SOURCE: Holley, Margaret. “Art as Exact Perception.” In The Poetry of Marianne Moore: A Study in Voice and Value, pp. 1-17. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Holley discusses the poems Moore published during her years at Bryn Mawr College, all of which appeared in the campus magazines Tipyn O'Bob and The Lantern.]

Originality, it seems to me, always comes in disguise, as the inevitable precipitated by the courage to be natural.

Marianne Moore

The emergence of an original poetic voice is an uncommon cultural moment, and even traced in retrospect it brings both the brief pleasure of surprise and the more lasting gift of an enriched world. The emergence of Marianne Moore's distinctive voice happened within the first dozen and a half poems that she published, all of them in the two Bryn Mawr College magazines Tipyn O'Bob and its successor The Lantern between 1907 and 1913. Read as a group these eighteen short pieces reveal the gradual refinement of Moore's unique poetic idiom in contrast to the style of late Victorian verse.

The Bryn Mawr poems announce explicitly and implicitly the aesthetic program that will establish their author as a leading poet of the modernist era. In the process of extricating her own work from the prevailing fin de siècle poetic mode, Moore issues in her verse a series of epigrams on the relation of perception and emotion to art. She declares herself unequivocally for an empiricism, an allegiance to sense perception, which she will first expand with virtuosity, then question, and finally transcend during the six decades of her career.

When she came to Bryn Mawr, Marianne Moore was not a young woman one would have marked as a future modernist, so traditional was (and would remain) her spiritual orientation. A student who, unlike her classmates, refrained from work on the sabbath was an unlikely candidate for advancing an aesthetic revolution. And while Moore never allowed her personal church practice to enter her verse, an insistence on the fundamental value of courage and the meaningfulness of hope permeated her work throughout her life. Moore did not enter the modernist stream through its challenge to the old spiritual order—she joined and advanced it through a radically new prosody set in the service of a clarity of vision that is the central value of these very early poems.

Moore brought with her to Bryn Mawr an already formidably educated mind. The setting of her childhood was the parsonage home of her grandfather, the Rev. John R. Warner, Pastor of Kirkwood Presbyterian Church near St. Louis, Missouri. Her father, John Milton Moore, had succumbed to a mental breakdown before her birth in 1887, and she never saw him, but she found her grandfather “a most affectionate man,”¹ and her mother, Mary Warner Moore, raised Marianne and her older brother Warner in a close, loving circle of family and friends. Both Mrs. Moore and this circle of friends provided rich ground for a fertile and original mind.

Moore once reminisced about how her mother had her and Warner “commit the catechism to memory,” much of which she still remembered in her late sixties.² Mrs. Moore also read Paradise Lost aloud to her children, in addition to instructing them in French and music and encouraging their love of books. When the Rev. Warner died suddenly of pneumonia in the winter of 1894, Mrs. Moore moved with her two children first briefly to cousins in Pittsburgh and then to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where their closest friends were the family of Dr. George Norcross, Pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church.

Marianne later recognized Dr. and Mrs. Norcross and their four daughters as “a main influence in my life as a writer. … An unfanatical love of books, music, and ‘art’ made Blake, Rembrandt, Giotto, Holbein, D. G. Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, Turner, Browning, Ruskin, Anthony Trollope, George Meredith household companions of the family and their friends. (The Wicksteed Temple Dante, was presented to me by Mrs. Norcross on successive birthdays.)”³ During Moore's youth the pieties of the Warner and Norcross parsonages blended rather smoothly with a lively cultural life and with family warmth. “We were constantly discussing authors,” she went on. “When I entered Bryn Mawr, the College seemed to me in disappointing contrast—almost benighted.”

Friends of that time remember Moore as striking in appearance and agreeable in disposition. Recalling Marianne as a child, librarian Fanny Borden described her to Elizabeth Bishop as “a strange and appealing little creature with bright red hair.”⁴ And a neighbor from Carlisle and classmate at Bryn Mawr, Peggy Kellogg-Smith, remembers her fondly: “Marianne Moore at thirteen was slim, tall and graceful with one thick beautiful red braid down to her skirt top. A gentle pleasing companion, humorous and friendly.”⁵

She arrived on the Bryn Mawr campus in the fall of 1905, shy and desperately homesick at first, but well prepared, having been tutored for over a year by Mary Norcross for the fifteen challenging entrance exams. Moore was one of thirty-seven students in her class of one hundred and eleven freshmen to be admitted “without conditions,” having passed all of the exams; nevertheless during her sophomore year the English Department found her prose lacking in the clarity required to major in that subject. So she majored instead in the composite field of history, economics, and politics; minored in biology; and began to truly thrive on the rich fare of friendships, Philadelphia cultural life, writing, and the remarkable presence of M. Carey Thomas, President of Bryn Mawr, whom she would later quote in her poem “Marriage.”

“When I was in college,” Moore said, “feminism was not taken for granted; it was a cause. It was ardently implemented and fortified by Miss Thomas. … She made things easy for us, and she made them hard for us. … I remember her pleased smile, one eyebrow a little higher than the other, at the faintest difficulty, and her disdain for anything superficially airy. … We felt it a serious deprivation to miss morning chapel exercises. … Dr. Barton would read from the Bible in firm, even tones, and Miss Thomas would comment on political, literary, or campus matters. Our zeal to be present, you may have surmised, was not devoutness. It was attributed to President Thomas's unpredictable originality.”⁶

Carey Thomas's absolute confidence that women should rise to the same level of challenge and expectation as men permeated the atmosphere of Bryn Mawr, and Moore wrote to her friend and fellow writer Bryher in 1921, “my experience there gave me security in my determination to have what I want.”⁷ She did not achieve what she wanted easily at first, and in the winter of her sophomore year, having failed to make it onto the editorial board of Tipyn O'Bob, she wrote to her mother, “I don't know why I am so possessed to write. I know it is not because of what nice things people say and its not for the doing itself, for I cannot express myself.”⁸ She did not know day student Hilda Doolittle well enough then to share their interest in writing or to provide mutual solace in their difficult times.

Looking back over her college years, Moore came to appreciate the relative freedom in which she grew. “At Bryn Mawr,” she continued in her letter to Bryher, “the students are allowed to develop with as little interference as is compatible with any kind of academic order and the more I see of other women's colleges, the more I feel that Bryn Mawr was peculiarly adapted to my special requirements.” The high point came when she achieved good enough marks in English to allow her during the spring of her senior year to take Georgiana Goddard King's course in Imitative Writing, a study of the seventeenth-century prose stylists. That year was her turning point. Moore had an abiding love for the seventeenth-century writers; she scattered a few trial lines of “A Jelly-Fish” in among her notes on Burton and Dryden;⁹ and while she had already in 1907 and 1908 published verses that were imitative of the general poetic modes of the day, her own distinctive voice comes through clearly for the first time in the five poems that appeared in the spring of 1909.

The dominant poetic mode from which Moore gradually departed in her Bryn Mawr poems is the mode that Ezra Pound later called “pseudo-Swinburnian.”¹⁰ This common style of verse for the first decade of the twentieth century was musically metrical in sound and romantic in its fascination with mysterious and magical loveliness, with what Pound called “dim lands of peace.” For example, Moore's first published poem appears on a page of Tipyn O'Bob (Welsh for “a little bit of everybody”) that also features Mary Frances Nearing's poem “Letter-Magic,” a piece ending

For in my hand—you did not know—
A talisman would paint the world
With moonbeams, and from buds upcurled,
Make fairy gardens grow.(11)

Nearing was a good friend of Moore and, unlike her, was found qualified to major in English. Marianna, as she was known to her classmates, tried her hand at the popular pre-Raphaelite mode in “To My Cup-Bearer,” published in the spring of her junior year.¹² This early portrait of a lady has an exotic medieval air: “Her eye is dark, her vestment rich, / Embroidered with a silver stitch.” Years later, when Elizabeth Bishop asked her “what the poems she had written at Bryn Mawr were like, she said, ‘Just like Swinburne, Elizabeth.’”¹³

Moore seems also to have been attracted to another currently popular style of verse, the Kiplingesque seaman's chantey, which we hear echoed, then quoted, and then self-quoted in “The Sentimentalist”:

Sometimes in a rough beam sea,
When the waves are running high,
I gaze about for a sight of the land,
Then sing, glancing up at the sky,
“‘Here's to the girl I love,
And I wish that she were nigh,
If drinking beer would bring her here’
I'd drink the ship's hold dry.”

The three layers of text here forecast Moore's later more subtle layering of voices and texts, and a certain distance from her derivative material is already indicated by the satiric note of her title.

Moore did not linger long in such apprenticeship. For a while she continued to make use of a conventionally jaunty sound for the doggerel with which she spiced her playful family newsletters,¹⁴ but the crisp voice and rhythm that emerge in “To a Screen-Maker” of 1909 are now recognizably Marianne Moore's:

I.

Not of silver nor of coral
But of weather-beaten laurel
Carve it out.

II.

Carve out here and there a face
And a dragon circling space
Coiled about.

III.

Represent a branching tree
Uniform like tapestry
And no sky.

IV.

And devise a rustic bower
And a pointed passion flower
Hanging high.

The imagery is still in the pre-Raphaelite style, and the measure is metrical, but encouragement in the newly economical, somewhat clipped rhythm appears to have come from Miss King and the seventeenth-century texts that were used in her writing class. In February of 1909 Moore jotted in her course notebook, “The indispensable thing is restraint wh [sic] gives on the one hand simplicity. … By the time you have simplic and restraint combined you have austerity—that is going to cut out most of our friends.”¹⁵ The five verses that appeared in 1909 are models of simplicity, and one of them, “A Red Flower,” explicitly celebrates the virtue of restraint.

We see an even more radical departure from the Swinburnian mode after Moore left Bryn Mawr. The Lantern for spring 1910 published fellow student Caroline Reeves Foulke's “Lullaby,” beginning “Baby is drifting thro' Sunset Land / In a rainbow-craft of dreams” and ending

—Little Dream-Ship, with your white sails furled,
          Rest in your haven deep;
A moonlit silence is flooding the world
          And the baby is fast asleep.

This is followed immediately by Moore's

“TUNICA PALLIO PROPRIOR”

My coat is nearer than my cloak;
Inside
My coat is an integument of pride.

Repeatedly in The Lantern the sweet music of what W. H. Auden called “poetry-in-general” leads up to the “arresting and interesting” verse statements of the young Moore.¹⁶

One of these statements that stands out with particular force in contrast to the preceding music of moonbeams and fairy gardens is Moore's assertion in “Qui S'Excuse, S'Accuse” that

Art is exact perception;
If the outcome is deception
Then I think the fault must lie
Partly with the critic's eye,
And no man who's done his part
Need apologize for art.

It is through this explicitly stated program of “art as exact perception” that Moore swerves most sharply away from the Swinburnian lullabies and the “dim lands of peace.” Two other verse statements buttress this project of poetry as clear perception: the two aphoristic titles “My Senses Do Not Deceive Me” and “Things Are What They Seem” announce an epistemology for the observations to come. The common theme of these three poems is reliance on direct perception. By the end of her 1924 collection Observations, Moore will have relied on direct perception long enough to begin her critique of its dangers and limitations. But for the duration of the verses printed at Bryn Mawr and those composed in Carlisle, the empirical ideal of “exact perception” serves to extricate her art from the legacy of dreamy atmospheres left by the end of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century.

Two elements in particular of Moore's characteristic style of perception are already clearly present in her Bryn Mawr poems—her interest in emblems and, underlying that, the fundamentally spatial orientation of her imagination. Moore's poetic sense of the still life, of the “still” as in a frame of film, a photograph, was always stronger and richer than her narrative impulse, and this spatial emphasis will permeate virtually all of her verse to come. What her friend Peggy Kellogg-Smith called the “arresting” quality of her college poems is created at least in part by their fixing of attention upon a spatial configuration, such as a carved laurel screen, in which form is emphasized over movement. A motive for this preference may be found in Moore's senior-year publication “A Red Flower”:

Emotion,
Cast upon the pot,
Will make it
Overflow, or not,
According
As you can refrain
From fingering
The leaves again.

Stillness is perceived as a corollary of intense feeling and of forbearance from fussing over that feeling. Likewise, in “To a Screen-Maker” the “dragon circling space,” the “branching tree / Uniform like tapestry,” and the “rustic bower” with its “passion flower / Hanging high” are still shapes carved in wood and now in words: they are the art of deliberately arranged, enduring forms.

When Coleridge said that all men are either Platonists or Aristotelians, he was making the same order of general distinction as the one Raphael made in his “School of Athens” when he painted Plato pointing upward at the eternal and Aristotle pointing downward at the earthly. Such a broad generalization is useful even while it invites qualifications. On the same order of generality we may distinguish for analytical purposes two general types of poems: one is the poem that narrates an experience, immersing itself in the flux of time, and the other is the poem that focuses on a scene, on spatial arrangements or durable entities. The pure prototypes of these are the story and the still life, the plot and the photograph.

These two poetries are the yin and yang of one another and will often be intermingled in one work. The spatial dimension of experience is not the opposite of the temporal dimension but rather its complement. The spatial axis runs, let us say, at right angles to the temporal axis, intersecting it at every so-called point in time. Historically, however, certain artistic styles may reflect a preference for one axis over the other, the primary axis being determined by the dominant values of the culture. In a romantic and post-romantic age, the touchstones of nature and progress will urge one to value the temporal energy of organic development, whereas the medieval artist and classicist work from an atemporal ideal that would rescue significant form from the restlessness of the world.¹⁷

Thus certain poems tend to see things in motion, to present them as events, as ongoing happenings, while other poems tend to contemplate the momentary scene, to present things as products rather than as processes. The artist may emphasize either the becoming or the being of something, its subjective or objective aspect. At the subjective pole of awareness, experience is an ever-unfinished event unfolding within some human consciousness; the objective pole of awareness must be construed as composed of at least recognizably stable entities, however fictive, in order for any comprehension, again however fictive, to result. Marianne Moore worked more consistently and exclusively than most poets along the spatial axis of her subjects. The strongly spatial tendency of her imagination is basic to her work and responsible for much of its unique flavor, since this “predilection” influences the poetic voice, its rhythms, diction, and tones as much as it guides her selection of materials, focus, and textual arrangements. The spatial axis, in its highlighting of significant form over movement, is the perceptual counterpart of Moore's later reaffirmations of formal closure, rhyme, and determinate meaning, her return from inquiry to advocacy of certain values.

Later in life Moore recalled some of the media that nourished her imagination during her childhood:

For anyone with “a passion for actuality,” the camera often seems preferable to any other mechanism; or so I felt in 1896, enthralled by Lyman Travelogues at the Opera House in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. As sequel to lantern slides, cosmoscope, and stereopticon, Brooklyn Institute movies were an Aladdin's revel.¹⁸

The stereopticon is Marcel Proust's magic lantern, an early slide projector that brought to the child in a small-town Opera House the sights of a larger world, captured in image after still image. Many of Moore's poems are like a series of lantern slides cumulatively disclosing an invisible subject. One might well say of her work that “No one can more ably turn frozen surfaces into tractable worlds, ‘appropriated by reflection, permeated by feelings.’”¹⁹

The contrast between the spatial and temporal types of poem may be exemplified by two works on the same subject, one written by D. H. Lawrence and the other by Marianne Moore. These are poets who share a love for “birds, beasts and flowers” and who write about many of the same subjects in this area, but whose temperaments and manifest messages are so different as to be nearly diametrically opposed. Lawrence's poem “Elephant” in Birds, Beasts and Flowers²⁰ and Moore's “Elephants” in Nevertheless both explore emblems and mottoes, both describe a ceremonial procession, and both display this animal as suggestive of certain human attitudes and possibilities. But Lawrence's poem narrates an ongoing experience and Moore's presents a series of scenes and shapes, and the difference is indicative of the overall difference in their visions.

Lawrence's immediately narrative approach takes us into an ongoing movement through time: “You go down shade to the river … / And you cross the ferry … / Elephants after elephants curl their trunks … / As they approach and salaam, under the dripping fire of the torches.” We experience along with him a firelit “Pera-hera,” the procession of elephants parading before the visiting Prince of Wales in the tropical night. Then we follow the elephants and natives home after the ceremony. The event is a confrontation: “tropical eyes dilated look up / … To that tired remnant of royalty up there / Whose motto is Ich dien.” Lawrence makes the Prince's motto, “I serve,” into part of the drama of this meeting, as he imagines that the elephants and the natives are disappointed in that “remnant of royalty,” the “pale and dejected” Prince: “the night fell in frustration” because they had come “to bow before royalty … for it's good as a draught of cool water to bow very, very low to the royal.” The poet wishes that he himself could have stood before them as a truly fine prince. After the ceremony the poetic voice imaginatively reinvents the scene, countering its failure with the depiction of a scene in which someone like himself orders the elephants to “Serve me, I am meet to be served. / Being royal of the gods.”

Moore's presentation of the elephants, in contrast, begins with the stillness of “matched intensities,” with the image of two trunks “Uplifted and waved till immobilized” into a “deadlock of dyke-enforced massiveness.” She then presents a series of slides of elephants: “One, sleeping with the calm of youth,” another with “his held-up foreleg,” and a group of “these ministrants all gray or / gray with white on legs or trunk.” She shows us repeated, symbolic types of behavior rather than a single event:

With trunk tucked up compactly—the elephant's
sign of defeat—he resisted, but is the child
of reason now. His straight trunk seems to say: when
what we hoped for came to nothing, we revived.

We are shown no motion of transition between these two poses, for the emblematic positions of the trunk are not subsumed in a plot but rather examined as a series of discrete and readable signs: “his held-up foreleg for use / as a stair … expounds the brotherhood of creatures to man.” Even during the procession of the Buddha's Tooth, Moore focuses not so much on movement as on the pyramidal configuration of the bearers: “see / the white elephant carry the cushion that / carries the casket that carries the Tooth.” And the poem ends on a note of complete composure: “asleep on an elephant, that is repose.”

The reason for these differences in presentation, Lawrence's preference for moving narrative and Moore's for composed pictures, lies in the overall thrust of each body of work. Lawrence felt dissatisfied with the civilization of industrial England and longed for renewal by something like the elephants' “mystery of the dark mountain of blood.” He projects his own yearning onto the elephants and follows the actual unsatisfactory procession with his imaginary, redeemed version. Movement and time, the mediums of restlessness and hope, are the life of his poem in both procedure and theme. To “capture the quick of the plasm” is both his means and his end.

In contrast to Lawrence's free-verse lines, Moore's rhymed quatrains are suited to a poem about equanimity. Their appearance of regularity and the constant return to an eleven-syllable line are a vehicle of composure for a poem that speaks admiringly of “calm … rest … serenity … reason … sweetness.” Equanimity is “contrived” not only by the elephant but also by the poet in this “pilgrim's pattern” of signs and emblems. Just as Lawrence is filled with longing for an ideal, so Moore too admits that, compared with the ease-ful wisdom suggested by the elephants, “we are at much unease.” The difference is one of primacy and emphasis. Lawrence writes primarily of a reality of dissatisfaction and longing, whereas Moore emphasizes an ideal of serenity and wisdom. And the verse form of her composition embodies, much as the poise of the elephant does, the intense stillness of a projected perfection. The real and the ideal are present in both poems, as they are in any vision, but each poem is a constellation formed noticeably nearer to one pole than to the other.

Moore's habitual preference for the spatial axis survives her various other developments, the stages through which her artistry grew. Thus we may follow a given motif—the dragon, for example, of which she was so fond—throughout her career and find it presented consistently with emblematic stillness. In “To a Screen-Maker” the suspended and composed energy of the laurel screen's “dragon circling space” is the first of a series of suggestively poised portraits of this dynamic and storied mythical beast. “In the Days of Prismatic Color” of 1919 embodies the “pestilence” of sophisticated complexity in Nestor's dragon from the Greek Anthology, emphasizing its absurd three-part sprawl and appendages:

                                        “Part of it was crawling, part of it
was about to crawl, the rest
          was torpid in its lair.” In the short-legged, fit-
ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiae—we have the classic
multitude of feet. To what purpose!

From her source Moore selected this overview of the layout and habitual gestures of the beast rather than Nestor's dramatic narrative of how Cephisus kills himself by running into its jaws.

Even “The Plumet Basilisk” of 1933, one of Moore's most action-oriented poems, pauses to balance the habits of the lizard, the “living firework,” with its architectural counterpart in Copenhagen, where the main door of the bourse

                                                  is roofed by two pairs of dragons stan-
                                                            ding on
                    their heads—twirled by the architect—so that
                              the four
green tails conspiring upright, symbolize four-fold security.

And finally in 1957, that immortalized cocktail-party remark, “O to Be a Dragon,” confirms the emblematic role this creature has played in Moore's ongoing fascination with it:

                              If I, like Solomon, …
                              could have my wish—
          my wish … O to be a dragon,
a symbol of the power of Heaven—of silkworm
size or immense; at times invisible.
          Felicitous phenomenon!

The challenge of the verbal portrait or still life—the danger that plodding detail will dissipate its energy—must be met by swiftness of stroke. Here the movement not of the object but of the voice turning from grand Solomon to the humble silkworm invests the center between those poles with the same kind of energy-in-stillness as the “dragon circling space” maintains.

Moore's preference for the spatial over the temporal axis has not gone unnoticed. William Carlos Williams evoked it early when he wrote in 1925 that “this quality of the brittle, highly set-off porcelain garden exists and nowhere in modern work better than Miss Moore.”²¹ In Language and the Poet Marie Borroff takes a syntactical approach to it: “Moore's grammatical preference for stative over dynamic bespeaks a deeper bias. Hers is an imagination that sees more meaning in fixity than in flux.”²² Borroff's illustrations of her point are those immobilized trunks in “Elephants” and the “water etched / with waves as formal as the scales / on a fish” in “The Steeple-Jack.” And Bonnie Costello notes in her chapter on “Moore and the Visual Arts” that “Moore's was an emblematic imagination.”²³ Costello's immediate context here is Moore's interest in traditional Chinese symbols, but she goes on to include in her broad conception of the emblematic a variety of plastic and pictorial forms—sculpture, tapestry, and painting.

As a special manifestation of the generally spatial bias, the emblematic imagination can itself take various forms. For example, Rosemary Freeman has documented the two quite distinct styles of the English emblem books of the Renaissance. These books all contain pictures accompanied by mottoes and/or verses spelling out the moral lessons intended by each illustration. The abstract idea is contained in both the image and the text, which serve each other equally. The fifteenth and early sixteenth century device or emblem was a conventional, almost coded image bearing a traditional moral message: “the words and the picture in it each formed self-contained statements of the author's conception and they were equally appropriate carved in jewels, blazoned on shields, embroidered on hangings or engraved in books.”²⁴ In contrast to these stylized and often simply frontal designs, the emblems of the seventeenth century like those of Francis Quarles are more complex, realistically detailed, and individual in conception, for their themes are more “psychological,” and hence they were seldom transferred to other media than the printed page.

Freeman emphasizes that neither of these styles of emblem “ever achieved the fulness and richness of emotional content of one of Blake's symbols,” for the emblem writer, in making his “detailed equation of picture and meaning, … deals in fixities and definites, establishing parallel after parallel in a purely objective way.”²⁵ She recognizes that George Herbert, whose work Moore admired and whose images are frequently emblematic, has transcended the usual limitations of that material to achieve “a richness of meaning and subtlety of tone which is the more distinctive for the simplicity of the means it uses.”²⁶ Herbert has often achieved this richness, I think, by pitting the egoism and desires of the psychological, earthly self against the clarity and constancy of divine emblems of the earlier, more objective kind. For Herbert the emblematic exercise is a patterning of the otherwise unruly self, a redemptive shaping of the soul: the intimacy and energy of the earthly personality are subjected, poem by poem, to the rigor and perfection of the divine emblem.

Moore, too, was drawn to the earlier “preliterary” emblems, and while her work is undoctrinal in effect, she often uses the emblem and/or its motto as a determinate foil for the indeterminate dimensions of her subject. In many of her poems, the conventional emblem's clarity of message, what Freeman calls (after Coleridge) its “fixities and definites,” is set as a figure against the background of a complex and ambiguous human condition. In “Elephants” the “pilgrim's pattern” of symbolic poses and “Sophocles the Bee, on whose / tombstone a hive was incised” are set in tension with that central, restless “As if, as if, it is all as ifs; we are at / much unease.” The four brass dragons of “The Plumet Basilisk” that “symbolize four-fold security” are placed next to the crowd of tuateras and other flighty, frilled lizards of the insecure, unpredictable earth outside of emblems.

Even in the early Bryn Mawr poems, Moore is able to capture this difference between the rather fixed sense of the emblem and the ambiguities of the images arranged beside it. In 1912 The Lantern printed “A Talisman”:

I.

Upon a splintered mast
Torn from the ship, and cast
Near her hull,

II.

A stumbling shepherd found,
Embedded in the ground,
A seagull

III.

Of lapis lazuli;
A scarab of the sea,
With wings spread,

IV.

Curling its coral feet,
Parting its beak to greet,
Men long dead.

The three elements of this poetic scene—the scarab, the wreck, and the shepherd—juxtapose the simpler, fixed emblem with larger, contrasting uncertainties. First, the emblem is the “scarab of the sea,” the carving of the seagull which bears a certain definite sense underlying the magic power of the stone. The bird is presumably to be understood as the seamen's emblem of swift passage and safe return to land. Second, the image of the splintered mast and hull where the scarab is found carries a less definite and richer import: somehow or other the talisman has failed; the emblem of safe return now lies amid wreckage. Here the poem both relies on and undoes the sense of its title, but one must understand the talismanic emblem's intended message in order to feel the irony of its discovery here. And third, the reader of the poem is presented the wider image of the shepherd stumbling on the talisman in the wreck, offering the contrast between his pastured life and the seafarers' perilous journeys. Each inner circle of meaning is necessary to the larger one that encloses it. Likewise, each layer of determinate meaning leads outward toward a less determinate but broader sense.

This poem's rhyme and regular stanzas are outside of the free-verse program of the Imagists, and the last clause, “to greet, / Men long dead,” is probably too explanatory for a purely Imagistic piece. Nevertheless, it is a good illustration of Pound's conception of the “Image” as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”²⁷ “A Talisman,” like its fraternal twin “To a Screen-Maker,” frames its emblem with an image without subscribing to the Imagistic program. Moore's strategy of juxtaposing determinate and indeterminate modes of meaning will play a central role in her more extended poetic inquiries of the twenties, thirties, and forties.

Moore's sources of determinate meanings include the verbal as well as the visual dimensions of experience. The emblem as bearer of a certain definite sense is a counterpart of one of the most pervasive and provocative elements of her verse, namely her art of quotation. If the emblem is a kind of quoted image, the quotation is a visual reproduction of a found text. From her very first published poems to her last, Moore made her own distinctive use of acknowledged, and sometimes unacknowledged, quotations from the voices and texts of her immediate world. Her first published poem, “Under a Patched Sail” of 1907, opens with a quoted song of unknown origin. The song is demarcated visibly in writing, but to the ear it blends seamlessly with the style and voice of the unquoted persona of the last four lines:

“Oh, we'll drink once more
When the wind's off shore,”
We'll drink from the good old jar,
And then to port,
For the time grows short.
Come lad—to the days that are!

The opening layer of quoted text is delivered uncritically by the speaker, and it is not until “The Sentimentalist” of a year later that the poet indicates in that title, as we have seen, a definite measure of remove from her speaker.

By the spring of 1912 Moore closes her series of seamen's verses with a poem in which another author's lines about Captain Kidd are not respoken but literally observed as a thing. “Leaves of a Magazine” describes a “dim verse” as a piece of objectified text, a “ragged block of shade” on the page,

                                                  with blurs and puckers where
Admiring hands have often brought to bear
Their pressure on the picture and the rhyme
Of buccaneering in the olden time.

The words she is writing about have a certain presence and density as things, a shape on a page on which the reader has also left visible traces. And if the text is an object, an object can also become a text. “Councell to a Bachelor,” beginning

If thou bee younge
Then marie not yett.
If thou bee olde,
Then no wyfe gett,

consists entirely of the motto that Moore found painted on an Elizabethan trencher or small wooden plate in Oxford's Bodleian Library.²⁸ She appended a title and modified the fourth line slightly, but otherwise she reproduced the verse verbatim, signing its double authorship, “Elizabethan trencher, Marianne Moore.” Neither of the “authors” in this case would be conceived of as an original creator but rather as a medium of transmission, an occasion or setting for the text of a virtually selfless “councellor.” As we shall see again later, quotation paradoxically both emphasizes and disregards the sense of a source, and thus of an “owner,” of texts.

In between the two poles of a whole poem as observed object and of object as poem lies Moore's more usual practice of incorporating into her own lines fragments from other sources—recorded remarks, maxims, mottoes, aphorisms, and all forms of quotation that pass segments of language intact from one context into another. For the title and first line of her early poem on pride she chose the saying “Tunica pallio proprior [sic], My coat is nearer than my cloak,” from Plautus' Trinummus (5.2.30). Her description of art as “exact perception” carries as its title the sixteenth century French maxim “Qui S'Excuse, S'Accuse.” And the final line of that poem is a loose translation of its title maxim: “And no man who's done his part / Need apologize for art.” Thus for the most part the early poetic voice appears to adopt the found text as central to the poem's manifest message. We shall eventually see how Moore becomes skillful at setting such quoted texts in deliberate tension with other elements of the verse in which they appear.

For the present we may merely note the way in which this early work displays and manipulates the intertextual dimension of poetry, the various ways in which the text is related to the prior and concurrent texts of its culture. Moore, like other modernists, brought a certain literal intertextuality into the foreground of poetry by recognizably quoting and paraphrasing other sources. On the one hand, this procedure has an effect of preserving the past by setting the new work into the context of its forbears; on the other hand, it has the effect of dismantling prior whole texts and of separating a fragment from its original context, exchanging its old field of meaning for a new one. Quotation thus gives the poem a double relation to the tradition from which the fragment was lifted. The conservative tendency of preservation is set in tension with the progressive tendency of dismantling and renewal.

If either of these tendencies comes to predominate in Moore's practice of quotation, we shall see that it is the progressive one. She does not quote for echoes, as Eliot does; like Williams she prefers to take as her written sources the ephemeral and non-poetic media of newspapers, magazines, and non-fiction accounts; unlike Pound she often takes her quoted material very far from its original field, sometimes losing that field entirely even in her own memory; and unlike all three other poets, she revises her quoted fragments freely, severing even further their relation with the parent text. In this way, as in her arresting rhythms and assertions, Moore from the beginning sets her own poetry at odds with poetry-in-general. We shall see her return in her mature work to a new level of interplay between the traditionally “poetic” and her very particular poetry.

Already in the Bryn Mawr poems of 1907-13, the marriage of opposites characteristic of enduring art is being prepared. Art as exact perception is her starting point, but the indeterminate is its silent partner. The spatial quality of her imagination has a certain conservative effect that balances the progressive tendency of her use of other texts, but so far she is only accomplishing one thing at a time. There is still a certain breach between the imagistic and the assertive modes. Some poems of these years produce visual configurations like the laurel screen, the scarab, the page of a magazine, while other poems deliver statements on the related subjects of pride, illusion, art, and appearances. A few pieces—“A Red Flower,” “Progress,” “Things Are What They Seem”—manage to combine these imagistic and assertive modes in a way that points toward the creations of her maturity, the poems that make her, in Randall Jarrell's words, “the poet of the particular” and “in our time, the poet of general moral statement.”²⁹

In February of 1915, Marianne wrote to her brother Warner, “I did a very craven thing today. Helen Taft wrote me for some poems for the Lantern and I sorted out ten or fifteen and then subtracted all the better ones, (2 of the better ones) in the hope that I could sell them.”³⁰ It was a turning point. 1915 brought her first professional publications and her personal introduction to the New York avant-garde literary world. It is the poems appearing in print from 1915 through 1917 that reveal what Moore was writing during those anonymous years at 343 North Hanover Street in Carlisle.

Notes

1. Donald Hall, “An Interview with Marianne Moore,” McCall's, XCIII, 3 (December 1965), 182.

2. Mary Seth, “An Instinctive Wish to Share,” Presbyterian Life, VIII, 8 (April 16, 1955), 16.

3. This and the following passage are from Marianne Moore, “Education of a Poet,” Writer's Digest, 43, No. 10 (October 1963), 35; reprinted in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, ed. Patricia C. Willis (New York: Viking, 1986), pp. 571-2.

4. Elizabeth Bishop, “Efforts of Affection,” Vanity Fair, 46, No. 4 (June 1983), 45.

5. Reminiscence of Peggy Kellogg-Smith, Class of 1910, Marianne Moore Collection, Bryn Mawr College Archive.

6. Marianne Moore, M. Carey Thomas Award Acceptance Speech, transcript in the Marianne Moore Collection, Bryn Mawr College Archive.

7. This passage, continued in the next paragraph, is from Moore's letter to Bryher of August 31, 1921, Rosenbach Museum and Library.

8. Marianne Moore to Mary Warner Moore, February 10, 1907, Rosenbach; also in Marianne Moore Newsletter, V, No. 1 (Spring 1981), 5.

9. Imitative Writing Notes, Rosenbach 1251/27, p. 42.

10. This and the following phrase appear in Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 3.

11. Tipyn O'Bob, 4 (February 1907), 12.

12. Laurence Stapleton [Marianne Moore, The Poet's Advance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)] has confirmed in conversation the nickname with which Moore signed one of her poems, “You Say You Said” of 1918.

13. Elizabeth Bishop, “Efforts of Affection,” 55.

14. Moore composed these newsletters, mainly The File and The Scale, from about 1912 till about 1916. Her own news, stories, doggerel, and glued-up clippings from newspaper headlines and advertisements (“Rat Suits Half Price”) may be seen in the Rosenbach.

15. Imitative Writing Notes, p. 39.

16. W. H. Auden, Making, Knowing and Judging (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 7, and Bryn Mawr alumna Peggy Kellogg-Smith's adjectives for Moore's early poems, Bryn Mawr College Archive.

17. A discussion of “spatial form” in modernism, based on different premises from mine about the nature of language and poetry, may be found in Joseph Frank's The Widening Gyre (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963), pp. 3-62.

18. Marianne Moore, “The Plums of Curiosity,” Vogue, 136, No. 2 (August 1960), 83; rpt. Complete Prose, p. 543.

19. Edward Said wrote this of John Berger's work in “Bursts of Meaning,” a discussion of photographic versus narrative-historical approaches to meaning in The Nation, 235, No. 19 (December 4, 1982), 596.

20. D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 386-92.

21. William Carlos Williams, “Marianne Moore (1925),” collected in Marianne Moore, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Charles Tomlinson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969), p. 54.

22. Marie Boroff, Language and the Poet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 101.

23. Bonnie Costello, Marianne Moore, Imaginary Possessions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 202.

24. Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948), p. 33.

25. Freeman, pp. 24 and 29.

26. Freeman, p. 153.

27. Pound, Literary Essays, p. 4.

28. See the article on “Councell to a Bachelor,” Marianne Moore Newsletter, IV, 2 (Fall 1980), 9-10, which includes a photograph of this particular trencher with its painted verse.

29. Randall Jarrell, “Her Shield,” Tomlinson, p. 117.

30. Marianne Moore to John Warner Moore, February 26, 1915, Rosenbach.