New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore

If you’ve only read later editions of poetry by Marianne Moore, you might not have read the poems that actually made her famous. We discussed this previously in my review of Observations, but basically, Miss Moore’s original work helped to create a modernist culture in poetry while earning impressive awards – from the National Book Award and Bollinger Prize to a Pulitzer. Giant names in poetry, from Elizabeth Bishop to William Carlos Williams to T.S. Eliot, applauded her work too.

Many (most?) poets would be thrilled to have such literary accolades and appreciation of their work, but apparently Miss Moore was not one of those. She continued to revise and rework her already-published and highly acclaimed poems until some might say she occasionally butchered them!

In hopes of remedying this, English professor and writer Heather Cass White undertook the massive task of trying to find the earliest versions of each poem to show the proper trajectory of Moore's work. Ironically, this collection from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who kindly sent me a copy to review, has been entitled the New Collected Poems since Poems, Selected Poems, Collected Poems, and Complete Poems had already been taken. However, the Introduction points out, “…’selected’ is the only adjective that accurately describes any book of Moore’s work thus far produced, or any that can be produced,” since “Moore’s art has no straight path from beginning to end.”

As Professor White explains, “For Moore, the publication of a poem in a periodical, or the ordering of poems in a book, marked resting-places in her poetry’s development, not its final form.”

Having seen Miss Moore’s flamboyant personality on television, which, for years, personified the general public’s perception of poets, I wonder if her revisions were part of the act – i.e., showmanship born, not of the perfectionism that might make some of us incessantly revise our poems, but of her inclination to dazzle.

As the Introduction reminds us, the clear eye and distinctive voice of Moore’s poetry were “also part of its simultaneous ‘dazzlement,’ the poems’ sometimes overwhelming complexities of statement, form, and metaphor.” i.e., “If clarity allows us to see better, dazzlement, however exciting, may mean we can hardly see at all. It is seldom easy to say what a Moore poem as a whole is about, even when it comes with a seemingly straightforward title. Moore was serious, but also witty, and not above liking to shock her readers.”

Yes. That’s it, exactly.

At the time of Moore's writing, rhymes ending the ragged lines of her poems would have been a novelty as would her use of quotations pulled from obscure literature, magazine ads, and even information from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

As we look at “To a Snail,” for example, notice the delayed rhyme (adorn/horn), the use of words with four or more syllables, and the quotes included:

To a Snail

If ‘compression is the first grace of style,”
you have it. Contractility is a virtue
as modesty is a virtue.
It is not the acquision of any one thing
that is able to adorn,
or the incidental quality that occurs
as a concomitant of something well said,
that we value in style,
but the principle that is hid:
in the absence of feet, “a method of conclusions”;
“a knowledge of principles,”
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.

Moore’s Notes 296 . Editor’s Notes 361

To assist us in finding the eclectic sources of the poet’s quotations, this edition presents each poem followed by a page reference to Moore’s Notes and/or the Editor’s Notes at the bottom of the page. So, “To a Snail,” includes a reference to Moore’s note on page 296 and the Editor’s note on 361.

With these aids, we can find the prior publications Editor White has tracked down for us, and, if the poet made a comment about a poem, we can find that too.

For instance, “compression is the first grace of style” in Moore’s poem above is credited as a quote from Democritus, whereas she cites Duns Scotus as the original source for the phrases “method of conclusions” and “knowledge of principles.”

Since the later phrases don’t seem to warrant quotation marks today, it’s hard to know if they were fresh at the time of her writing or whether the poet was just playing with us and the literary scene. Since that scene changes drastically, you can see why a highly innovative poet might think her poems needed to do the same.

Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2017, poet-writer, reviewer

New Collected Poems, hardback



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The new release of Observations by Marianne Moore

In the new release of Observations, which publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux kindly sent me to review, the poems of Marianne Moore have been restored to their original appearance.

After the book first came out in 1924, the poems were so well received that Moore became the second recipient to receive the highly prized Dial Award, won previously by T.S. Eliot. Nevertheless, Moore later omitted at least a dozen of the poems in subsequent collections of her work and radically revised some of the poems that remained.

As the “Introduction by Linda Leavell” reminds us, Marianne Moore “was the first major poet to appropriate for poetry the language of textbooks and commerce.” Occasionally, her poems even included quotations from ads or from comments she had overheard!

Equally innovative were the syllabic patterns Moore set for herself, which, as Linda Leavell tells us, “are most easily seen in ‘The Fish,’ where each stanza contains six lines of 1-3-8-1-6-9 syllables each, and the rhyme scheme is aaxbbx. The title, as is often the case with Moore, serves as first line.”

Such titles as “Bowls,” “Novices,” and “The Octopus” also act as the opening lines to their respective poems, but, unexpectedly, that octopus consists “of ice. Deceptively reserved and flat” and lying “beneath a sea of shifting snow dunes” in a long poem whose lines sprawl and retract like their namesake.

Other titles bear note, too, not for their brevity or line placement but their quirkiness, for example: “Is Your Town Nineveh?” “An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish,” “To a Steam Roller,” “Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight,” or “Nothing Will Cure the Sick Lion but to Eat an Ape.”

Notable, too, among the poet’s many experiments and innovations are the Moore-made patterns she set for herself in writing syllabic verse with such odd line breaks that readers might miss the sound echoes and rhymes unless they read the poems aloud.

Anyone who has read Moore’s poetry has likely noticed her experiments in forms and free verse, but the contents of the unusual lines bring to light a poet who challenges the status quo, for instance, in “Roses Only” when the poet tells the flower often memorialized in poetry, “You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability….”

Or, when the poet writes about “Poetry,” the 1924 version begins, “I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle./ Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one/ discovers that there is in/ it after all, a place for the genuine.” Moore aimed to show that genuine while disdaining the obtuse poetry in and out of vogue during her lifetime. In 1925, her heavily revised version of “Poetry” tells us:

“I too, dislike it:
there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
The bat, upside down; the elephant pushing,
a tireless wolf under a tree,
the base-ball fan, the statistician –
'business documents and schoolbooks' _
these phenomena are pleasing,
but when they have been fashioned
into that which is unknowable,
we are not entertained.
It may be said of all of us
the we do not admire what we cannot understand;
enigmas are not poetry.”

Those of us who remember Ms. Moore sweeping onstage in her floppy hats and outgoing personality know how entertaining she could be, chatting with Jack Parr on The Tonight Show, but apparently that image of her as poet lingered too. Years later, at my high school reunion, a friend asked if I'm still writing, and when I answered, "Yes, poetry," he said, "Then, why don't you dress like a poet?" Why, indeed.

Review by poet-author Mary Harwell Sayler, © 2016


Marianne Moore Observations, Poems, paperback



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