Last Saturday, 5th February, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Marianne Moore. So for this week’s Some Flowers Soon I’ve reworked part of my 2014 review of Linda Leavell’s excellent biography of Moore.
The childhood origins of Marianne Moore’s poetic tone and technique were hinted at by Grace Schulman’s 2003 edition of The Poems of Marianne Moore, which restored the large number of poems excised by the poet from her own Complete Poems in 1967 (‘omissions are not accidents’, she commented, with characteristically elegant menace). Schulman chose Moore’s earliest surviving poem as a ‘Prelude’ to her expanded edition — a rhyming, handwritten note-for-the-chimney from December 1895, which crisply indicates the respective wishes of the eight-year-old Marianne and her brother, Warner:
Dear St. Nicklus
This Christmas morn
You do adorn
Bring Warner a horn
And me a doll
That is all.
This postage-stamp-sized cinquain — running from lyric invocation to laconic conclusion in twenty syllables, bound by rhyme — sketches in miniature the quizzical movement of many of Moore’s mature poems (in old age she did in fact publish two further Dear-Santa pieces).
Linda Leavell has already written an academic monograph on Moore’s poetry, but in Hanging On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore (2014) she treads lightly when it comes to textual exegesis. Instead, she thoughtfully directs the reader’s attention to Moore’s unique development as a literary technician, who pioneered syllabic verse as a poetic form in English.
Syllabic verse is composed by silent counting and not by sounded accent. As such, it became an ironically strict way of shaping poems for Moore, who in early works such as ‘The Fish’ employed an initial 1-3 couplet to split open unlikely internal rhymes (‘an / injured fan’, ‘the / turquoise sea’, ‘ac-/cident—lack’). The tension generated between pattern and meaning suited her precise yet digressive temperament perfectly.
At school, Moore struggled with numerical tasks and the logical ordering of ideas, in a way that might now have been diagnosed as dyscalculia. Yet she also fondly remembered the pleasure in shape fostered by the progressive educational vision of the American kindergarten movement, which encouraged children to explore the geometrical structure of natural forms using ‘toothpicks and dried peas’.
In light of this, Moore’s idiosyncratically calculating verbal art, which made the looseness of prose submit to an exacting poetic economy, can be seen as the triumph of an imaginative child over the adult world of ‘“business documents // and school-books”’ — to quote her poem ‘Poetry’. Her second collection, Observations (1924), contained many of the poems on which her reputation continues to rest, including ‘Poetry’, with its notorious opening gambit (‘I, too, dislike it’) and dry sign-off (‘[…] then you are interested in poetry’). Such phrases resonate with the tension that sounds throughout Moore’s verse. Her steely eloquence webs itself lightly and calmly over depths in which something inarticulate endures, like the fish which ‘wade / through black jade’. Every Marianne Moore poem ends, in a way: ‘That is all.’
It’s also just over a hundred years since Poetry magazine marked the appearance of Moore’s first pamphlet, Poems (1921), with a critical symposium. You can read it here.