MARIANNE MOORE: GENERAL COMMENTARY

TESS GALLAGHER (ESSAY DATE 1985)

SOURCE: Gallagher, Tess. "Throwing the Scarecrows from the Garden." Parnassus 12, no. 2 (1985): 45-60.

In the following essay, Gallagher outlines and counters the negative critical reaction—particularly from feminist commentators—to Moore's poetry.

In 1970 when I began to read Marianne Moore in a class with the poet Jean Garrigue, I was determined not to like Moore's poems. But they were on the menu and I allowed my nose to be pressed into the plate—not by Ms. Garrigue, who was the gentlest of teachers, but by the poems themselves. I resented what I took to be their holier-than-thou, near Olympian chill, the lack of visible emotion, the magpie clutter, the pert glint in the bird's eye that said I was too dull-witted to ever catch her meaning without a sojourn in the moat. Luckily, this was not to be the lasting impression Moore made on me.

I happened upon George Eliot's insistence that "Women have not to prove that they can be emotional and rhapsodic, and spiritualistic; everyone believes that already. They have to prove that they are capable of accurate thought, severe study, and continuous self-command."¹ It was a call for women to "rebut the generalizations which had encouraged their onesidedness."² Seen in this light, I quickly began to revise my attitude toward Moore's poetry, and developed a hard-earned advocacy by the end of the course.

I begin here with my failure toward her work because I believe it to be the rule with readers, having by now taught her to classes myself—classes populated with recalcitrant Moore-haters, some of whom are never converted. One aspect of general reluctance toward her work arises from a too-narrow definition of passion, which young people especially yearn for in poetry. Being so vested in bodily notions in our first understanding of the word passion, we neglect what Louise Bogan called "a passion wholly of the mind." It is here that Moore's poetry is situated.

Such misunderstanding of Moore is not restricted to the young or the uninitiated. In her book Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women: A New Tradition,³ the critic Suzanne Juhasz continues a tradition of using Emily Dickinson to beat Moore over the head, Moore being "without Emily Dickinson's range and passion."⁴

If passion is the capacity to show evidence of burning, of being carried by one's enthusiasms and frustrations, then Moore has it. Time and time again we see her expertly adrift on her own tides, especially in the long poems such as "An Octopus" and "Marriage." When Moore gives us "the roar of ice" in "An Octopus" ⁵ I find myself thinking that this is indeed the cumulative effect of this poem which begins in the seeming desolation "of ice. Deceptively reserved, and flat," and ends "in a curtain of powdered snow launched like a waterfall." Her intensity is analogous to "the unegoistic action of the glaciers." Line by line Moore populates the mountain like Noah's ark turned upside down. On it are "bears, elk, deer, wolves, goats and ducks" as well as a water ouzel and a marmot. She is attentive also to the flora of the mountain:

birch-trees,
ferns, and lily-pads,
avalanche lilies, Indian paint-brushes,
bear's ears and kittentails,
and miniature cavalcades of chlorophylless fungi

With the "relentless accuracy" which is the passion of the naturalist and the scientist and of this artist, she observes the mountain and also what the mountain is not. It is not where some of these animals have their dens; they come there for things they need, just as the reader visits the worlds writers provide in order to experience joys and hardships of habitats other than those to which they have become accustomed. Moore's tertiary movement in the poem allows her to intend a direction and then turn back on it; or, she will embellish a minor movement until it takes on noteworthy proportions and has to be considered a legitimate digression relevant to some compelling inner sense of appropriateness Moore feels toward the subject. What emerges is a dialogue concerning interiors and surfaces. At first, one begins to feel that the mountain is what is on it. But as the poem nears its conclusion we are brought to understand that the ultimate forces of the mountain, as with Moore's writing, are unseen, "creeping slowly as with mediated stealth." It is not the surface which has the last say here, but the interiors which have been "planed by ice and polished by wind," and which have the power to send avalanches "with a sound like the crack of a rifle."

Juhasz seems unaware that the definition of passion also admits "appetite" and is synonymous with fervor, enthusiasm, zeal, and ardor; all "denoting strong feeling, either sustained or passing, for or about something or somebody."⁶ Enthusiasm as it relates to passion "reflects excitement and responsiveness to more specific or concrete things."⁷ It is in her enthusiasm and responsiveness that we must locate Moore's passion, and if she loves "in a mild distant, sisterly way"⁸ it is still loving, and a variety of loving perhaps much underrated when opposed to the Latin sense of self-abandonment which argues for an authenticity based on surrender of the will. It is Moore's insistence on maintaining the means and terms of her loving, her responsiveness, that we should admire as something progressive in the literature of women.

ON THE SUBJECT OF…

MOORE'S VERSE, ACCORDING TO W. H. AUDEN

Miss Moore's poems are an example of a kind of art which is not as common as it should be; they delight, not only because they are intelligent, sensitive and beautifully written, but also because they convince the reader that they have been written by someone who is personally good.

Auden, W. H. An excerpt from "Marianne Moore." In The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays. New York: Random House, Inc., 1962.

To get closer to Moore's sense of passion, one must read her essay on Pavlova in which Moore notes that the Russian dancer was "self-controlled rather than a prison to what she prized,"⁹ that "she did not project as valuable the personality from which she could not escape," and finally, the observation that "that which is able to change the heart proves itself."¹⁰ Each of these insights may be valuably applied to Moore's own attitudes toward her art.

One cannot miss Moore's love for what this woman communicated of the human spirit by way of what Moore saw as the most naked of the arts—dance. The connection to Pavlova is so deep that Moore cannot resist retelling the circumstances of Pavlova's death in the chronology she provides at the end, so that the piece ends with Moore's own sense of the loss of this beautiful, passionate presence:

In January 1931 she died in Holland, of pleurisy. While enroute to the Hague via the Riviera, to begin a tour, after a sleepless night in a train that had stood on a siding all night, she caught cold—recorded thus reverently by Mr. Beaumont: "Hardly settled in the Hotel des Indes, she fell ill; the flame that was her life flickered, burnt low, and half an hour after midnight, on Friday, January 23rd, went out."

(p. 160, Predilections )

Moore did not need to supply this ending in such detail. The first line of this passage would have sufficed. The loss of the flame, the very metaphor Moore chooses to repeat in Mr. Beaumont's description, was necessary to what Moore needed to communicate of her own sense of Pavlova's intensity—her fire. One can't be a bystander to passion when it arrives so artfully given. Yet Moore appreciated in Pavlova the way in which her passion separated her even from those with whom she danced: "for in her dancing with persons, remoteness marked her every attitude." (p. 160, Predilections ) This might also be applied to the remoteness of Moore's own tone in her poems at times.

I smile to think of Moore "sitting in" on Louise Bogan's 1956 class at the YW-YMHA and being advised with the rest of the class to "keep your abstract thought for the prose, your emotions for the poetry,"¹¹ and to remember that "emotion should remain direct and uncomplicated … issuing from the heart, not the 'ego.'" Moore was only partially obedient, ignoring the edict on abstractions and adopting directness in tone, while preferring to complicate her stance by recessing emotion or exchanging it for industry and insight. Emotion with her was itself form. And, of course, she must have decided all this long before her encounter with Bogan. It is this lack of visible emotion, what in speaking of Dryden and later of Auden has been called "the middle way" of writing, which has obscured Moore's particular brand of passion, for she reinterpreted the "middle" style to mean "the circumspectly audacious."¹² We are unused to meeting passion unattended by displays of emotion, except perhaps in its sharper forms as with Swift or Pope.

The charge that Moore sacrificed emotion in order to be "one of the boys" is one I find particularly obtuse. But Juhasz adopts it and seems to imply some Uncle Tom-ism as regards an essential element of the feminine: that women are emotional beings and that this has to be in the work of women writers we admire as such. Oh hogwash! And give that woman a bucket of newts. This is exactly the kind of non-thinking that cripples our response to what is truly individual in the best writing of women. Feminist scripts, like all scripts, are anathema. I daresay that had Moore begun writing at the time I did, in the late Sixties, she would have secured her poetry against the Belfast of feminist ideology in favor of some less compulsory relationship to feminist attitudes and its legitimate urgencies.

All one needs is a month-long stay in Northern Ireland to understand that all defections are not simply cowardice, as Juhasz implies when she notes that Moore abjures emotion. Good sense is often involved. Like Seamus Heaney leaving his birthplace in Derry for Black Rock in the Republic of Ireland, Moore was capable of a stringent vigilance toward her gift. Since hers was a gift vested in the desire to deliver us from our biases rather than confirm us in them, she was especially wary of responses dominated primarily by the emotions. Her brand of morality was marked by its utter lack of evangelism. Perhaps this continues to delay her reception by some readers.

Another complaint of feminist critics seems to be that Moore is too obsequious, always sitting in the corner eating humble pie. In a time when women writers want to be seen as having fully assumed the powers of their craft through the authority of their own skills, Moore's insistence on humility at every turn must strike them as a reprimand and also as an obsolete pretense meant to throw the hounds off the scent of what they assume to be her self-satisfied withdrawal from responsible connection to her creations. This, however, is not at all her circumstance, but one conferred on her by our times.

For Moore, humility was connected to a genuine sense of Grace, of being allowed knowledge in the face of odds, of being allowed her very art which had sources other than the audacity of her will. Or as Auden put it, "suffering plays a greater part than knowledge" in our acts of the will and "one must not discount Grace."¹³ Like Pavlova, Moore would have considered genius as a trust, "concerning which vanity would be impossible."¹⁴ Humility was a form of honesty with Moore, an honesty which, Donald Hall has been shrewd enough to point out, was not in the least self-effacing. It is not a concession when one considers oneself to be a beneficiary, especially for an intellect like Moore's which, as she well knew, was fully prepared for what Grace would deliver. She did her share of the work and took requisite pride in that.

Reticence is another detraction Juhasz enlists against Moore. It is true Moore is often reticent, but in all the skillful, interesting ways. Take, for instance, Moore's agility at chain-linking quotations one with another from borrowed sources, and coupling them with her own observations until she could project them into a quite unanticipated structure having its own integrity:

But someone in New
England has known to say
that the student is patience personified, a variety
of hero, "patient
of neglect and of reproach,"—who can "hold by
himself." You can't beat hens to
make them lay. Wolf's wool is the best wool,
but it cannot be sheared, because
the wolf will not comply. With knowledge as
with wolves' surliness,
the student studies
voluntarily, refusing to be less
than individual. He
"gives his opinion and then rests upon it;"
(from "The Student,"   p. 101-102)

Or in "The Monkey Puzzle" :

this "Paduan cat with lizard," this tiger in a bamboo thicket,
"An interwoven somewhat," it will not come out.
…

It knows that if a nomad may have dignity,
Gibraltar has had more—
that "it is better to be lonely than unhappy."

Juhasz takes Moore's constant quoting of others as the sign of her unwillingness to accept responsibility for her own assertions. I prefer to see quotation as proof of Moore's ambition not to write simply in the isolation of the ego, but to write as if she were a team, or an orchestra:

When three players on a side play three positions
and modify conditions,
the massive run need not be everything.
("Baseball and Writing"  )

She was willing to take responsibility to a new, enlarged arena then, to present and credit views other than her own, and to provide a context for hearing a concert of voices. She was, of course, the ever present conductor. She chose the score, was enigmatically "galvanized against inertia,"¹⁵ delivered her baton strokes beginning "far back of the beat, so that you don't see when the beat comes. To have started such a long distance ahead makes it possible to be exact. Whereas you can't be exact by being restrained."¹⁶ She preferred the responsibility of conversation to the responsibility of the orator. Her allegiance was to community and individual at once, no small commitment, and she ironically recognized the ways in which one compromised the other in the ending to "Marriage" when she puts a quote within a quote, and writes "'Liberty and union / now and forever'; / the Book on the writing-table; / the hand in the breastpocket."¹⁷

Moore's homage to her sources, what she called her "borrowed" and "hybrid method of composition," was proof, I believe, of a generosity of spirit that admitted that the work of the artist is often the result of "gifting" from others, as much as it is a matter of being gifted. It is an innovation not even Whitman, with all his pride of inclusion, thought to design.

One has only to read Moore's notes to the poems to be reminded of how rich non-literary sources can be for a writer. Moore knocked down the fence around literature. She let in the writers of books about tigers, books on physiography and anthropology. The list includes The Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, The New York Times, The I-Ching, a tour book guide to Italy, a progress report from research on cancer, an article on "Plastic Sponge Implants in Surgery," the dictionary, the Christian Science Monitor, and even a letter from a curator of reptiles and amphibians.

Reading Moore in 1970, I was impressed with the voracity of her interests. Reading her again fifteen years later, I feel that somehow a large amount of curiosity and attention toward the diversity and particularity of the history, the geography, the flora and fauna, the creatures of the earth and its inhabitants has been regrettably neglected by today's poets. It is refreshing to read a poet who has bothered to find out about more than her own traumas.

It is the lack of the contemporary central and exposed "I" which allows Moore to generalize and to extend both the range of her subject matter and the moral import of her explorations. There seems to be something in the very nature of her moralist's approach which prohibits confession. Probably this comes from the need to speak from a position of relative immunity. Auden managed it with the public "we." Recently Frank Bidart in his dramatic narrative, The War of Vaslav Nijinsky, calls on Nijinsky to fight the battles of his moral questionings. The dismay as to how to classify Bidart's work is not unlike that accorded Moore's poems when they first appeared: should we call this poetry? Donald Hall has responded in Bidart's favor by enlisting Moore's reliance on "the genuine": "Bidart is not a confessional poet; he is dramatic and universal, a moral observer of humanity.…When I read poems that are 'not poetry,' and yet 'wholly genuine,' I know that I am in the presence of something new."¹⁸

While Bidart's newness rests in his dramatic stance, his mixing of prose passages with lyrical bursts and dialogue, Moore's newness in technical matters comes from her incorporation of actual bits of prose into the bloodstream of her lines. In this she presaged Ashbery's experiments with prose elements in diction and gesture, as well as perhaps the current borrowing from prose characterized by a preference for methods of accumulating energy through narratives that comment upon one another such as Robert Hass's "Pascal Lamb."¹⁹

No one, however, has shown signs of developing a moral equivalent to Moore's content. Her poems "have a sense of civilization about them"²⁰ that seems outside the grasp of contemporary American practitioners. Just as America now buys its cars, blenders, galoshes, and pharmaceutical supplies abroad, it also seems to be looking to the Irish, the Polish, the Turkish, and the Russians of Akhmatova's generation for spiritual and moral qualities. Here also deficits accrue, and only intermittently, firefly style, do single accomplished poems with a moral approach hint at the general lack of Made-In-America resourcefulness Moore so much exemplified in this respect. Moore's conclusion to her essay on Louise Bogan allows one to see the lack of illusion with which she faced such issues: "we are told, if we do wrong that grace may abound, it does not abound. We need not be told that life is never going to be free from trouble and that there are no substitutes for the dead; but it is a fact as well as a mystery that handicap is proficiency, weakness is power, that the scar is a credential, that indignation is no adversary for gratitude or heroism for joy. These are medicines."²¹ She had, in other words, no miracle cures, and would have agreed with the anthropologist studying tribal healing who said "spells are not communiques: they are gestures."²²

Still, the mania for solutions is a pressure the artist is usually aware of, and must with agility renounce. Doris Lessing on a recent tour in Australia remarked in a newspaper interview that she was appalled by the number of people in her audiences who asked her for answers to a set of wide-ranging problems that ran the gamut from personal to political to ideological and religious. What frightened her was the feeling that these people were hungry for answers, not hungry for ways of thinking toward the problems. They wanted to be told what to do, and this, as she realized, is very dangerous because it signals that people's resources and patience for self-generated action and for defining alternatives are lamentably low. Dangerous also because it invites someone of perhaps not altogether unimpeachable motives to do just what is asked, to tell them what to do. And therein lies an end to freedom.

A similar trend plagues us in the public moralism of the Reagan era which operates without (yes, surprise!) morality. It seeks to substitute dogma and ad-man hype for authentic action and discovery. Moore's aesthetic scorns such remedies, although the rather Confucian style of the wisdom she often provided at the ends of her poems would at first seem to indicate the opposite. But cut your teeth on advice like:

It was enough; it is enough
if present faith mend partial proof

The application is in no one's hands but the reader's. Or, take the ending of "Elephants" in which Moore tells us that

as Socrates,
prudently testing the suspicious thing, knew
the wisest is he who's not sure that he knows.
Who rides on a tiger can never dismount;

Here Moore has it both ways, says wisdom depends on a certain unsureness toward "the suspicious thing," and yet presents what seems a verity, that he "who rides on a tiger can never dismount." I mean, I wouldn't. It is this mixture of fable with aphoristic surety added to "conversities" that cause one not to know from moment to moment on which side the gavel is going to come down. Conversities is a word Moore invented to indicate that her meaning might work positively and negatively without canceling out either possibility. I can remember a wonderful afternoon in a cafe in my hometown during which Michael Burkard and I took a close look at "Critics and Connoisseurs." Whose side is she on? we kept asking. The ledger would strangely balance itself at moments when we seemed about to identify a victim. I don't think we ever did settle it. This "conscientious inconsistency," as she termed memory in "The Mind Is An Enchanted Thing," is active throughout her poetry as a guarantee against rigidity of vision and narrow mandates. As Moore said when speaking of Williams, "the truth of poetry is not dogma, but a cry of a whole soul."²⁵ This does not mean Moore is reticent about what she values or the need for values. In "Values in Use" she makes clear that values should not overwhelm the use we make of them: "Certainly the means must not defeat the end."²⁶

The tyranny of prescribed morality I spoke of earlier strikes me as not far removed from the feminist critic's practice of composing hit lists in which a poet's work is ransacked for poems useful to the cause, and if the tally is insubstantial, the writer is sent to the purgatory of "unrecommended reading." Juhasz, for instance, found that "Marriage" was the only poem of Moore's that could be counted as clearly having feminine experience as a central subject. Evidently, lines such as "Marriage, tobacco, and slavery, / initiated liberty"²⁷ were inadmissible. Nor did she note the application of sexual identity to a hedgehog in "His Shield" which directs it somewhat pointedly, as with others of Moore's animal poems in which the animal is assigned a sex.

In his
unconquerable country of unpompous gusto,
gold was so common none considered it; greed
and flattery were unknown.

In presenting the hedgehog as masculine here, Moore seems to highlight the pomposity men have for exactly these negative capabilities. Juhasz failed to surmise that Moore's femininity is most active in her tendency toward dualism, odd partnerships, and hairline distinctions between neighboring qualities or properties. Here I'm thinking of poems like "Granite and Steel" and "Voracities and Verities Sometimes Are Interacting," although there are many other poems I might have chosen to mention. Oppositions of themselves invite "our metaphorical thinking to make one the masculine and one the feminine counterpart."²⁸ But surely we needn't go to these extremes to accept the gifts of one who is our own.

If pressed, however, I would recommend that "Love in America" with its "benign dementia," its "a Midas of tenderness; nothing else," and its hiss of yeses at the end be added to the stockpile of poems of particular interest to women. I would also single out "He Wrote the History Book" for how it reminds us of the male signature over all history writing and the "you" of the feminine contribution "to your father's / legibility"… which causes women to appear "sufficiently / synthetic." She ends the poem with a real karate chop disguised as a bouquet: "Thank you for showing me / your father's autograph." Some of her animal poems also allow us humor toward feminine predicaments, sexual and not—my favorite of these being "The Lion In Love," with its: "Lions or such as were attracted / to young girls, sought an alliance,"²⁹ and "Love, ah Love, when your slipknot's drawn, / One can but say, 'Farewell, good sense.'"³⁰

What is one to make of Juhasz' charge that in Moore's work "woman" and "poet" were "separated as the most effective means of achieving professional success"?³¹ Or that Moore concentrated upon "technical brilliance coupled with a marked exclusion of feminine experience from art"?³² Reading this makes me feel I've been caught in a strange time warp in which it is suddenly revealed that Bach is inferior because he doesn't seem to know anything about Reggae.

What is Moore writing about, then, if she is intent on neglecting feminine experience in order to make a success of herself? She is writing about aesthetic choices of all kinds, about being human in a world also inhabited by animals and insects whose world we have largely colonized, which in the worst sense of colonial, as Moore points out, has never been synonymous with mercy. She veritably puts the human family back on Noah's ark, where we have to lie down with each other while the waters rise. Indeed, her focus is on our very beingness itself. The questions she's asking are every bit as important to me as what I might be interested in writing with a view to women's issues, although that does interest me. Some of these questions are: What relation does the past have to the present? How do beauty and sensibility coexist when faced with an uncompromising power? How do we value, and why, and what? Is there such a thing as "progress" when we consider military endeavors ("fighting fighting fighting that where / there was death there may / be life")?³³ What is liberty? Union? How does one preserve judgment in a world of hucksters and "snake-charming controversialists?"³⁴ What is a critic's job? What is poetry and why should we value it? What endures? How do we choose? What is transcendence? Consolation? Envy? Charity? Justice? ("And so, as you are weak or are invincible / the court says white is black or that black crimes are white.")³⁵ How should one deal with an enemy? ("Choose wisdom, even in an enemy.")³⁶ What is freedom? ("The power of relinquishing what one would keep")³⁷.

If this reads like Topic Time at the back of a high school civics text, Moore's handling of these questions is always more an approach than a tourniquet. She is a poet who needs the constellation and the morning star, though she might object to their being yoked by that despised connective "and."

Moore, it seems likely, as with so many extraordinary women of her time, never assumed accepted sexual exclusions within the artistic, social, or political sphere; and so, in many ways never had to confront such issues in the way contemporary women have had to, sexual imperatives having defined our intellectual, social, and psychological battlefields for the past fifteen to twenty years.

I confess to being weary of feminist honor rolls in which Moore is addressed condescendingly as if she were merely the crumpled first step toward the Acropolis of Plath. Moore is no carriage-drawn supplicant at the mercy of General Motors. She was an originator, not simply an entrepreneur. And if she was a spare-parts wizard, she knew how to make things work, and did. She was also no pussycat, as many like to infer from her "mousing pose."³⁸ As she observed, "an animal with claws should have opportunity to use them,"³⁹ and she took several. How would you like, for instance, to have been the one for whom "The Steam Roller" was intended? Or told that you "lack half-wit"? Or that you are one of those "self-wrought Midases of brains / whose fourteencarat ignorance aspires to rise in value"?⁴⁰ Nonetheless, Moore is closer to Molière than to Swift. She recognized Molière as a relative, I think, and paid homage to him in "To the Peacock of France," seemingly enjoying kinship in his lack of popularity in certain quarters. Like Molière, she was concerned with manners, with those discrepancies between civility and brutality, action and word, intention and outcome that make us smile and wonder at human nature, make us take up our cudgels or our shields. She was a true archaeologist of the spirit, curious and exacting before the remnant of some variegated attitude, or "the deft white-stockinged dance in thick-soled shoes!",⁴¹ the "mantle lined with stars."⁴²

One last scarecrow I would like to fling from Moore's imaginary garden is the idea that because she was a spinster her poetry is marred by the limitations of that social role, as Roy Harvey Pearce has implied.⁴³ Juhasz goes even further by accusing Moore of "opting for nonsexuality"⁴⁴ and thereby escaping "those feminine characteristics that threaten."⁴⁵ Juhasz is ready to assign Moore to a museum by virtue of her chastity. "Chastity is non-engagement; it leaves one in a position of safety."⁴⁶ Chastity was not "a position of safety" then, nor do I suspect it to be now, and the correctness of chastity as metaphor must, I think, bear witness to the act in order to support itself. Moore, as she put it best herself, simply "was not matrimonially ambitious."⁴⁷ She was nobody's fool and must, like Emily Dickinson, have understood that to take a husband in those times was tantamount to signing one's artistic death warrant. Adrienne Rich has retrieved Emily Dickinson from the myth of the madwoman in the attic by pointing out that Dickinson had reasons for choosing solitude—she was at work! Moore chose the companionship and nurturing of her mother for not dissimilar reasons, I think. Certainly, had she been "inclined," she could have managed to marry. All this is beside the point. I'm interested in Moore precisely for her difference. If one has access to the ultimate in virgin thought, one ought to prize it, pay attention, not pronounce it remedial. Give me a smart woman any day, whatever her gynecological qualifications.

There are so many things Moore has given me as a writer and human being over the years that I feel I ought to have acknowledged them long before now. I've needed her distrust of easy answers, her wonderful humor—"Humor saves a few steps, it saves years."⁴⁸ Her team spirit appeals to me, though I don't know much about baseball and I'd make a rotten cheerleader. But, I agree that some things have to be done together and that each person in that "together" has an important contribution. Still, I don't want to march or hear the national anthem played three times a day. And neither does Moore. I prize Moore's cinematic eye, the way she uses the close-up metaphor so you can forget what you saw and keep seeing: "the lion's ferocious chrysanthemum head," "the swan's maple leaflike feet." Her poems operate the way our sight does on objects at a distance, requiring us to guess what we're seeing before we can confirm it. There she is, like the retina, collecting until the image identifies itself as something seen for the first time. I enjoy how Moore often delays confirmation syntactically so that conclusiveness itself is mocked.

Moore's propensity for miniature self-portraits is rather like those childhood visual puzzles where one attempts to see how many faces are camouflaged in the seemingly unpopulated landscape of the drawing. She is always there in multiples, "porcupine-quilled":⁴⁹ in her "complicated starkness"⁵⁰ or as "that spectacular and nimble animal the fish, / whose scales turn aside the sun's sword by their polish"⁵¹ or "an obedient chameleon in fifty shades of mauve and amethyst,"⁵² or "like electricity, / depopulating areas that boast of their remoteness."⁵³

There was the trick of writing messages invisibly in lemon juice which I used once or twice as a child. The scarcity of matches made it impractical. But when you could manage to scorch the paper just right, it was a thrill to see the words appear on the page as if out of nowhere. This somehow describes the way Moore's poems affect me. If she tells me "Titles are chaff,"⁵⁴ I get out my matches to see what else might be on the page. Sure enough, the meaning-after-the-meaning ripples across the brain. I see she meant more than that titles are to be discarded. It's the chaff, after all, that protects the germ of the wheat until it's matured toward harvest. I blow out the match.

Some final advice to those about to encounter the newest wave of resistance to Moore's poetry: to drink from a waterfall you have to get wet, but don't stand under it.

On my first visit to New York City in the summer of 1971, Jean Garrigue had invited me to meet Marianne Moore. The car I was driving across the country from Washington State had a sieve for a radiator, and I did not arrive in time. In the meanwhile, Moore had become very ill. That February she died. I was grateful, in a way, not to have met her at that time. How do you say goodbye to a waterfall?

Notes

1. George Eliot, "Women in France: Madame de Sable," in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (Routledge, 1963), p. 53.
2. Lynne Sukenick, "On Woman and Fiction," The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards (U. of Mass., 1977), p. 33.
3. Suzanne Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women: A New Tradition (Harper, 1976).
4. Ibid., p. 40, quoting Roy Harvey Pearce.
5. Marianne Moore, "The Octopus," The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (Macmillan, 1982), pp. 71-76.
6. The American Heritage Dictionary, Second Edition (Houghton Mifflin, 1982).
7. Ibid.
8. Louise Bogan writing to Morton Zabel about her affection for T. S. Eliot whom she had just met. Elizabeth Frank, Louise Bogan: A Portrait (Knopf, 1985) p. 343.
9. Marianne Moore, "Anna Pavlova," Predilections (Viking Press, 1955), pp. 147-160.
10. Ibid., p. 159.
11. Elizabeth Frank, Louise Bogan (Knopf, 1985), p. 346.
12. Ibid., p. 85.
13. Marianne Moore, "W. H. Auden," Predilections, p. 87.
14. Marianne Moore, "Anna Pavlova," Predilections, p. 153.
15. Marianne Moore, Predilections.
16. Marianne Moore, "Feeling and Precision," Predilections, p. 5.
17. Marianne Moore, "Marriage," The Complete Poems, p. 70.
18. Donald Hall on the jacket of The Sacrifice, by Frank Bidart (Random House, 1983).
19. Robert Hass, New Poets of the 80's, ed. Jack Myers and Roger Weingarten (Wampeter Press, 1984), p. 124.
20. Roethke talking about Louise Bogan in Louise Bogan, by Elizabeth Frank, p. 364.
21. Marianne Moore, "Compactness Compacted," Predilections, p. 133.
22. Jonathan Miller, The Body In Question (Vintage, 1978), p. 85.
23. Marianne Moore, "Enough," The Complete Poems, p. 187.
24. Ibid., "The Elephants," p. 130.
25. Marianne Moore, Predilections.
26. Marianne Moore, "Values in Use," The Complete Poems, p. 181.
27. Ibid., "Enough," p. 186.
28. Lynn Sukenick, On Women and Fiction, p. 32.
29. Marianne Moore, "The Lion In Love," The Complete Poems, p. 246.
30. Ibid., p. 247.
31. Suzanne Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms, p. 35.
32. Ibid., p. 35.
33. Marianne Moore, "In Distrust of Merits," The Complete Poems, p. 137.
34. Ibid., "The Labors of Hercules," p. 53.
35. Moore, but I don't know which poem. I'm quoting from memory.
36. Marianne Moore, "The Bear And the Garden-Lover," The Complete Poems, p. 257.
37. Ibid., "His Shield," p. 144.
38. Ibid., "Style," p. 169.
39. Ibid., "Peter," p. 44.
40. Ibid., "The Labors of Hercules," p. 53.
41. Ibid., "A Carriage From Sweden," p. 132.
42. Ibid., "Spenser's Ireland," p. 112.
43. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 366.
44. Suzanne Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms, p. 39.
45. Ibid., p. 39.
46. Ibid., p. 39.
47. A Marianne Moore Reader, "Idiosyncracy and Technique," (Viking, 1965), p. 170.
48. Marianne Moore, "The Pangolin," The Complete Poems, p. 119.
49. Ibid., "The Monkey Puzzle," p. 80.
50. Ibid., "The Monkey Puzzle," p. 80.
51. Ibid., "An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle In the Shape of A Fish," p. 83.
52. Ibid., "Peoples Surroundings," p. 56.
53. Ibid., "The Labors of Hercules," p. 53.
54. Ibid., "He Wrote the History Book," p. 89.

CHARLES ALTIERI (ESSAY DATE SUMMER 1988)

SOURCE: Altieri, Charles. "The Powers of Genuine Place: Moore's Feminist Modernism." Southern Humanities Review 22, no. 3 (summer 1988): 205-22.

In the following essay, Altieri explores the ways in which Moore's gender influenced her modernist verse.

Perhaps nothing captures the fundamental values projected by Modernist American poetry better than William Carlos Williams's image of the "artist figure of / the farmer—composing/—antagonist" who

in deep thought
is pacing through the rain
among his blank fields, with
hands in pockets,
in his head
the harvest already planted.
("Spring and All," in Imaginations, 98-99.)

This is Constructivism's lonely and sublime sense of the responsibilities of artistic intelligence faced with the daunting task of transposing the uncontaminated latent energies of that landscape into structures giving order and significance to cultural life. Any less blank sense of the field would risk losing the mystery of the radical contrast between hands and head that warranted rejecting both the symbolic and subjective models of expression cultivated by nineteenth century art. Each in its own way made too many demands on art's concern for mimetic content to allow the full tension between composer and antagonist roles to emerge. Romantic symbolic readings of the field would try to read as immanent within nature what Williams projects as dependent on the artist's compositional activity, while subjective models of expression simply locate all the relevant properties of the field in the psyche of the observer and the private (albeit potentially representative) history that shaped the associations. Thus in order for the full force of that antagonistic intelligence to be manifest and for the composing self fully to challenge and ground its own willfulness, Williams tries to make his artist figure capable of meeting two basic demands. He must be able to treat his work as a mode of objective expression that continues Romantic ideals of art as not copying the real but disclosing elemental forces within the artist's engaging it, and he must make that process of disclosure define the expressive subject in terms of objective or impersonal energies that it puts in literal motion. Poetry must have the same literal, testimonial force that Mondrian creates by having his paintings force the observer to participate self-reflexively within the dynamic balances which the work articulates.

I need not tell this audience that a good part of that farmer's exemplary status depends on his gender. But I do need to be able to tell myself what literary criticism can gain by insisting on that observation: what blindnesses derive from that gendering of the Modern, and, more important, what struggles or projects become possible within general Modernist ideals once that gendering is foregrounded? One can answer the first question without considering the second. But that seems to me to make it impossible to distinguish between the limits of Modernism and the limits of male imaginations, thus denying feminism the resources of Modernism and the challenge to confront its own tendencies to return to forms of self-assertion that rely on the modes of expression which Modernism saw as imaginatively bankrupt for the twentieth century. I propose instead that we ask ourselves how someone who accepted Modernist values could go on to criticize male versions of them and propose alternatives still faithful to constructivist commitments.

Williams provides a convenient beginning. It hardly takes someone of Moore's intelligence and stubbornness to grow a bit queasy at versions of constructivism so enamored of this role of "composing-antagonist" which confers the right to impose one's orders on the bland fields horizontal before a looming erect presence. Resisting such fantasies would not depend simply on abstract moral imperatives. To be a woman in Marianne Moore's society meant to be at times a victim of those wills; and, more important, woman's place afforded an imaginative position where other forms of imaginative power became available. If one replaced the composing will by a more flexible imaginative playfulness, it might be possible to show how the will itself could be understood in terms of new dispositions of the psyche which this constructivist art had the capacity to articulate. For example, Modernist abstraction from Mallarmé to Mondrian and Eliot had shown how resistance to the narcissistic fascinations of the synthetic image made available new transpersonal modes of consciousness. In this work it became possible to imagine replacing the willful assertion of the ego's images on experience by so bracketing the composing "I" that the force of the work came to depend on the ways in which the audience could complete it—the "I" of Eliot's "Preludes" becomes anyone who reconstitutes through the poem what it means to be an "infinitely suffering, infinitely gentle thing." And these possibilities in turn made it plausible to think that it would be precisely those whose place in the social order keeps them suspicious of all hegemonic images who must fully explore the powers latent in this new imaginative dispensation.

Moore had a variety of terms for those powers. She spoke of "sincerity," "genuineness," and "authenticity" as the qualities that best distinguished her ambitions.¹ These terms, however, seem to me at best simple indices of the kind of presence that concerns her: they so clearly bear the marks of her fear of staging and displacing the distinctive trait of her imaginative activity that they defer as much as they reveal. Therefore, rather than stay with her terms, I propose our reading some of her best poems in the light of a remark that she made on the poster-artist E. MacKnight Kauffer, attributing to him "an objectified logic of sensibility as inescapable as the colors refracted from a prism" (quoted in Costello, 190). That remark shows a remarkable awareness of both the way in which abstraction makes available new versions of the powers poets mediate and the possible objective means art could develop in order to testify to the claims such powers have within extra-textual experience. Thus where most readings of Moore's work celebrate the ways that her mobile intelligence comes to possess objects, we shall try instead to locate the distinctive powers that she defines by showing how the content of the poems becomes inseparable from the leaps and projections that it invites its audience to see itself making as collaborators in the compositional activity. So the lady then manages to preserve her strangeness, yet also achieves the power to forge in her own terms imaginary trophies with real and abiding desires in them.

Moore never insists that these powers are distinctively those of a lady, so it is plausible to read most of her work as truly impersonal or directly transpersonal. However, two reasons lead me to proceed on the assumption that she wants us to read most of her poems in the light of those that emphasize the female situations that foster their distinctive powers. First, there is a good rationale for her refusing to have more of her poems insist on gender identifications. For the more art could distance the immediate urgencies of such identifications, the more it freed intelligence to a more flexible and complex set of interventions in the world. Yet the pure transumption of such identifications would severely limit a crucial aspect of Moore's own imaginative strengths because that would deny the ways in which her work promised an alternative to the male fantasies of the poet as Promethean forger of new cultural identities. So Moore had to experiment with establishing an aura of gender as a property not of the content of experience but of its formal structure within the reflective space of the poem. Instead of propounding a specific image of "female" experience, Moore would try to make the powers available to a gendered stance become part of the virtual presence that the work composed for its readers. As they flesh out the world the poem composes, they find themselves re-enacting powers that the mimetic level of the poem or its context in its volume signs as the specific orientation of an imagination consigned by history or biology to the cultural position deemed to be woman's place.

My second reason consists of the exemplary role Moore's Modernist project can play for a contemporary criticism highly suspicious of Modernist ideals. The dominant ideology in feminist discussions of Modernist poetry emphasizes the limitations in the cult of impersonality, celebrating in its stead those poets who manage to find or steal a voice and a language that can express the distinguishing features of their individual experiences.² That view, however, confuses the limits of Modernism with the limits of male imaginations and posits an alternative that must rely on the notoriously slippery notion of expressing the truth of one's experiences. When one takes that perspective on experience, one relies on an essentially empty concept that becomes whatever one wants—what is not "experience"? And, perhaps more disturbingly, what claims about experience do not eventually invite ironic laments about the source being alienated from the means of representation available? Caught in such empty pursuits it becomes all too easy to lose sight of the full range of resources which the history of poetry provides, so that there is little more driving the poetry than female versions of the narcissism that leaves male poets impotently prancing before the mirrors they make monuments to their own sensibilities. Such dangers are precisely what led Modernists like Moore to resist models of subjective expression which make poetry an analogue for the delusions Moore pilloried in her "Marriage" :

The fact forgot
that "some have merely rights
while some have obligations,"
he loves himself so much
he can permit himself
no rival in that love.
She loves herself so much,
she cannot see herself enough—
(The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore,   68)

Therefore it seems to me crucial that feminism try to align itself provisionally with a critical spirit that links suspiciousness of the scenic self with a fierce commitment to individualism. For Moore those desires led to Modernist constructivism because the stances that it cultivated seemed to her the only ones that could isolate the full power of idiosyncracy from the prevailing cultural codes which provide the script for more expressivist models of personal identity. Modernist concerns for the exemplary roles form might play may make it possible to envision a poetics that is best suited to female experience not because of what it talks about—and thereby stages as specular reflections for our imaginary senses of our own sensitivities—but because of what it shows poetry can do as a virtual force that negotiates a wide range of experiences without ever itself taking the kind of substance that leads even Williams to his fantasized identifications. Thus Moore felt that once a few poems demonstrated the ways in which her distinctive female "polish" could sustain elaborate structures of care, she could make the working out of those structures as impersonal as possible. Only on those terms could the work fully test how qualities that derive from gendered situations make values available that can modify the life of anyone willing to participate fully in the transpersonal imaginative activity that reading promises.³

The first step in defining the qualities Moore establishes for her authorial energies is to turn to "An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish," the poem that most clearly differentiates her model of composition from Williams's "composing-antagonist":

Here we have thirst
and patience, from the first,
and art, as in a wave held up for us to see
in its essential perpendicularity;
not brittle but
intense—the spectrum, that
spectacular and nimble animal the fish,
whose scales turn aside the sun's sword by their polish.
(Complete Poems,   83)

This is no Romantic plea for unity with nature; it is as insistent as Williams on the willfulness or resistance to the given which is necessary for the site art composes. Moore, however, is very careful not to turn such resistance into a self-sufficient "masked ball / attitude" that might impose on the quest for personal identity "a hollowness / that beauty's light momentum can't redeem" (86). There are hollownesses or gaps which are necessary to beauty, and to redemption, but one must be careful not to fill them in too quickly with one's own self-image. Rather than turn back on a representable will, Moore makes the movement of the poem itself the only possible definition of a willfulness which can be kept in public circulation, available for any consciousness willing to recapitulate the control giving this work its polish.

The result is a polish that extends beyond any social connotations to the most intricate and intimate relations between life and art. Notice first the two nouns which initially define the poem's "here," and thereby establish some of the qualities which give art an "essential perpendicularity" not translatable into any simpler, more naturalistic terms. What other site could so combine the physical and psychological properties of thirst and patience? "Here" we see the bottle's shape and function; we see the thirst it should alleviate strangely connected to the fish it represents; and we observe the traces of craft which ultimately align patience with another mode of thirst that only this play of forces might satisfy. No wonder that these appearances so quickly transpose what we see from physical object to the more abstract state of defining the art itself as a wave we can envision cutting against the planes that pure perception must occupy.

All that the wave implies immediately takes psychological form in the second pair of adjectives syntactically linking the two stanzas. "Brittle" describes the glass, but in conjunction with "intense" (and after the oxymorons of the first stanza) the adjectives expand to refer also to the activity (and thirst) of both the artist and the viewer. Yet the temptation to turn all this into mere metaphor, into what the farmer might keep in his head, is denied by the fact that the poem is also speaking about the spectrum of light growing inseparable from the movements of the fish. Now the fish begins actually to swim, although in an element that the artist has composed for it. And that light then becomes something very different from the sun's sword, something whose polish does transform that sword into the perpendicularities of its own prismatic waves. Language makes us see a new object. In fact the movement of this language so fuses the abstract and the concrete that it becomes an actual example of that polish which in the visual object literally gives the fish a different medium.

Moore's celebration of art then brilliantly combines the presentational forces of the two media, glass sculpture and language, showing how each transforms a world of thirsts into a world where the dynamic properties of the artistic acts compose a perpendicularity considerably more satisfying than any physical shape. Moore reveals no hidden symbolic forces and works out no deep psychological conflicts. She does, though, define modes of activity where it may be possible not to have to live in the sets of oppositions that are generated by those conflicts. "Egyptian Glass Bottle" suspends the claims of realism in order to create the effect of liberating the self and language into an awareness of how the world can be contained by what our arts can make of our care and attention. There is no denying Williams's insistence on the artist's will as antagonist to the sun's sword, but such intricate objective displays of what language can do make it unnecessary to turn that will into a specular icon of itself—whose imaginary structure then creates a thirst which no mode of polished play will be able to satisfy.

Moore can propose an alternative to that specular self because she envisions the artist not as the subject of the poem but as the perpendicular force which keeps the work of art in taut opposition to the realm of natural energies. That does not mean denying their claims. Rather it becomes the imperative to set polish against less self-reflexive modes of thirst. In fact, that ideal contains in itself precisely the playful resistance to the given which Moore proclaims. Her model of polish evokes standard cultural expectations about cultivated women, only to reappropriate them in a finer tone. Like Derrida on Nietzsche on the stylus, Moore plays her own artifice against what finishing schools were expected to produce, while crossing that irony with a sly reference to the kinds of attention one develops as one tries to keep one's mind alive while doing household chores. Irony, however, does not suffice. The intricacies of polish characterize the mode that establishes perpendicularity, but they do not adequately account for the full set of concerns that they bring to bear. For that, for a fully human sense of what formal activity makes available as content, Moore turns to a version of Mondrian's self-reflexive virtuality. By making perpendicularity a site where the artist can free the self from the theatrical ego, she can also call attention to the forms of care and identification which then become actual within the mode of agency that the poem establishes.

No Modernist poem makes fuller use of the resources of virtuality than Moore's final version of "Poetry" :

I, too dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine
(Complete Poems,   36)

This is not Shelley. Indeed it is not much of anything until we find ways of locating where its poetry lies. But once we adapt the basic strategy necessary for non-iconic art, once we see that much of the force of the work depends on its refusing to be something else, we can begin to understand what its exclusions make present. First we must ask why the poem refers to poetry only as "it." What other options are there, and how does this choice martial the possibility of gaining authority for specific claims about the genuine that the poem wants to make? Suppose there is something about the ontological status of art, its tilt perhaps, that demands the indefinite pronoun, as in Dante's reference to Bertrand de Born, who faces him with his head in his hands. Perhaps the most important feature of any definition of poetry is its ability to acknowledge the ontological strangeness stressed in Crocean theorizing about the impossibility of holding poetry to any categorical constraints. Perhaps it is only by treating poetry as so indefinite a category that one can see how its content depends on the specific processes of disclosure set in motion by a linguistic intricacy that puts relation in the place of substance.

These hypotheses are not wrong, but they are severely limited by the Romantic framework in which they are cast. Moore pushes against those limits by refusing to be content with the moment of negation setting perpendicularity against reference. The very force of the perpendicular must make possible a strange yet evocative positive characterization of that site. In this case the basic vehicle for fleshing out the content of the "genuine" is her note on the poem that shows us what she cut from previous versions. For then we have a contrast to the "it" which motivates its strategic indefiniteness. Indeed we have a complex set of virtual forces leading both back into Moore's past and forward into a more dynamic sense of how contempt and genuineness may be closely linked, mutually reinforcing states. Once we feel the pressure of all these images that rush in to provide names for poetry but actually displace it, we begin to understand how those indefinite pronouns both reflect extremely intelligent choices and orient us toward the kind of negotiations necessary if poetry is to provide alternatives to those images. So long as one needs these supplemental metaphors to define poetry, one is condemned to the distance of attempting to explain the fully genuine—the site of perpendicularity and polish—in terms of merely illustratory materials, which are thus necessarily only partial realizations of what they attempt to instantiate. Such images turn the positive into positivity, preparing metaphors for the dump that so fascinated Moore's friend Stevens. But as we realize the failure of images, we also get a glimpse of the deepest efforts of poetry—to find within the transient a sense of the genuine that is abstract enough to allow for a range of contents and fluid enough to merge into the state of grace achieved by individual poems.

If we were to make generalizations about this sense of discovery we would have to say that the point of the poem is to show how we must conceive the genuine in poetry in terms of forces rather than of things or images. Poetry must be abstract in order to focus attention on the genuine concreteness of its processes that tend to be subsumed under the narcissistic substitutes that we impose upon them as we create scenic contexts and thematic interpretations. But as we make even that generalization, the deeper point of Moore's poem begins to become clear. Generalization itself must take the role of indefinite pronoun. Rather than explaining anything, it too becomes a means of tracking this sense of the genuine, which resides less in anything we say about the poem than in what we do as we try to cut through the images to what underlies them.

Moore's poem, in other words, is not about the genuine so much as it is the literal action of attempting to locate "it" in the only way that the "it" can be given significant content. Rather than proliferating names for the pronoun, we must let it lead us to reflecting on the forces that it actually gathers within the poem. These comprise what can be genuine about poetry. At one pole the poem shifts from images to the force the authorial process embodies as it works out what is involved in Moore's epigraph, "Omissions are not accidents." Omissions are, or can be, an author's means of asserting control over the complex energies of negation which we have been observing at work. Omissions are not accidents because they are perhaps the only way of negotiating between the accidental and the essential. Thus they lead us to the complex framework of memories, needs, and cares which provides the background that poetry must rely on and bring into focus. The poet's powers of negation are her richest means of showing what motivates her quest and abides within it to prepare for the satisfactions that poetry's perpendicular presences afford. Then all these powers call attention to the other pole of readerly activity. The virtual background that the negations evoke is ultimately not abstract at all since it takes specific form in the reader's own efforts to transform an initial befuddlement not unlike contempt into a momentary realization of all that the "it" comes to embody. Reading this poem engages us in precisely the process that the poem describes: puzzled by the "it," we must recover what the early drafts offered, understand why that fails to define poetry, and put in its place the realization that the genuine consists in this dialectical process that establishes a "place" (in all the senses of that term) where all readers can see what is shared in the effort to find something mediating between the "it" and its substitutes. To see what that entails is to demonstrate the power to achieve it.

This play of virtual forces and identifications is obviously not given a specific gendered context. Yet it does serve the crucial role of indicating how thoroughly certain active forces constitute the dynamic texture of Moore's poems, forces that can be made to resonate in conjunction with qualities that some situations can mark as gendered. So now we must turn to some ways in which Moore focuses attention on those properties. The quickest and most general means of doing that is to shift from what Moore shares with non-iconic painterly strategies to her departures from their characteristic concerns. Where the painters concentrate on rendering certain dynamic and irreducible balances that take form as essentially independent structures with which consciousness tries to align, Moore's virtual forces are irreducibly psychological and willful. The negation in "Poetry" is not a way of getting beyond the personal so much as a way of getting within it, getting to forces of an individual will too wise to theatricalize the terms of its caring, but freed by that wisdom to relish the more general form of that care as something approaching an absolute power. And if poetry is the will to care uncontaminated by the theatrics that the culture imposes on those impulses it hopes to ennoble, we begin to see how Moore's abstraction can employ its freedom to define that particular mode of caring as essentially female, as capable of thriving in a world where its only theatricalizing must take place in subtle winks and shifts of imaginative position—in polish wrought to its uttermost. And then what Williams, Stevens, and Burke all praised in Moore as liberating energies can be given concrete form in the forms of power realized as the lady of "Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns," reduced to reading about heroic male deeds, nonetheless creates an order of "agreeing difference" that male demands for possession can neither imitate nor appreciate (77-79). This female writerly presence establishes a remarkably active form of passivity enabling her to domesticate a beast whose freedom and rarity can only be glimpsed in reading and whose rebellious capacity to escape all who remain its hunters can be "tamed only by a lady, inoffensive like itself—as curiously wild and gentle." The lady, in other words, literally exemplifies the "genuine place" of poetry, possessing the power to engage in hunts that need not destroy what they discover. Having insisted that the male dream of pushing back the limits of the known to map wild adventures has been replaced by a social order in which mapping is a science and the romance will has been victimized by its own will to power, Moore makes her actual processes of imagination evidence for a wile and patience that may be the only plausible way to extend the human world to the site where the unicorn's "mild wild head" might rest.

Moore wants this model of freedom to appear passive and simple. For understatement hones the irony that is the modern hunter's strongest weapon. What Douglas Collins calls being always already embarrassed becomes the imagination's best protection against setting up specular theaters where it spends the rest of its time watching itself rather than exploring the positive forces released by its capacity to withdraw into virtual space. But Moore also wants us to "have a record of" the philosophical weight made possible by these fluid forms of care enabling the imagination to contain what it thereby brings to life. Thus her "The Plumet Basilisk" puts the process of searching for the genuine to the specific task of locating psychological correlates for what in previous cultures had assumed mythic images. Here all of Pound's and Yeats's nostalgias about the old gods give way to a polish witty enough to compose a space where gods can still show themselves, made vital by the absences that they define.

The poem is a typical Moore journey, with books as her maps and the imagination her principle for exploring the various locales. After voyaging from lizards to dragons to stories of the gods, attention focuses once again on the basilisk:

he is alive there
in his basilisk cocoon beneath
the one of living green; his quicksilver ferocity
quenched in the rustle of his fall into the sheath
which is the shattering sudden splash that marks
his temporary loss.
(Complete Poems,   24)

Here the immediacy of her poetic play captures not only the activity of the basilisk but also the ways in which that activity helps explain why such figures make the mind think of gods. For what engages us in what we see also provides confidence that what we cannot see will return. We are led to experience loss in such a way that it calls up virtual powers of renewal—in the mind as well as in what it observes and transforms. With "temporary" so fully captured as itself an aspect of a larger temporality, the poem concludes by calling upon the implications of all the allusive liberations which throughout the poem have given the lizard a place in our affections. Thus loss becomes a way of recognizing the significance and force of those affections. They testify to virtual relations between attention and temporality that warrant feelings that the gods are there in their loss—perhaps findable precisely because of the way in which that loss forces us to reconsider our own powers.

The principle of containment as release is a marvelous poetic ideal. But how far does it carry poetry into life? Or to put the question in gender terms, how well does it avoid complicity in certain cultural visions that would impose the burden of care on women in order to "free" men for more worldly pursuits while confining women's cleverness to the poetic imagination? Both questions are far too complex to answer here, partially because there are enormous differences between identifying certain concerns as characteristically female in our culture and deciding that they should or should not be cultivated by specific groups. Similarly Moore's own conservative individualism is content to propose certain imaginative possibilities which readers are then free to use or ignore, so it lacks any terms for adjudicating the actual political implications of such choices. Therefore I shall dodge the general issues by adapting what I think would be her strategy: there is no possibility of or need for defending every aspect of any poet's vision—what matters is being clear on what a poet makes available to those who may need it. There remains, however, one crucial particularizing move of Moore's that does address the question of social implications and that therefore must be considered as an index of her own sense of how the powers she explores have practical consequences. That move occurs in the poem "Silence," which concludes her 1935 Selected Poems and thus raises the possibility that everything in the book contributes to and is modified by this dialectical assertion of her female strength:

My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat—
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth—
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint."
Nor was he insincere in saying, "Make my house your inn."
Inns are not residences.
(Complete Poems,   91)

That "nor was he insincere" marvelously fixes a prevailing tone defining the emotional burdens which I think demand a daughter's Modernist refusal of all the old representational securities. Facing a father so willfully manipulating the powers that language confers, the daughter's primary task is to appropriate those powers to her own mode of restraint that must grapple with the task of fixing him and freeing herself. Such needs, however, also bring extreme risks. Should she either overestimate her power or underestimate the task, she is likely to trap herself in poses of hatred and obsessive resistance that only confirm his victory. Ironically that is why the father's advice is so compelling. One in her situation must refrain from any self-staging—either as self-pity or as Plathian fantasies of revenge. Instead virtuality becomes a vital weapon, and Modernist formal strategies establish a possible psychology. All the care that attracts the unicorn or preserves traces of the basilisk here goes into investing herself in the father's basic sources of strength without having to fixate on either his deeds or any single fantasy of her own projected response. This empathic distance becomes formidable power as she replaces melodramatic rhetoric with a withering precision whose formulated phrases capture in the simple double negative of "nor was he insincere" the essential inhumanity of his reticence. Moore is by no means immune to the power of his control over language, but this "nor" superbly positions her attraction against the background of a deeper unspeakable negative which casts his self-control as bordering on the margin of a terrifying monstrosity. It is no wonder, then, that once the daughter's imagination is released by an extended simile it dwells on the morbid scenario of the mouse in the cat's mouth, an objective correlative for life with father.

For Moore, though, and for her Selected Poems, that terror must not be allowed to prevail or to generate a counter-violence sustaining a similar self-absorption. The first thing necessary to resist his authority is to do him justice by acknowledging the style and insight that make his idiosyncratic ways come to exemplify values she seeks in her own poetry. But then one must test what one has made from those beginnings by exploring both the poet's and the daughter's ability to transform the basic strengths of her internalized father figure into a precursor for her own sense of individual power. In order to understand, she must identify with him by continuing to quote his characteristic utterances, but in order to conquer she must be so supple in her identifications that she maintains her own difference, her own perpendicularity, without having to project it into the terms such fathers love to deconstruct. What better way to do that than to use her meta-morphic abilities to appropriate the phrase most characteristic of her father's strengths and her fears, "Inns are not residences"?

An emblem which she continues to hold in this strange mix of awe and fear becomes through the testimony of this volume also the expression that best characterizes her own capacity to make language a provisional and fluid mode of dwelling. There remains the risk that even this degree of accepting the father's formulation will make playing at differences only an evasion of remaining at heart the dutiful daughter. But for Moore that risk becomes part of the implicit background, part of the contrast that reminds us of how thinking in such global categories either misses or denies precisely what gives Moore her claims to independence. Were one to avoid that risk, one would have to reject the entire culture shaped by such fathers. By quoting that authority, on the other hand, Moore can create a very complex site where we observe language playing out a drama of affiliation and difference that is basic to life within a culture. Yes, this is dependent on his formulation. But that dependency is a beginning, not a final state. It resounds as an implicit contrastive context testing her own ability to make language precise and fluid enough to appropriate what it echoes. As Pound would try to do on a much more theatrical scale, Moore uses her mobile shifts simultaneously to confirm her banishment to a life of inns and to make that instability a residence in its own right—a home won by the power to control virtual identifications with such grace that they need never be tied to forms that invite either the mirror or the dump.

By having to win a style against such a father (or such fathers, if we allow this concluding poem its full figural scope), Moore gave Modernism two distinctive and important ways of using foregrounded syntactic effects for semantic, extra-formal purposes ignored by the grand ambitions of Williams and Eliot and Pound and Stevens—allies at least in their blindness. First, her model of virtual forces gives poetry a model for subjective interests that makes those formal activities an actual process of soul-making: the energies which allow personal idiosyncracy to establish a perpendicular to the pressure of reality can be continually tested for the qualities of care that they make available as they are forced to muster intensity outside the traditional self-staging modes of lyrical expression. Second, by locating self within those energies, the poetry can generate sufficient mobility for the writing that it is free to define that care in the most concrete and discursive of ways. Once the lyrical energy need not depend on either melodrama or conceptual structures afforded by myth or politics, the poet need ground it only as a mode of care, a way of manifesting what it is about certain objects and states which can warrant the delight which, as poetry, ties the subject to the world. As Auden and Ashbery would later realize, such a voice is free to make the most overt discursive statements, secure that its own intricacy and precision preserve the mobility of imagination. Inns, in effect, can fully suffice as residences. Then, taken as corollary principles, the two ways show how imaginative energy can refuse both the absoluteness of identification that cramps identity and the resoluteness of fact that represses the site of virtual play, putting in their place the power to replace the father's authority by the turning and twisting of a daughter's volition and consciousness where

In the short-legged, fitful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiae—we have the
classic
multitude of feet. To what purpose! Truth is no
Apollo
Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes.
Know that it will be there when it says,
"I shall be there when the wave has gone by"
(Complete Poems,   41-42)

This way of surviving, however, is not without serious limitations which would emerge in Moore's later poetry. For there are some modes of care which require more stable residences, some pressures of reality which demand more overt and defined values than any sense of mobile virtuality can sustain. This Moore, like Stevens, learned in the late thirties as problems of social justice then of international order came to seem the inescapable burden of the poet. When confronted with these issues idiosyncracy does not appear to generate sufficient public roles for the self, and the habit of making a constructive sensibility replace more abstract and rhetorical forms of self-assertion simply will not produce sufficiently discursive or actionable ways of referring to experience. I am not sure that any modern poetry can meet that challenge, or that it should even try, since there will always be a considerable private residue created by public issues. But it is hard not to attempt making the form of language that one most trusts address the problems that one finds most compelling.

This is obviously not the place for an extended discussion of Moore's later poetry. But I raise the issue in part to define the limits of her version of Modernism and in part to show how those limits are already present in a second crucial poem about place, "The Steeple-Jack," which Eliot realized had to serve as the volume's opening balance to the freedoms that "Silence" wins from the father. Both poems insist that freedom makes sense only in relation to a sense of place or ground that frees it from having to stage an abstract self as its source and end. But as soon as that ground grows at all abstract in its own right it tempts one to relax one's vigilance and, more important, to begin thinking that, simply by submitting, one will receive something in return that comes as a gift and does not require the labors of constructive intelligence. In confronting those issues the poem's opening stanzas create a site as subtle and complex as anything in Modern poetry. An abstracting, synthetic style links a sea scene with Dürer's visions and then with the multiple relations which make of the whole "an elegance of which the source is not bravado," and hence a "fit-haven" for living. But here Moore seems to feel compelled to find an abstract reason why this elegance is significant, so she tries to go beyond the exemplary qualities which the constructive sensibility exemplifies to more thematic and symbolic ways of projecting significance for the details. This entails populating the place with symbolic surrogates which show how those powers pertain to society. But they also displace those powers—into rather simple roles, and into modes of activity and belief that have very little to do with what the poem can exhibit and test. Where the virtual powers of poetry had been able to carry a force which no image could quite capture as it shifted between presence and absence, the seen and what might be inferred by transpersonal features of the psyche, now the need to make those powers present demands embodying them in figures that must be able to stand as quasi-allegorical signifiers. These, ironically, become as legible and as pathetically ineffectual as the steeple-jack's sign.

Here poetry adapts its perpendiculars to concerns that would soon be even more overtly focused on the large moral and psychological questions pervading American life. But to do that means supplementing one's concerns for the virtual space that makes one free by positing ideas and images which that freedom could use to direct its interests. Freedom had to be acculturated, to claim a real residence. However, real residences are not very hospitable to the virtual, individualizing energies which actually gave Moore's poems means for fluidly negotiating the demands of the social world. The move from negotiating that world to become a spokesperson for it was not one she could have her poetry make without losing more than she could gain. Virtuality falls into its images and the non-assertive poet ends up confirming the assertions trumpeted by far less refined minds. Late Moore dramatizes the failures of constructivist aesthetics to develop a practical cultural model which could extend their principles beyond individualism while demonstrating the need for a poetry that could handle the assertive will without theatricalizing that most theatrical of forces. We see why an Adrienne Rich would have to reject her early interest in Moore's virtuality for the risky path of trying to make "genuine" an adjective that could apply to will as well as to place.

Notes

1. Both John M. Slatin and Bonnie Costello begin their excellent books on Moore with the question of how questions of defining poetry in conjunction with models of identity are central to her enterprise. But where Slatin emphasizes the contexts that Moore manipulates, Costello focuses on matters of building a poetic ethos. Thus her Imaginary Possessions argues that the range of terms that Moore uses for poetry attempts to combine "moral and aesthetic or intentional and expressive categories: feeling and precision, idiosyncracy and technique" (2). Then she does a superb job of showing how Moore's mobile intelligence gathers and disperses energies as it resists making imagistic effigies of itself, and she adds a very informative and intelligent chapter on Moore's relation to the visual arts of her time. But while she is very clear on how Moore's use of her medium is Modernist, she seems to me to stay essentially within a realizational aesthetic that cannot take account of either the powers or the sense of mystery that Moore tries to evoke for the conditions of agency that her poems establish. For example, Moore is simply too abstract for this formulation: "Moore's poems are not, finally, representations of things or statements of opinions. They are imaginative acts, efforts to reconstruct the world in language, and thus in relation to the self, to render the world harmless and to give the self objectivity" (65). If I am right, it is not so easy to talk about self, or even about objectivity—not because these are not concerns of Moore's reconstructions, but because she succeeds at times all too well to allow so traditional a recuperative language. And without an adequate model of the forms of agency that Moore does compose one cannot adequately handle the degree to which agency becomes gendered within Moore's imaginative universe. Therefore, we need to take a critical tack that will emphasize the actual forces that Moore's compositional activity establishes. For that the best analogues are those painterly models which eschew realization entirely to focus attention on relational powers. In relying on those analogues I need not deny that the visual Modernism most interesting to Moore consisted mostly in Cubist works. I claim only that she learned from them much the same lessons learned by Mondrian and Malevich, both of whom continually cite Cézanne and Picasso, so that it is those painters who most clearly capture what she makes even of that Cubist work like Picasso's collages most dependent on virtuality. As a good test case for the differences I am trying to indicate, compare my treatment below of the last version of "Poetry" and Costello's. As in Slatin's fine reading of the poem's various stages, she sees all the intricacy of the pronouns, but then she concludes that "reducing the poem to three lines may be Moore's attempt to uncover the genuine, but a short poem is no more genuine than an expansive one" (26). True enough, but this short poem's negation of the image introduces a quite different poetic theater. Pound sharply caught the differences involved in this way of reading when he compared Moore to Williams: "Williams is simple by comparison—not so thoughtful. It has a larger audience because of its apparent simplicity. It is the lyric of an aptitude. Aptitude, not attitude" (Selected Prose 399).
2. The best way to see the prevalence of the problem is to observe the many studies like Alicia Ostriker's Stealing the Language which celebrate the expressive ego's efforts to steal and remake a patriarchal language. I cannot quarrel with the ideal of remaking the language, but I worry about a critical framework that can praise such obviously mediocre poetry because it manages to express that mediocrity as a full definition of one's subjectivity. So long as it stays in this vein, new feminism is but old late romanticism writ large, and both the critical force and imaginative resources of Modernism simply get relegated to ancient history. For a good critique of those tendencies, as well as of the attendant language of victimage that would have appalled Moore, see Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson. I should add that I support the remarks of my next sentence as implicitly critical of the concept of "experience" in my Diacritics review, "Reach Without a Grasp: Review of Paul Fry, The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory."
3. Moore's use of abstract testimonial principles and her blend of the personal and the impersonal also make it possible to claim that very little is lost even if I am wrong or if the specifically gendered poems that I deal with do not prove sufficiently representative. The central point is how she insists on making her authorial energies sustain a poetical character defining a fully ethical presence able to understand what its loves make possible. I think there is sufficient evidence to treat that ethos as gendered and sufficient cause to make that consideration. But even those who suspect that argument should see from the arguments it elicits how thoroughly Moore's experiments in constructivist ideals of virtuality and transpersonality distinguish her work from the more painterly and perceptual versions of abstraction pursued by Williams and Stevens, especially during the decade after the first World War when she was clearly embarked on a more radical rethinking of language than they were.

Works Cited

Altieri, Charles. "Reach Without a Grasp: Review of Paul Fry, The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory." Diacritics, 14, No. 4 (1984), 58-66.

William Cookson, ed., Selected Prose 1909-1965: Ezra Pound, New Directions, 1973.

Costello, Bonnie. Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1985.

Moore, Marianne. The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. New York: Viking, 1981.

——. Selected Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1935.

Ostriker, Alicia. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Webster Schott, ed., Imaginations. New York: New Directions, 1970.

Slatin, John M. The Savage's Romance: The Poetry of Marianne Moore. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986.