MODERNMooreNotes1

Awareness of...details [such as the rhyme scheme] may affect our vocalization, but not much; the eye of curiosity discovers them, the mind of affection retains them, but for the voice to force them on another person's notice entails such a disruption of sense as to constitute a breach of manners. They are quirks to be pointed out... (159)

This disjunction between ear and eye, this emphasis on the visual in the verbal is, for other readers, the exact starting place of an interest in Moore’s form. What Kenner essentially dismisses as a mistaken by-way on the road of High Modernism (or, even worse, as a diminutive, female sort of artistry marked by such phrases as “breach of manners,” “quirks,” “tactful”) we will examine as a major formal innovation, a translation of abstract form from the visual to the verbal arts. As Cubists and other Modern painters flattened and broke up the pictorial surface and found new ways to direct the movement of the eye across the canvas, so too Moore flattens and breaks up the poetic voice and finds new ways to direct our attention across her subjects.

Still, the relationship between the seen and the heard was an important issue for Moore herself. Her foray into free verse in the 1920s was motivated at least in part by first hearing a recording of herself reading her poems, and she made several statements in later years regarding her desire for clarity and naturalness-- though in face of the poems she actually did write, one should not assume her definitions of those words are the obvious ones. Moore’s rhythmic models were not other poets but writers of great prose, and one wonders, as the later poems (particularly after the 1940s) lose both the complexity and the rhythmic effects of the early poems, if they are not mirrors of 20th century American English. If we posit that Moore succeeeded in reproducing the rhythms of prose at it was written in her lifetime, we might describe her late poems not as failed art but simply as art built with inferior raw material.

For the purposes of her patterns, though not for the purposes of the voice, all syllables have the same formal value: there is no fixed ratio of stressed to unstressed syllables within the line, and the line itself is rarely more than a purely syllabic--that is, typographic and therefore inaudible--unit, rather than a rhythmic one. Sentences most often begin and end within the line, a practice which overrides Moore’s stated preference for the end-stopped line and makes enjambment her characteristic procedure. In fact, many of her sentences not only run over from one line into the next, but often carry through several enjambed lines, even crossing stanza breaks. (88)

Moore’s stanzas may appear prose-like, as their formal features do not seem to be structuring or controlling. Rhyme, when it occurs, is “buried deep within a syntactic structure which does not and cannot pause for them, and so neither displays them nor is itself displayed by them.” (89)

Slatin goes on to demonstrate that a piece of genuine prose, even Moore’s prose, cannot convincingly be recast into a Moore-like stanza: her forms cannot carry the weight of extended prose (real prose) any more than they can carry the weight of a rhythmically different poetry. Thus, she must quote prose and she must quote short pieces of prose, for her forms, so necessary to what the poems “say” can accommodate no larger intrusion.

The poem acts upon such bits and pieces of prose like a magnet on iron filings, arranging them along its own lines of force, pulling them into the pattern; but since the poem necessarily violates its own limits in appropriating to itself the language of another text, it must set additional, compensatory limits on itself in response to these alien words. Thus Moore uses quotation marks as internal limits which both mark the boundaries of the borrowed phrase and redefine the boundaries of the poems itself. (92)

He continues: “By marking the phrase as borrowed, Moore simultaneously defines it as an interruption and gains a measure of control over it, in effect withholding it from the pattern even while leaving it in its place.” The double nature thus accorded to the quoted text allows it to remain prose, though it rests inside a poem. This internalizes and complicates the debate over the differences between prose and poetry, which, he argues, casts new light on Moore’s reluctance to name her texts “poems.” Form, he says, protects Moore against her own “predatory tendencies.” (93)

In the longer version of “Poetry,” for example, when Moore quotes Tolstoy’s diary re: the distinction between poetry and prose she erases his (slight enough) distinction in two ways. On the level of content, she states that we must not “discriminate against ‘business documents and / school-books,’” which Tolstoy cites as possibly the only categories of language which are not poetry. On the level of form, she makes Tolstoy’s words part of a poem. The result is that these words are no longer clearly prose, nor are they clearly now poetry--nor is her ‘poem’, called “Poetry.” (53) Note, too, that the poem does not say that all the things it names are poetry: it merely makes them available to poetry. The “genuine” is not defined, therefore, by subject matter, but by what the poet does with it--with technique. What began as an opposition of poetry vs. prose becomes an opposition of poetry vs. not-poetry. Thus “poetry” is not a question of “what” but of “how.”

Moore’s use of rhyme, Slatin says “she employs a set of rhymes so subtle, so unconventional, and so apparently arbitrary as to constitute a kind of private joke at the expense of both convention and innovation.” (25) She accomplishes her “feigned inconsequence of manner”witn specific practices: rhymes are often widely spaced; they may be slant rhymes; they may rhyme on unaccented syllables or on inconsequential words; there may appear at first to be no semantic relationship between rhymed words. Readers must take part in making the rhymes meaningful. “Rhyme expresses the internal logic of the poem by forcing its component terms int active “external” relationships among themselves.” (24)

ENG LISH 660: 002	Modernist Women Poets: Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Lorine Niedecker
Marianne	Moore: instructor's notes: Susan Tichy
spr ing 20 05 GEO RGE MAS ON UNI VER SITY	A Note on Texts: For decades, Marianne Moore’s miscalled Complete Poems (1967, revised 1981) was the only edition of her poems in print. It omitted roughly half the poems Moore published before 1925, the period of her greatest innovation. Of those present, many had been revised to make them accord both formally and thematically with her later work. This had a peculiar affect on Moore's reputation and on the practice of her readers and critics. We are lucky now to have The Poems of Marianne Moore for this class, but we have to remember that this edition did not exist when our critics were publishing. Early studies of Moore took the Complete Poems (hereafter CP) as authoritative and thus often valued her later work more highly than the bowdlerized early work. The late 1980s and 1990s produced an explosion of Moore criticism. Most of these more recent critics have made an effort to assess Moore’s development by taking the poems/versions in sequence and/or by seeking to determine the “authoritative” version of each poem. Thus, you must read carefully when a critic quotes a passage--the argument may be based on lines that differ from those you have read. John Slatin, for example, bases his arguments on the earliest published text of each poem and treats later revisions as revisions--or, as he puts it, as Moore’s later critical responses to her own work. Linda Leavell is not consistent in choosing first or later texts, but bases her readings on whatever text she believes to be definitive for each poem. For the convenience of readers, Christanne Miller cites mostly from versions printed in CP, except where chronology is important to her argument or where earlier versions of a poem more adequately represent an analytical problem. Nearly all critics of Moore divide her work into distinct phases, though the exact basis for division may vary. The first phase extends from her first publication in 1915 to 1920. The poems of this phase were composed in syllabic stanzas, and most appeared in two radical new journals: The Egoist and Others. The second phase runs from 1920 to 1925, a period in which Moore published only free verse, though several of the poems had been composed first in syllabics then revised into free verse. These poems contain more quotations than those of other periods, and the poems become longer and more complex as the years pass. From January 1925 through June 1932 Moore served as acting editor, and then as editor, of The Dial and published no new poems. Thus her third phase begins in 1932 and runs through 1936--or to 1941, depending on your criteria. These poems return to syllabic form but are longer and more formally complex than the poems of 1915-1920. They appeared in a variety of well-established literary journals. Many readers locate the apex of Moore’s achievement somewhere in the work of these years--but there are exceptions, such as Jeanne Heuving, who find most of the post-1932 poems disappointing in comparison to the radical work of Moore’s youth. Though Moore lived until 1972 and published through the late 1960s, few critics speak on behalf of her late work (from 1942 onwards). For one reading of Moore that celebrates her late work, see Laurence Stapleton, Marianne Moore: The Poet’s Advance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Marie Borroff’s Language and the Poet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979) also draws exclusively on Moore’s later work. Later chapters of Cristanne Miller's Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender and Authority in Marianne Moore (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992) also deal respectfully with the later poems. This course will focus on poems published through Moore’s 1941 volume What Are Years, though a few later works will be considered for comparison in certain contexts. Quotations from Moore's Complete Prose ON ‘THE GENUINE’: Whatever one may feel about sweetness in literature, there is also the word honesty, and this man is a faithful friend of the objects he portrays; altogether unlike the sentimentalist who really stabs them treacherously in the back while pretending affection. 35 review of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations, 1918 “What Columbus discovered is nothing to what Williams is looking for.” 156 quoting Wallace Stevens on William Carlos Williams There is in Dr. Williams, an appetite for the essential and in how may people may one find it? 59 review of Williams’ Kora in Hell, 1921 When an artist is willing that the expressiveness of his work be overlooked by any but those who are interested enough to find it, he has freedom in which to realize without interference, conceptions which he personally values. But advertising, the opposite of such intensiveness, has its uses. 214, untitled comment in The Dial, 1929 A certain buoyancy that creates an effect of inconsequent bravado--a sense of drama with which we may not be quite at home--was for her a part of that expansion of breath necessary to existence, and unless it is conceited for the hummingbird or the osprey to not behave like a chicken, one does not find her conceited. She was not usual, but her need was the universal human one never disguised. She saw no comfort in refusing to question that about which she wished most to be sure. 292 review of Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, 1933 Poetry is an unintelligible unmistakable vernacular like the language of the animals...Art here is shown to be a thing of proprieties, of mounting “the thickest man on the thickest stallion-back”; yet a congruence of opposites as in the titles...It is a classifying, a botanizing, a voracity of contemplation. “The actual is a deft beneficence... Wallace Stevens can be as serious as the starving times of the first settlers. 329-330, review of Stevens’ Ideas of Order, 1936 One’s humor is based upon the most serious part of one’s nature. 93 “Well Moused, Lion”, a review of Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium, 1924 ON DICTION: Instinct for words is well determined by the nature of the liberties taken with them, some writers giving the effect merely of presumptuous egotism--an unavoided outlandishness; others, not. 94 “Well Moused, Lion”, a review of Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium, 1924 To like reading and writing is to like words. The root meaning, as contrasted with the meaning in use, is like the triple painting on projecting lamellae, which--according as one sands in front, at the right, or at the left--shows a different picture. 340, review of Gertrude Stein’s The Goegraphical History of America, 1936 ON IMAGINATION: Imagination implies energy and imagination of the finest type involves energy which results in order “as the motion of a snake’s body goes through all parts at once," and its violation acts at the same instant in coils that go contrary ways. 96 “Well Moused, Lion”, a review of Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium, 1924 “Thousands of people can talk,” Ruskin says, “for one who can think; but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one.” A special kind of seeing, a “mental strife,” “rapture and labor,” are characteristic of few persons indeed, and of no one perhaps to the degree in which they are characteristic of Blake. 184, untitled comment on Blake, 1927 ON ACCENT & RHYTHM: The better the artist, moreover, the more determined he will be to set down words in such a way as to admit of no interpretation of the accent but the one intended, his ultimate power appearing in a selfsufficing, willowy, firmly contrived cadence... 96 “Well Moused, Lion”, a review of Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium 1924 One finds fault with the statement that Hardy is not a great poet, not because the critic has failed to enjoy Hardy’s poetry, but because the statement implies an insuffcient grasp of Hardy’s prose. 42 review of Old & New Masters in Literature by Robert Lynd, 1919 “The heart is the form,” as is said in the East--in this case the rhythm which is a firm piloting of rebellious fluency; the quality of sustained emphasis, as of a cargo being shrewdly steered to the edge of the quai...We have in some of these metrical effects a wisdom as remarkable as anything since Bach. 322-323, review of Pound's A Draft of XXX Cantos, 1934 Mr. Stevens...employs...the principle of dispersal common to music; that is to say, a building up of the theme piecemeal in such a way that there is no possibility of disappointment at the end. 330, review of Stevens’ Ideas of Order, 1936 It is a feat of writing to make the rhythm of a sentence unmistable without punctuation...In a real writer’s experimenting there can be an effect of originality as one can achieve a kind a Venetian needlepont by fitting into each other two pieces of a hackneyed pattern of peasent edging. 340, review of Gertrude Stein’s The Geographical History of America, 1936 ON FORM: Since form and content corroborate each other, it is not suprising to find that the technique of these poems should, like the substance, present a fastidious prodigality--an apparent starkness which is opulence. 113 “The Bright Immortal Olive”, a review of H.D.’s Collected Poems. 1925 Style is for Mr. Cummings “translating”; it is a self-demonstrating aptitude for technique...[...]...And the typography, one should add, is not something superimposed on the meaning but the author’s mental handwriting. 301 “A Penguin in Moscow,” review of E.E. Cummings’ Eimi, 1933 “It is seldom that the professed grounds correspond with the real motives of a war,” we are told...In making works of art, the only legitimate warfare is the inevitable warfare between imagination and medium... 176-177, untitled comment on Whistler & Ruskin, 1926 What matters here is that we have, for both author and reader, a machinery of satisfaction that is powerfully affecting, intrinsically and by association. The method is a main part of the pleasure: lean cartography; reiteration with compactness; emphasis by word pattern rather than by punctuation; the conjoining of opposites to produce irony; a counterfeiting verbally of the systole, diastole, of sensation--of what the eyes see and the mind feels; the movement within movement of differentiated kindred sounds.... 267 review of Eliot’s Marina, 1931 Far from being a disgrace, awkwardness is often an excellence and the Downright Scholar is not resented, whose “mind is too much taken up with his mind...who has not humbled his meditations to the industry of compliment.” But literary neatness implies a certain decorum of manner as of matter. A theme had, like a house, better not have “the appearance of having been thrown out of its own windows.” Egotism is usually subversaive of sagacity... Pressure of business modifies self-consciousness and the genuine matter for exposition seems to aid effectiveness. 177-178, untitled omnibus review, 1927 ON RHYME: Yet, in the never monotonous, ever recurring device of the alternate repeated word--”torture me not with this or that or this”--in a careful mosaic of rhymes such as we have in “Lais”: Laid is not no lover of the glass, seeing no ore the face as once it was, wishing to see that face and finding this; we have the verbal continuity, the controlled ardor, the blanced speech of poetry. 113 “The Bright Immortal Olive”, a review of H.D.’s Collected Poems. 1925 This hiding, qualifying, and emphasizing of rhyme to an adjusted tempo is acutely a pleasure besides being a clue to feeling that is the source, as in Ash Wednesday, of harmonic contour like the sailing descent of the eagle. 268 review of Eliot’s Marina, 1931 Notes on Moore's Prosody In his essay "Meditation and Enactment" Hugh Kenner has pointed out the difference between what one hears when reading a Moore poem and what one sees. He says, in fact, "Miss Moore's formalisms are so tactful they will not make themselves heard" (Tomlinson 1969, 159). Here is what he offers as "the heard" and "the seen" at the opening of "Critics and Connoisseurs"-- There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness. Certain Ming products, imperial floor-coverings of coach-wheel yellow, are well enough in their way but I have seen something that I like better-- a mere childish attempt to make an imperfectly ballasted animal stand up, similar determination to make a pup eat his meal from the plate. There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness. Certain Ming products, imperial floor-coverings of coach- wheel yellow, are well enough in their way but I have seen something that I like better--a mere childish determination to make an imperfectly ballasted animal stand up, similar determination to make a pup eat his meal from the plate. Of which he says-- Awareness of...details [such as the rhyme scheme] may affect our vocalization, but not much; the eye of curiosity discovers them, the mind of affection retains them, but for the voice to force them on another person's notice entails such a disruption of sense as to constitute a breach of manners. They are quirks to be pointed out... (159) This disjunction between ear and eye, this emphasis on the visual in the verbal is, for other readers, the exact starting place of an interest in Moore’s form. What Kenner essentially dismisses as a mistaken by-way on the road of High Modernism (or, even worse, as a diminutive, female sort of artistry marked by such phrases as “breach of manners,” “quirks,” “tactful”) we will examine as a major formal innovation, a translation of abstract form from the visual to the verbal arts. As Cubists and other Modern painters flattened and broke up the pictorial surface and found new ways to direct the movement of the eye across the canvas, so too Moore flattens and breaks up the poetic voice and finds new ways to direct our attention across her subjects. Still, the relationship between the seen and the heard was an important issue for Moore herself. Her foray into free verse in the 1920s was motivated at least in part by first hearing a recording of herself reading her poems, and she made several statements in later years regarding her desire for clarity and naturalness-- though in face of the poems she actually did write, one should not assume her definitions of those words are the obvious ones. Moore’s rhythmic models were not other poets but writers of great prose, and one wonders, as the later poems (particularly after the 1940s) lose both the complexity and the rhythmic effects of the early poems, if they are not mirrors of 20th century American English. If we posit that Moore succeeeded in reproducing the rhythms of prose at it was written in her lifetime, we might describe her late poems not as failed art but simply as art built with inferior raw material. John Slatin has described Moore’s stanzas thus: For the purposes of her patterns, though not for the purposes of the voice, all syllables have the same formal value: there is no fixed ratio of stressed to unstressed syllables within the line, and the line itself is rarely more than a purely syllabic--that is, typographic and therefore inaudible--unit, rather than a rhythmic one. Sentences most often begin and end within the line, a practice which overrides Moore’s stated preference for the end-stopped line and makes enjambment her characteristic procedure. In fact, many of her sentences not only run over from one line into the next, but often carry through several enjambed lines, even crossing stanza breaks. (88) It is for these reasons that Moore quotes prose and not other poems, whose own internal patterns would make such overriding impossible. Prose, he says, is “less physical” than verse. (89) Moore’s stanzas may appear prose-like, as their formal features do not seem to be structuring or controlling. Rhyme, when it occurs, is “buried deep within a syntactic structure which does not and cannot pause for them, and so neither displays them nor is itself displayed by them.” (89) Slatin goes on to demonstrate that a piece of genuine prose, even Moore’s prose, cannot convincingly be recast into a Moore-like stanza: her forms cannot carry the weight of extended prose (real prose) any more than they can carry the weight of a rhythmically different poetry. Thus, she must quote prose and she must quote short pieces of prose, for her forms, so necessary to what the poems “say” can accommodate no larger intrusion. The poem acts upon such bits and pieces of prose like a magnet on iron filings, arranging them along its own lines of force, pulling them into the pattern; but since the poem necessarily violates its own limits in appropriating to itself the language of another text, it must set additional, compensatory limits on itself in response to these alien words. Thus Moore uses quotation marks as internal limits which both mark the boundaries of the borrowed phrase and redefine the boundaries of the poems itself. (92) [Note a marked difference from Diepeveen, when Slatin defines “the poem itself” as that part of the text that is not quoted.] He continues: “By marking the phrase as borrowed, Moore simultaneously defines it as an interruption and gains a measure of control over it, in effect withholding it from the pattern even while leaving it in its place.” The double nature thus accorded to the quoted text allows it to remain prose, though it rests inside a poem. This internalizes and complicates the debate over the differences between prose and poetry, which, he argues, casts new light on Moore’s reluctance to name her texts “poems.” Form, he says, protects Moore against her own “predatory tendencies.” (93) In the longer version of “Poetry,” for example, when Moore quotes Tolstoy’s diary re: the distinction between poetry and prose she erases his (slight enough) distinction in two ways. On the level of content, she states that we must not “discriminate against ‘business documents and / school-books,’” which Tolstoy cites as possibly the only categories of language which are not poetry. On the level of form, she makes Tolstoy’s words part of a poem. The result is that these words are no longer clearly prose, nor are they clearly now poetry--nor is her ‘poem’, called “Poetry.” (53) Note, too, that the poem does not say that all the things it names are poetry: it merely makes them available to poetry. The “genuine” is not defined, therefore, by subject matter, but by what the poet does with it--with technique. What began as an opposition of poetry vs. prose becomes an opposition of poetry vs. not-poetry. Thus “poetry” is not a question of “what” but of “how.” Moore’s use of rhyme, Slatin says “she employs a set of rhymes so subtle, so unconventional, and so apparently arbitrary as to constitute a kind of private joke at the expense of both convention and innovation.” (25) She accomplishes her “feigned inconsequence of manner”witn specific practices: rhymes are often widely spaced; they may be slant rhymes; they may rhyme on unaccented syllables or on inconsequential words; there may appear at first to be no semantic relationship between rhymed words. Readers must take part in making the rhymes meaningful. “Rhyme expresses the internal logic of the poem by forcing its component terms int active “external” relationships among themselves.” (24)