The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Marianne Moore

by T. S. Eliot

MARIANNE MOORE

Poems. By Marianne Moore. 12mo. 24 pages. The Egoist Press, London.

Marriage (Manikin Number 3). By Marianne Moore. 16mo. 20 pages. Monroe Wheeler. $0.25.

TWO years ago Miss Moore's book of Poems—so far as I know her only book—was published in London by The Egoist Press; and I then undertook to review it for The Dial. This promise, for one reason after another, I never fulfilled. Now another poem has appeared, Marriage, published by Manikin, printed apparently in Germany, and with a parenthetical introduction by Mr Glenway Wescott. Meanwhile I have read Miss Moore's poems a good many times, and always with exactly the same pleasure, and satisfaction in something quite definite and solid. Because of a promise which, because of the long delay, may be considered as having been broken, and because I can only, at the moment, think of five contemporary poets—English, Irish, American, French, and German—whose work excites me as much as, or more than, Miss Moore's, I find myself compelled to say something about them. Not that there is much that is usefully said about any new work of art—I do not rate criticism so highly; but one ought, in honesty, to publish one's beliefs.

Mr Wescott has, in fact, written a good introduction; I only think that his distinction between proletariat art and aristocratic art is an artificial and unimportant distinction with dangerous consequences. So far as a proletariat art is art at all, it is the same thing in essence as aristocratic art; but in general, and at the present time, the middle-class art (which is what I believe Mr Wescott to have in mind when he speaks of proletariat art (the proletariat is middle class in America) is much more artificial than anything else; it plays with sham ideas, sham emotions, and even sham sensations. On the other hand a real aristocracy is essentially of the same blood as the people over whom it rules: a real aristocracy is not a Baltenland aristocracy of foreign race. This apparently purely political definition applies to art as well: fine art is the refinement, not the antithesis, of popular art. Miss Moore's poetry may not seem to confirm this statement. I agree with Mr Wescott that it is "aristocratic," in that it can only please a very small number of people. But it is not, or not wholly, aristocratic in the Baltenland sense. I see in it at least three elements: a quite new rhythm, which I think is the most valuable thing; a peculiar and brilliant and rather satirical use of what is not, as material, an "aristocratic" language at all, but simply the curious jargon produced in America by universal university education—that jargon which makes it impossible for Americans to talk for half an hour without using the terms of psychoanalysis, and which has introduced "moron" as more forcible than "idiot"; and finally an almost primitive simplicity of phrase. There may be more. Up to the present time Miss Moore has concerned herself with practising and perfecting a given formation of elements; it will depend, I think, on her ability to shatter this formation and painfully reconstruct, whether Miss Moore makes another invention equal in merit to the first.

Rhythm, of course, is a highly personal matter; it is not a verse-form. It is always the real pattern in the carpet, the scheme of organization of thought, feeling, and vocabulary, the way in which everything comes together. It is very uncommon. What is certain is that Miss Moore's poems always read very well aloud. That quality is something which no system of scansion can define. It is not separable from the use of words, in Miss Moore's case the conscious and complete appreciation of every word, and in relation to every other word, as it goes by. I think that Those Various Scalpels is an excellent example for study. Here the rhythm depends partly upon the transformation-changes from one image to another, so that the second image is superposed before the first has quite faded, and upon the dexterity of change of vocabulary from one image to another. "Snow sown by tearing winds on the cordage of disabled ships:" has that Latin, epigrammatic succinctness, laconic austerity, which leaps out unexpectedly (altogether in Talisman).

"your raised hand
an ambiguous signature:"

is a distinct shift of manner; it is not an image, but the indication of a fulness of meaning which is unnecessary to pursue.

"blood on the stone floors of French chiteaux, with
regard to which guides are so affirmative:"

is a satirical (consciously or unconsciously it does not matter) refinement of that pleasantry (not flippancy, which is something with a more definite purpose) of speech which characterizes the American language, that pleasantry, uneasy, solemn, or self-conscious, which inspires both the jargon of the laboratory and the slang of the comic strip. Miss Moore works this uneasy language of stereotypes—as of a whole people playing uncomfortably at clenches and clevelandisms—with impeccable skill into her pattern. She uses words like "fractional," "vertical," "infinitesimal," "astringently"; phrases like "excessive popularity," "a liability rather than an asset," "mask of profundity," "vestibule of experience," "diminished vitality," "arrested prosperity." If this were all, Miss Moore would be no different from her imitators. The merit consists in the combination, in the other point of view which Miss Moore possesses at the same time. What her imitators cannot get are the swift dissolving images, like the mussel shell

"opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan"

and phrases like

"the sea when it proffers flattery in exchange for hemp
rye, flax, horses, platinum, timber and fur.

"Truth is no Apollo
Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes."

or a magnificence of phrase like

"I recall their magnificence, now not more magnificent than it is dim"

(how like Valery's "entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes" or like his "eternellement, Eternellement le bout mordre").

And also they cannot imitate her animals and birds—

"the parrakeet—
. . . destroying
bark and portions of the food it could not eat."

Mr Wescott, if he agrees with all or even with a part of what I have written, will probably consider it as an affirmation of his belief in a kind of "aristocratic" art drawing no sustenance from the soil. "An aristocratic art, emulating the condition of ritual." But of course all art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment. And nothing belongs more properly to the people than ritual—or indeed than aristocracy itself, a popular invention to serve popular needs. (I suppose the Ku Klux Klan is a popular ritual—as popular as a ritual can be in a country where there are only variations within the middle class.) Miss Moore's relation to the soil is not a simple one, or rather it is to various soils—to that of Latium and to that of Attica I believe (or at least to that of the Aegean littoral) as well as most positively to the soil (well top-dressed) of America. There are several reasons (buried in this essay) why Miss Moore's poetry is almost completely neglected in England, beside the simple reason that it is too good, "in this age of hard striving," to be appreciated anywhere.

And there is one final, and "magnificent" compliment: Miss Moore's poetry is as "feminine" as Christina Rossetti's, one never forgets that it is written by a woman; but with both one never thinks of this particularity as anything but a positive virtue.

T. S. Eliot