'Darting, Delicate, Exacting, Pan-Interested Mind'

Asked to name which “mental attitude” she judged “dismal, disastrous and distasteful,” Marianne Moore replied with a single word: “apathy.” It’s a complicated state, not easily dismissed. Dr. Johnson defined it as “the quality of not feeling; exemption from passion; freedom from mental perturbation.” In other words, not a wholly bad thing. Many things, from politics to video games, are worthy of principled indifference but not at the cost of perturbation. 

Chief among Moore’s virtues as a poet are curiosity and wonder coupled with precision of expression. A Moore poem resembles a Kunstkammer, a cabinet of curiosities drawn from every human realm. Not for her what Tennyson called “hollowhearted apathy, /  The cruellest form of perfect scorn.” There's too much to love in the world. Kay Ryan, a poet having a lot in common with Moore, lauds her “darting, delicate, exacting, pan-interested mind.” In her 1960 Paris Review interview with Donald Hall, Moore quotes George Grosz: “How did I come to be an artist? Endless curiosity, observation, research – and a great amount of joy in the thing.”

 

Artists endure who attend to the world. Details are precious. Art is collecting and arranging them. Moore’s poems, even those misread as nature poetry, sentimental bric-à-brac or whimsy, are cunningly made. The modern writer she most resembles is Vladimir Nabokov. “Beauty is everlasting, / and dust is for a time,” she wrote during World War II after seeing a photograph of a dead soldier in a magazine.

 

Moore’s condemnation of apathy above is from her reply to questions posed by Harper’s Bazaar and published as “Antidotes” in its July 19, 1963 issue. The magazine asked “Which play, book, painter, food, film, musical work, celebrity, activity, virtue, place, mental attitude, type of humor has seemed to you dismal, disastrous and distasteful?” Don’t go looking for self-revelations. Like  the animal she favored, Moore is admirably self-protective. As to the book she scorned, the poet answered:

 

“The Prince by Machiavelli: so dull; the advice, obvious (win the obstacle’s favor, enslave, or extirpate has not been working very well). Whereas the History of Florence says all by implication and sparkles like a diamond.”

 

Moore writes in “Armor’s Undermining Modesty” (1950):

 

“If tributes cannot

be implicit,

 

“give me diatribes and the fragrance of iodine,

the cork oak acorn grown in Spain;

the pale-ale-eyed impersonal look

which the sales-placard gives the bock beer buck.

What is more precise than precision? Illusion.”

 

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