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.
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