'There Are Medicines'

Marianne Moore often likened the practice of poetry to the practice of medicine. Not that poems heal their authors or readers, exactly. She writes in “The Staff of Aesculapius” (1954): “experiments such as Hippocrates made / and substituted for vague / speculation, stayed / the ravages of a plague.” Poems are never “vague speculation.” In Moore’s hands, they muster facts, the fruit of precise observation. She deals in particulars like a first-rate diagnostician. 

In her 1961 Paris Review interview Moore told Donald Hall: “Did laboratory studies [while a student at Bryn Mawr] affect my poetry? I am sure they did. I found the biology courses—minor, major, and histology— exhilarating. I thought, in fact, of studying medicine. Precision, economy of statement, logic employed to ends that are disinterested, drawing and identifying, liberate—at least have some bearing on—the imagination, it seems to me.” She sounds like Nabokov: “It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science.” Moore’s poems are sometimes essay-like. They are beautiful the way an elegant equation is beautiful.

 

In 1926, when the journal she edited, The Dial, awarded its annual prize to William Carlos Williams, a family doctor, Moore wrote:

 

“Physicians are not so often poets as poets are physicians, but may we not assert that oppositions of science are not oppositions to poetry but oppositions to falseness? The author of the Religio Medici -- not more a physician than poet? – ‘has many verba ardentia,’ Doctor Johnson observed, ‘forcible expressions which he would never have found, but by venturing to the utmost verge of propriety; and flights which would never have been reached, but by one who had very little fear of the shame of falling.’”

 

The attraction of poetry for Moore is never parochially aesthetic. Beauty is more than merely beautiful. It is moral. In her poems she can be schoolmarmish in the best sense, a quality tempered by Moore’s agile wit. In a 1952 letter to the poet Louis Ginsberg (Allen’s father), she writes: “We are here to transcend and help others transcend what impairs us.” In the November 15, 1941 issue of The Nation, Moore asks in her review of Louise Bogan’s Poems and New Poems: “For mortal rage and immortal injury, are there or are there not medicines?” She answers, in part:

 

“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 was born on this date, November 15, in 1887, in Kirkwood, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis, and died on February 5, 1972 at age eighty-four.

 

[The reviews quoted above can be found in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, 1986). The letter to Louis Ginsberg is collected in The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore (ed. Bonnie Costello, 1997).]