'Daring to His Own Disadvantage'

“The words poetic and fatuous ought not to be synonyms; and to encounter a mind which is against mock society, mock poetry, mock justice, mock spirituality—against  any form of enslavement—is a benefit.” 

Marianne Moore could be a soft touch when it came to reviewing. She could also be acerbic. The passage above is her ambiguous opening sentence to a review published in the July 12, 1936 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The book in question is Rock and Shell: Poems 1923-1933 by John Wheelright (sometimes “Wheelwright”). I confused him with John Hall Wheelock. Moore says of Wheelright:

 

“There is unlooked-for wording that is not so happy; and one wonders if Mr. Wheelright means by injustice what one means by it oneself; for his originality, creativeness, urgency, voracity of imagination and varied reading, make his philosophy difficult to assort. It is like a fish too strong for what has caught it but too restricted not to be hampered by the net.”

 

I looked  at Rock and Shell thanks to the digital version available through the university library. Here’s a sample from the 175-line poem “Gestures to the Dead”:

 

“Each Chamber of Commerce manufactures

its own Five-Year-Plan;

a super-power plant has shaken

the Palace of the Vatican;

Neo-Thomists and not engineers

should meet in consultation,

while the Apostolic Radio

weeps for the Workingman.

Go on, Go on, Slavic Boy Scouts.

Two blades of grass grow where one grew before.

U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. Y.M.C.A.?

Go on, Go on, from strength to strength.”

 

Dreadful, isn’t it? Moore nailed it with a single adjective: “fatuous.” So bad, it’s embarrassing. It sounds remarkably contemporary, even after almost ninety years. Wheelright seems to have been a confused fellow, and not just while putting together this stuff. Winfield Townley Scott, writing in the New Mexico Quarterly in 1954, said of Wheelright:

 

“He was a rebel. He was a devout Episcopalian and also he was an active member of the Socialist Workers Party. He was a proletarian poet on Beacon Street. He was an aristocrat and a radical artist. These seeming contradictions were certainly not in his mind contradictions at all; the very core of his poetry is a hard consistency of social-political-religious-beliefs.”

 

In 1940, at age forty-three, he was struck and killed by a drunken driver in Boston. At the conclusion of her review, drawing on deep wells of irony, Moore writes: “[H]e can be daring to his own disadvantage; but if there is such a thing as modern American poetry, these poems are part of it.”

 

[Moore’s review of Wheelright’s volume is collected in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Moore, 1986).]