Reviews and Comment The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. Faber, 42s. Selected Poems. Marianne Moore. Faber, 9s. (paper).

Wallace Stevens reviewed Marianne Moore’s Selected Poems of 1935, and whilst saying ‘she is not a writer. She is a woman who has profound needs’ he insisted that she was a romantic-indeed, ‘unless one is that, one is not a poet at all’. The romantic attitude ‘inevitably falsifies . . . but it does not vitiate’; these are the alternatives. The Collected Poems appeared in 1951 ; now with the Complete Poems, we have another opportunity to consider the apparent paradox of the writer for whom since ‘An aspect may deceive’ then ‘Art is unfortunate’ (CP 104); the strategy of one for whom technique is essential, over-consciousness inexcusable, and who says (of love), ‘Whatever it is, let it be without/affectation’ (CP 240). The same applies to poetry:

I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,

it, after all, a place for the genuine. (CP 36). one discovers in

In the original version of this poem (of which only these three lines survive in the Complete Poems, the rest being relegated to the Notes) poets were exhorted to become ‘literalists of the imagination’. This is her consistent belief: the poet should avail himself humbly and intelligently of the ‘evident poetry’ in the world around him, ‘this country cart/that inner happiness made art’, rather than invent a distorted world of his own.

Tell me, tell me where might there be a refuge for me from egocentricity

and its propensity to bisect, mis-state, misunderstand and obliterate continuity? (CP 231).

Subjectivity and the stasis of art (with its ‘bleak finalities’) are equally sterile: ‘No swan so fine’ is a direct answer to ‘Byzantium’, revenge for ‘common bird or petal’ over ‘golden handiwork‘; the china swan at Versailles

. . . perches on the branching foam of polished sculptured flowers-at ease and tall. The king is dead. (CP 19).

Course Significantly the jerboa, a small desert rat, offers her a better image for poetry:

the jerboa, or plunder its food store,

and you will be cursed. It honors the sand by assuming its color . . .

Marianne Moore doesn’t course poetry, or plunder its world; she domesticates it. And so her poems are a kind of imaginative camouflage; hospitable (especially to animals), self-obliterating; they assume the colour of the world, where ‘it is a privilege to see soimuch confusion’; they are cunningly disguised with details, names, references, quotations (not ‘set’ or ‘placed‘ but simply caught up in the tentacular syllabic lines), and the appended notes with their d6bris of curious learning: ‘all these phenomena are important’. (The relevant notes are included even in the Selected Poems, taking up ten pages of ninety.)

192 Criticd QuarterZy But it is a camouflage: the poems are made things, themselves ‘handiwork’; wc

can see them there, standing out against the world of fiat facts, moving (like her favourite chameleon) with their own discreet shapes, subtle colours, and indi- vidual rhythms: ‘with an elegance/ignored by one’s ignorance’ (CP 13). She is as inventive (and as disciplined) in her stanza forms as Herbert, her rhyming is tight and unobtrusive (except where it is asked to be witty), and her unique syllabic rhythm enables her to pick her way cleanly between dull puddles of words:

With innocent wide penguin eyes, three large fledgling mockingbirds below

the pussy-willow tree, stand in a row,

wings touching, feebly solemn, till they see

their no longer larger mother bringing

something which will partially feed one of them. (CP 105).

A. Kingsley Weatherhead writes at length and interestingly about Marianne Moore in his recmt book The Edge of the Image--again taking up the qus t iw of ‘sticking to the facts in a world in which there are no facts’ (Stevens). He suggests that pattern in her poems has a ‘minimal impact’, ‘sets a light seal of endorsement upon the point the poet is making with modesty and circurn- spection in the imagery’. She herself, circlihg round the same problem in a typical jackdaw’s nest of an essay ’Idiosyncrasy and Technique’, recalls: ‘we have literature, William Archer said, when we impart distinctiveness to ordinary talk and make it still seem ordinary‘. With Hopkins, as he himself lamented, &tine tiveness became queer; with Marianne Moore it still seems (in the very best seme) ordinary.

They answer one’s questions, a deal table compact with the wall; in this dried bone of arrangement one’s ’natural promptness’ is compressed. not crowded out; one’s style is not iost in such simplicity. (CP 55).

DAMIAN GRANT