my joints, makes me very gray but I am
used
To
it, it may
Remain
there; do away
With
it and I am myself done away with, for the
Patina
of circumstance can but enrich what was
There
to begin
With.
This elephant skin
Which
I inhabit, fibred over like the shell of
This
coco-nut, this piece of black glass through
which
no light
Can
filter—cut
Into
checkers by rut
Upon
rut of unpreventable experience—
It
is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the
Hairy
toed. Black
But
beautiful, my back
Is
full of the history of power. Of power?
What
Is
power and what is not? My soul shall
never
Be
cut into
By
a wooden spear; though-
Out
childhood to the present time, the unity of
Life
and death has been expressed by the circum
ference
Described
by my
Trunk;
nevertheless, I
Perceive
feats of strength to be inexplicable after
All;
and I am on my guard; external poise, it
Has
its centre
Well
nurtured—we know
Where—in
pride, but spiritual poise, it has its
centre
where?
My
ears are sensitized to more than the sound of
The
wind. I see
And
I hear, unlike the
Wandlike
body of which one hears so much, which
was
made
To
see and not to see; to hear and not to hear,
That
tree trunk without
Roots,
accustomed to shout
Its
own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained
intact
By
who knows what strange pressure of the at-
mosphere;
that
Spiritual
Brother
to the coral
Plant,
absorbed into which, the equable sapphire
light
Becomes
a nebulous green. The I of each is to
The
I of each,
A
kind of fretful speech
Which
sets a limit on itself; the elephant is?
Black
earth preceded by a tendril? It is to that
Phenomenon
The
above formation,
Translucent
like the atmosphere—a cortex
merely
That
on which darts cannot strike decisively the
first
Time,
a substance
Needful
as an instance
Of
the indestructibility of matter; it
Has
looked at the electricity and at the earth-
Quake
and is still
Here;
the name means thick. Will
Depth
be depth, thick skin to be thick, to one who
can
see no
Beautiful
element of unreason under it?
(1918/from
Poems, 1921)
The
Fish
wade
through
black jade.
Of
the crow blue mussel shells, one
keeps
adjusting
the ash heaps;
opening
and shutting itself like
an
injured
fan.
The
barnacles which encrust the
side
of
the wave, cannot hide
there;
for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split
like spun
glass,
move themselves with spotlight swift-
ness
into
the crevices—
in
and out, illuminating
the
turquoise
sea
of
bodies. The water drives a
wedge
of
iron into the edge
of
the cliff, whereupon the stars
pink
rice
grains, ink
bespattered
jelly-fish, crabs like
green
lilies
and submarine
toadstools,
slide each on the other.
All
external
marks
of abuse are present on
this
defiant
edifice—
all
the physical features of
ac-
cident—lack
of
cornice, dynamite grooves, burns
and
hatchet
strokes, these things stand
out
on it; the chasm side is
dead.
Repeated
evidence
has proved that it can
live
on
what can not revive
its
youth. The sea grows old in it.
(1918/from
Poems, 1921)
Dock
Rats
There
are human beings who seem to regard the place
as
craftily as we do—who seem to feel that it is a
good
place to come home to. On what river;
wide—twinkling
like a chopped sea under some
of
the finest shipping in the
world;
the square-rigged four-master, the liner, the
battleship
like the two-thirds submerged section of
an
iceberg; the tug—strong-moving thing, dip-
ping
and pushing, the bell striking as it comes; the
steam
yacht, lying like a new made arrow on the
stream;
the ferry-boat—a head assigned, one to
each
compartment, making a row of chessmen set
for
play. When the wind is from the east, the
smell
is of apples; of hay, the aroma increased and
decreased
suddenly as the wind changes;
of
rope; of mountain leaves for florists. When it is
from
the west, it is an elixir. There is oc-
casionally
a parakeet
arrived
from Brazil, clasping and clawing; or a
monkey—tail
and feet in readiness for an over-
ture.
All palms and tail; how delightful! There is
the
sea, moving the bulkhead with its horse
strength;
and the multiplicity of rudders and pro-
pellors;
the signals, shrill, questioning, per-
emptory,
diverse; the wharf cats and the barge
dogs—it
is
easy to overestimate the value of such things.
One
does not live in such a place from motives of
expediency
but because to one who has been ac-
customed
to it, shipping is the most congenial
thing
in the world.
(printed
in Others, 1920)
Poetry
I,
too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading
it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it
after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands
that can grasp, eyes
that
can dilate, hair that can rise
if
it must, these things are important not because a
high
sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful;
when they became so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
same
thing may be said for all of us—that we
do
not admire what
we
cannot understand. The bat
holding
on upside down or in quest of some-
thing
to
eat,
elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a
tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse, that feels a flea,
the
base-
ball
fan, the statistician—case after case
could
be cited did
one
wish it; not it is valid
to
discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”;
all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however:
when dragged into prominence by half poets the result is not poetry,
nor
tell the autocrats among use can be
“literalists
of
the
imagination:—above
insolence
and triviality and can present
for
inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
it.
In the meantime, if you demand on one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
the
raw material of poetry in
all
its rawness, and
that
which is on the other hand,
genuine,
then you are interested in poetry.
(1919/from
Poems, 1921)
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