The career of Marianne Moore … provides us with a perfect example of the way a poet's fame may come in time to obscure the essential quality of the poetry upon which it is ostensibly based. The reputation achieved by this extraordinary poet in the later years of her life, when she was finally showered with literary honors and assumed the position of a cultural celebrity, was often grotesquely at odds with the very stringent and unyielding vision of her best writing. For the media that found her an appealing subject in those years, and thus for the many people who first came to know of her through the media, she was something that she had never been for her contemporaries: the very archetype of the quaint literary spinster….

Precisely what moved the elderly Marianne Moore to encourage this misperception—for there is no question that she lent herself to its promotion—must be left for her biographers to explain…. What remains imperative for us to understand just now, however, is that this fabricated image had nothing whatever to do with the poet's real achievement, which from the outset was anchored in a tougher, doughtier, more disabused view of both art and life.

Not that an exact appreciation of this achievement was ever an easy thing to acquire even for serious readers of poetry. Moore was an original and often a very difficult poet. Her style marked a decisive break with established literary practice. At the same time, it remained too individual to be easily assimilated into the modernist conventions of her contemporaries. Even in a generation distinguished for its radical innovations in poetic discourse, hers were in many ways the most astonishing. The eccentric prosy rhythms she employed, like the dour, essayistic vocabulary she favored, seemed to disavow any obvious poetic intention. Her use of blunt, discursive statement, combined with collage-like accretions of incongruous quotation, likewise confounded poetic expectation. Even the tone of dispassionate irony in her verse was unlike anyone else's, for it did not have a dandyish function and only lightly masked a fierce moral intensity that was anything but ambiguous in the judgment it made of experience. Everything important to her style and outlook—except, perhaps, her humor, which owed a lot to Henry James—she seemed to have invented for herself.

This originality was problem enough for most readers. But it was compounded, in Moore's case, by her reluctance to leave her work intact. She was always much given to revision and amendment, and in her later years this revisionist impulse developed into a bizarre appetite for unrestrained deletion….

Some poems—"An Octopus," for example—she simply vandalized by lopping off important lines. Others—most notably, the well-known poem on "Poetry" itself—she reduced to a ruin. In what was probably her single greatest book—"Observations" (1924)—"Poetry" was a poem of 13 printed lines. By the time the "Collected Poems" appeared in 1951, it had grown into a poem of nearly 40 printed lines. (It was this version, with its celebrated reference to "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," that became famous.) But in the misnamed "Complete Poems" of 1967, it had been reduced to four! And it is in this ruined state that it reappears now in this new "definitive" edition of "The Complete Poems," which is said—grim thought!—to conform "as closely as is now possible to the author's final intentions."

One must therefore approach this new, augmented version of "The Complete Poems" with a certain caution—and, if possible, armed with earlier editions of the poet's writings—for it obviously does not always represent its author at her best….

The "ecstasy" of "the occasion" always lies deeply hidden in this poetry, almost as hidden as its sly music, and is hidden by design. Yet to miss it completely is to mistake the elaborate verbal artifice for the inner core of feeling it is meant to contain and preserve. (p. 7)

The best, certainly the most challenging place to observe the process by which feeling, "modified by the writer's moral and technical insights," is transmuted by Moore into a dazzling and sizable poetic structure is in that long, difficult, still neglected poem called "Marriage."… First published in 1923, it occupies a place in Moore's oeuvre equivalent to that of "The Waste Land" in T. S. Eliot's. That it takes a similarly bleak view of the human enterprise is not something that has been very much remarked upon in the criticism of modern poetry, perhaps because Moore is seldom credited with having a profound—much less a truly pessimistic—view of anything. Fortunately, the text of "Marriage" was not one that Moore was tempted to tamper with, except to adjust a hyphen or italicize a word, and so it survives intact in "The Complete Poems," which is worth having for this poem alone.

From the opening lines of "Marriage," we know we are in the presence of a poet unlike any other. (pp. 7, 22)

R. P. Blackmur, repeating the mistake so many other critics had made about the novels of his beloved Henry James, complained that there was "no element of sex or lust" in this poem. But this is not, I think, the way the poem reads to us today. In fact, there is a good deal of sexual preening in the poem, all of it mercilessly satirized, and no shortage, either, of the sort of pain and melancholy that is recognizably sexual in its very essence…. However inexplicit "Marriage" may be about the details of conjugal life—"expanded explanation," as Moore observed in "Feeling and Precision," "tends to spoil the lion's leap"—the whole poem is actually infused with an acute sexual tension….

"Marriage" is a poem of renunciation. Its tone is at once aggrieved and aloof, and its principal ironies are reserved for the grave differences separating private feeling from the rituals of its public codification….

After the litany of pain, vanity and foolish imposture that precedes it, the concluding tableau of this poem … both freezes the blood and makes one laugh—not an uncommon effect in Moore's early and best writing. (p. 22)

Despite its many spoiled texts, then, "The Complete Poems" remains an important book, and one that every reader will want to have…. It is a book teeming with sharp observation, profound moral insight, high satiric wit and all manner of esthetic delight. If, as I believe, there is a distinct decline in quality and intensity to be observed in the poems Moore wrote after the 1930's, even this does little to diminish her stature as one of the pre-eminent figures in the greatest generation of poets this country has produced. (pp. 22-3)