'Intensely Cultivated and Painstakingly Honest'

In the brief foreword to her first prose collection, Predilections (1955), Marianne Moore writes as good an apologia for her manner of writing, among others, as I’ve ever encountered:

“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.”

 

In The Journal of John Cardan (1961), J.V. Cunningham echoes and almost sounds like Moore: “No dignity, except in silence; no virtue, except in sinuous exacting speech.” Moore is the great pleasure-giver among the high-Modernists. She virtually patented the interpolation of quotations from other writers, often unidentified. In a January 18, 1925 letter to Moore, Yvor Winters praises the “intensity, perfections, & originality of your work, &, what is more astounding yet, the mass of uniformly achieved work & the almost complete absence of anything not achieved, impresses me more every time I think of it or look at it.” Though more expansive than Cunningham's, Moore’s poems share with his a dedication to concision and precision. You’ll find little or no unsightly adipose tissue in their poems or prose.

 

In 1925, Winters reviewed Moore’s second collection, the presciently titled Observations, in Poetry. In the review, “Holiday and Day of Wrath,” he quotes five lines from her poem “A Graveyard” and writes:

 

“The poignancy, the connotative power, of such a passage should need no comment. The emotion is not ‘worked up’: there is no plea for sympathy, no covert attention to the audience, but the essential emotion remains, complete, profound, self-sufficient, bony, like that of Donne or Emily Dickinson. The balance of the entire poem is as perfect as the balance of any one of its lines.”

 

Those accustomed to Winters’ occasional ferocity as a critic may be surprised by the general tenor of his review and by what he writes of Moore’s poem “Black Earth”: “[T]he sound effects are as tremendous and incessant as thunder, and it is not an empty thunder; the verses are as packed with thought as with sound.”

 

Winters says of Moore’s style that it is “at once intensely cultivated and painstakingly honest, never fails to charm me, and whose mastery of phrase and cadence overwhelms me. It is a privilege to be able to write of one of whose genius one feels so sure.” In 1961, Moore returned the compliment. Her contribution to a special issue of the journal Sequoia dedicated to Winters was the poem “Yvor Winters--,” in which the title was the start of the poem’s first line:

 

“something of a badger-Diogenes—

we are indebted technically; and

attached personally, those of us who know him;

are proud of his hostility to falsity;

of his verse reduced to essence;

of a tenacity unintimidated by circumstance.

He does not hesitate to call others foolish,

and we do not shrink from imputations

of folly—of annoying a man to whom

compliments may be uncongenial;

--wise to be foolish when a sense of indebtedness

is too strong to suppress.”

 

Moore was born on this date, November 15, in 1887 and died in 1972 at age eighty-four.

[For the Winters letter see The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by R.L. Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. For his review of Moore’s collection see Yvor Winters: Uncollected Essays and Reviews (1973), edited by Francis Murphy and published by Swallow Press.]