'The Mass of Uniformly Achieved Work'

“I feel more & more acutely that, inasmuch as you are going in for animals, you have devoted remarkably little attention to the porcupine, who, I am sure, would reward you richly should you study him.” 

Marianne Moore is the head zookeeper among poets. Others minored in animal husbandry – La Fontaine (whose fables she translated), John Clare, Apollinaire – while Moore’s major was zoology. By 1925, when Yvor Winters wrote her the letter quoted above, she had devoted poems to lions, snails, snakes, mongooses, dock rats, tigers, fish, monkeys, whales, peacocks, mice, chameleons, among others, real and metaphorical. Later came the wood-weasel, jerboa, ostrich and pangolin (“scale / lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity”), and the less exotic toad and grasshopper.   

 

Moore often celebrates animals equipped with armor and spines, though seldom first-rank predators. The only reference to porcupines I find in her work is in “Apparition of Splendor,” in which she begins with Dürer’s engraving of a rhinoceros, “Like a porcupine, or fern,” and then quotes a line from Oliver Goldsmith.

 

Moore is the great pleasure-giver among the high-Modernists. She virtually patented the interpolation of quotations from other writers, often unidentified. Here is the final stanza of “Apparition of Splendor”:

 

“Maine should be pleased that its animal

is not a waverer, and rather

than fight, lets the primed quill fall.

Shallow oppressor, intruder,

Insister, you have found a resister.”

 

In his January 18, 1925 letter, Winters praises Moore’s “intensity, perfections, & originality of your work, &, what is more astounding yet, the mass of uniformly achieved work & the almost complete absence of anything not achieved, impresses me more every time I think of it or look at it.”      

 

Moore was born on this date, November 15, in 1887.