‘I like country fairs, roller-coasters, merry-go-rounds, dog shows, museums, avenues of trees, old elms, vehicles’ (on being asked to name the new Ford she suggested ‘the utopian turtle top’ or ‘the intelligent whale’), ‘experiments in timing, like our ex-Museum of Science and Invention’s two roller-bearings in a gravity chute, synchronized with a ring-bearing, revolving vertically. I am fond of animals and take inordinate interest in mongooses, squirrels, crows, elephants.’ This is Marianne Moore on Marianne Moore, one of the ‘Authors of 1951 Speaking for Themselves’ in the New York Herald Tribune. She also listed as among the few great artists of her time Casals, Soledad, Alec Guinness and the Lipizzaner horsemen. She adored gardenias, beautiful clothes, Beatrix Potter and baseball, which she compared to writing. She told Esquire in 1962 that she regarded the statement by a famous player that ‘Marianne Moore speaks to our condition as ballplayers’ as one of the great compliments of her life. She wrote the liner notes to Muhammad Ali’s TV series, ‘I Am the Greatest’. Though she never married, lived quietly at home and was an inveterate letter writer, Emily Dickinson she is not.
Neither love (‘My Senses Do Not Deceive Me’) nor death are primarily her subjects, nor does time feature greatly. Art gets more attention, as does war, the pangolin, roses, monkeys, snails, steamrollers and that most fascinating subject, human behaviour. She is cool. She is thrilling. Despite the fact that Hilda Doolittle first published Moore (without her permission); that she became a mentor to Elizabeth Bishop; that Grace Schulman edited the current Faber collection, nevertheless she may have found her precursors were men rather than women, according to Cynthia Hogan. And the men found her. ‘Miss Moore’s poetry forms part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time . . . in which an original sensibility and alert intelligence and deep feeling have been engaged in maintaining the life of the English language’: T. S. Eliot in his preface to Selected Writings by Marianne Moore. W. H. Auden said of her, Marianne Moore is one of the very few modern-day poets I can read any day, or in any mood.’ She numbered fellow poets William Carlos Williams and Randall Jarrell among her admirers. She won the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize and, for her translation of the fables of La Fontaine – a work that took her over ten years to complete – the coveted Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres.
‘The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing,’ she wrote. Marianne Moore’s mind enchants us with its truthfulness, its clarity, its wit. For once, the word ‘rapier-like’ is legitimate. ‘If Miss Moore is laughing at us, it is laughter that catches us . . . and half-paralyses us, as light flashed from a very fine steel blade, wielded playfully, ironically . . . Yet with all that craftsmanship . . . her art resides only in that serene palace of her own world of inspiration – frail, yet as all beautiful things are, absolutely hard’: Hilda Doolittle in her essay on Moore for The Egoist – the short-lived but immensely influential literary journal. Her art is also direct. There is with other poets, and particularly Dickinson, the delight in the thing seen ‘slant’. That is not where delight is found in Marianne Moore. Though she is intellectually complex, the fresh-washed quality of her work comes from the ‘straight on’ vision. She sees ‘the rock crystal thing to see’. She is, as Randall Jarrell said of her in his essay ‘Her Shield’, ‘the poet of the particular’. The particular, and the demand that it be described accurately, was key to the aesthetic philosophy with which she is associated: imagism. ‘The natural object is always the adequate symbol’ was Ezra Pound’s mantra. (Pound was, it seems, everywhere.) Grace Schulman points out that her laboratory studies affected Moore’s poetry profoundly. ‘Art is exact perception’ is the opening line of one of her poems ‘And no man who’s done his part/Need apologize for art.’
She did not write poetry ‘for money or fame. To earn a living is needful, but it can be done in routine ways. One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one’s happiness to express.’ ‘Objectify’ is the operative word in that sentence. In her poetry, which she once referred to as Escher compositions, each word is precisely positioned on the page, though not necessarily in the precise position one might expect! Moore was, as Grace Schulman notes, often irritated by those who commented upon the strict syllabic method from which she did not deviate. However, its accommodation – which necessitated the regular splitting of words from line to line – is fundamental to the structure of her work and its Pound-like visual effect on the page. Later in life, however, she was to say to Schulman that the sound of her poetry was more important to her than its visual effect on the page.
The visual effect is nevertheless powerful – but always to a purpose, for example, her generous use of inverted commas around every borrowed or stolen line, even from dinner party guests. When asked why, she said, ‘When a thing has been said so well that it could not be said better, why paraphrase it? Hence my writing is, if not a cabinet of fossils, a kind of collection of flies in amber.’ Thus one learns to trust her. It is strange how compelling that reaction becomes, as one begins to see clearly what Auden saw: ‘with what unfreckled integrity it has all been done’.
The seeds of that integrity were sown early. Until she was seven Marianne Moore lived in the home of her grandfather, a Presbyterian pastor. Her father, over whose mental health there seems to have been a shadow, disappeared shortly before her birth – she was never to meet him. She attended Bryn Mawr. In her introduction to Selected Letters, and there were thousands from which one could select, Bonnie Costello quotes a line of rather daunting self-knowledge from a letter to a friend: ‘My experience [at Bryn Mawr] gave me security in my determination to have what I want.’ Commercial college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, followed, where she studied typing and business, which she then taught, evidently extremely well. In 1918 when she was thirty-one Marianne Moore moved to New York – ‘the savage’s romance’ that gave her ‘accessibility to experience’. Since she worked for the New York Public Library and later edited the prestigious The Dial, a literary journal, which counted Yeats, Eliot and Pound among its contributors, it also gave her accessibility to virtually every major literary figure in America. Marianne Moore’s was a long and brilliant life in literature, in which the black-caped, threecorner hatted, white-haired woman became an icon of American letters.
Her very ‘properness’ gives a surprising salt and dash to her work. She was never for sale – to anyone. Her disciplined artist’s eye looked on her own work and cut it ruthlessly. Patricia C. Willis notes in her introduction to Marianne Moore, Woman and Poet that the poem titled ‘Poetry’ once shrank from five stanzas to thirteen lines, and eventually to three lines! Luckily she relented, though as she said, ‘Omissions are not accidents.’ She died in 1972, aged eighty-five. Grace Schulman tells us that Ezra Pound came out of his long seclusion to recite her poem ‘What are Years?’ at her memorial service. The last line of the poem is appropriate to a woman who looked unflinchingly at life and its inevitable end: ‘This is mortality/this is eternity.’ She may have written of poetry, ‘I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.’ The poem, however, continues, ‘Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.’