'Outward Form from Inward Intensity'

Marianne Moore’s review of Louise Bogan’s Poems and New Poems in the November 15, 1941, issue of The Nation may be my favorite review by one poet of another. It’s generous, admiring and never patronizing of a potential poetic rival, but it’s also written in a style reminiscent of late-period Henry James, who would have approved of Moore’s concision and her mingling of abstractions and particulars. It can be read for profit and with enjoyment by readers with no interest in Bogan or her work -- which suggests a partial definition of good criticism. She begins: 

“Louise Bogan’s art is compactness compacted. Emotion with her, as she has said of certain fiction is ‘itself form, the kernel which builds outward form from inward intensity.’ She uses a kind of forged rhetoric that nevertheless seems inevitable.”

 

The phrase Moore quotes from Bogan recalls Guy Davenport’s artistic motto, “Every force evolves a form,” adapted from Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers. He likens the thought to Heraclitus and Darwin. “As an ideal,” Davenport writes, “that form is the best response to the forces calling it into being has been the genius of good design in our time . . . A work of art is a form that articulate forces, making them intelligible.” Poetry or any art is never a gush, a spontaneous geyser of emotion, though a powerful emotion may be its ultimate source. Poetry is not therapeutic self-purging. As Moore suggests, “And there is fire in the brazier—the thinker in the poet.” And this: “One is struck by her restraint—and unusual courtesy in this day of bombast.” Pause for a moment and weigh Moore’s choice of “courtesy.” In her own work, Moore is always decorous, never autobiographical in the banal sense. She refers to the “spectacular competence” of Bogan’s “Animal, Mineral and Vegetable,” a sort of guided tour of a natural-science museum, including this stanza:

 

“Charles Darwin saw the primrose, and took thought.

Later, he watched the orchids. There, the bees

Enter in, one way; then, with pollen fraught,

Have to climb out another, on their knees.

The stigma profits, and the plant's at ease.”

 

We’re back to forces evolving forms. The poem’s closing, one-line stanza: “What Artist laughs? What clever Daemon thinks?”  In the final paragraph, Moore makes no reference to Bogan or her work, and sounds less like Henry James and more like another master of English prose, and a favorite of Moore’s, Sir Thomas Browne:  

 

“Those who have seemed to know most about eternity feel that this side of eternity is a small part of life. We are told, if we do wrong that grace may abound, it does not abound. We need not be told that life is never going to be free from trouble and that there are no substitutes for the dead; but it is a fact as well as a mystery that weakness is power, that handicap is proficiency, that the scar is a credential, that indignation is no adversary for gratitude, or heroism for joy. There are medicines.”

 

[Moore’s review can be found in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, Viking, 1986).]