'Almost Sure to Please Others'

I prefer the prose to the verse of two great poets: John Keats and Marianne Moore. That’s heresy, I know, and I’m not trying to be provocative. I can judge only by my frequency of rereading and the resultant pleasure. Keats’ letters are endlessly amusing, intellectually stimulating and poignant – a young poet trained as a doctor is dying and he knows it. Among his consolations are Shakespeare, Burton, his family and friends. His final journey to Italy with Joseph Severn reads like a novel. He’s dead at twenty-five. I prize Hyder Edward Rollins’ two-volume 1958 edition of the letters.

 

Like her poems, Moore’s prose is concise, allusive and precise, a densely sewn quilt of quotes, and often recalls Henry James. Her 1934 essay “Henry James As a Characteristic American” is one of her best. Her prose is casually aphoristic and it’s worthwhile finding a copy of The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, 1986). A Moore prose sampler:

 

“In [Dr. Johnson’s] writings we have so competent a grasp of what was to be said, that we have the effect of italics without the use of them. There is also an abundant naturalness, and a simplicity which like that of Abraham Lincoln’s, was not ashamed to be vulnerable to distress.” and “There cannot be too much excellence.” (review of two new editions of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, The Dial, 1926)

 

“Profundities need not be a bore; and presented with the light touch, by a serious mind, can be, as here, a prism of fascination.” (“High Thinking in Boston,” Moore’s review of Kathrine Jones’ Miss Gifford’s, 1948)

 

“[G]usto thrives on freedom, and freedom in art, as in life, is the result of a discipline imposed by ourselves. Moreover, any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.” (“Humility, Concentration, and Gusto,” 1949)

 

“Silence is more eloquent than speech – a truism; but sometimes something that someone has written excites one’s admiration and one is tempted to write about it; if it is in a language other than one’s own, perhaps to translate it – or try to; one feels that what holds one’s attention might hold the attention of others. That is to say, there is a language of sensibility of which words can be the portrait – a magnetism, an ardor, a refusal to be false, to which the following pages attempt to testify.” (Foreword to Predilections, 1955)

 

“What do I mean by straight writing, I have been asked. I mean, in part, writing that is not mannered, overconscious, or at war with common sense.” (“Idiosyncrasy and Technique,” 1956)

 

Kenneth Burke wrote in his review of Predilections, Moore’s first prose collection: “Reading her criticism is like borrowing a book from the personal library of a skilled reader who underlined all the good spots.” In 1966, in a letter to Writer’s Digest, Moore quoted John Cheever approvingly: “I have an impulse to bring glad tidings. My sense of literature is one of giving, not diminishing.”

[Moore died on February 6, 1972 at age eighty-four.]