SOURCE: Holley, Margaret. “Nonchalances of the Mind.” In The Poetry of Marianne Moore: A Study in Voice and Value, pp. 133-55. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Holley examines the unique characteristics of Moore's poetry during the decade from the mid-1940s through the mid-1950s, a period during which she received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.]

During the mid-forties Moore's normally brisk pace of life, which had come to include a fair amount of travel for readings and talks, slowed down to accommodate her mother's advanced age and increasing infirmity. Mrs. Moore was bedridden, and paralysis of a throat muscle made the taking of even the slightest nourishment a difficult and exhausting process, which Marianne tended entirely by herself. “Work is a balm,” she wrote to Hildegarde Watson in August of 1946; “it is the shadowy resistance of the inevitable, to our struggling minds, that harms us and must not be let harm us.” In the same letter she recognized that “Mother's struggle is not temporary.”¹

The following May she confessed to Hildegarde, “I have not ‘been to anything’ for a year and more, but Saturday went to T. S. Eliot's lecture on Milton at the Frick Collection. … Mother had promised to do ‘anything I told her’ if I would just try the experiment of an outing and give no thought to any clinical cares.”² The experimental outing was quite successful, but by the end of June Moore was again reporting, “None too good, these last weeks. In fact I can just say I know assistance must come to one so faithful and brave as Mole.”³

It came on July 9, 1947, when Mary Warner Moore died at the age of eighty-five. She was buried in Gettysburg according to her wish, and Marianne wrote to Hildegarde from Bethesda, Maryland, where she was staying with relatives after the funeral: “How dear to us, your saying in these lines just now received, ‘I thank God to have known Mole & been lifted by her tenderness, wisdom and grace over so many places it did not seem possible to endure.’” She added, “Warner has been sublime. His voice shook as he pronounced the benedictory words of farewell to mortal flesh, beside what is now her grave.”⁴ It was a staggering loss—not just of her mother but even more of her closest friend, her sternest critic, and the voice that had stirred and joined her own in some of her finest poems.

After a visit to Ezra Pound in St. Elizabeth's Hospital and a stay in Maine, Moore returned to Cumberland Street to pick up the threads of her life there. Work remained a balm, and she resumed her labors on the translation of La Fontaine which she had begun in 1945. “I'd wake up at 6, work until 8, eat and then go on all day and all evening. I'd stop occasionally, go to market and buy a few things, then go on again. Early mornings in the winter, I'd work in bed. … The whole thing was done over completely four times.”⁵ After it was finished, she admitted with characteristic candor and respect for completeness, “It was fanatical of me to do them all. But I still feel that to have omitted some would be shabby.”⁶

As enormous and possessing as this labor became, it still was often background music to visits with her fellow artists and friends, as she resumed the more active life she preferred. In the autumn of 1948 Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Carlisle neighbor William Rose Benét, and others were photographed by Life magazine at the Gotham Book Mart reception for Dame Edith and Sir Osbert Sitwell. In the same letter mentioning this reception and her work on the fables, she tells of going to a dinner given for the Sitwells by W. H. Auden and the Lincoln Kirsteins, having Warner and Constance stay with her for five days, and attending Auden's lecture on “The Lyric of Condensed Experience” at the New School for Social Research.⁷ She was by nature a curious and sympathetic person, who delighted in the rich cultural life that New York offered and was supported and refreshed by the company of friends. And in turn one of her friends from Bryn Mawr, Mary Case Pevear, once remarked of Marianne, “Well just simply anything you did with her was fun.”⁸

Nor was the La Fontaine project always at center stage in her daily work. By 1951 Moore had prepared and brought out what probably remains her finest book, The Collected Poems, including nine previously uncollected pieces. The appearance of this volume immediately won her national acclaim and virtually every literary honor available in America. First came the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, then the Bollingen Prize and the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Moore was no newcomer to prizes. Since the Dial Award of 1924, she had received the Helen Haire Levinson Prize from Poetry in 1932, the Shelley Memorial Award in 1941, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award and the Contemporary Poetry Patrons' Prize in 1944, and by 1950 she had already been awarded honorary degrees by Williams, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges. Nevertheless, the annus mirabilis occasioned by The Collected Poems confirmed her stature as one of the major American poets of the century.

And fast in the wake of these honors came the media, eager to transform the white-haired lady poet into their own kind of “literature,” a marketable commodity. The mass media during the fifties and sixties offered a crash course on the public figure who had begun as a very private young poet and then earned the respect and affection of her peers as a poet's poet. For the final two decades of her life Moore managed to bear, usually with patience or amusement, various reporters' attempts to make some catchy, comprehensible sense of her grandmotherly appearance, her unusual personality, and her genius. They lit, of course, on her love of animal subjects and eventually her interest in baseball as quirks that would be accessible and endearing to the general public. Hilton Kramer has suggested that “she may very well have been the last spinster type created by the communications industry before the women's movement radically altered the terms of media mythmaking.”⁹

It must have been both a tonic and an exhausting time for Moore. One of her responses to the sudden pressures of public attention was to strengthen her public persona by the adoption of the tricorne and black cape, a choice that had a touch of her mother's taste behind it. For the National Book Award dinner, she recalled, she wanted a new hat. “And as I was passing by in a bus I saw a tricorne in a 5th av. shop. My mother had bought a green straw tricorne in the 20s and I liked that, so I decided to try to find this new one.”¹⁰ By the time she found the shop, the tricorne had been sold; however, a Brooklyn hatter, Mrs. Klein, agreed to make one for her. “‘How do you want to look?’ asked Mrs. Klein. ‘Like Washington crossing the Delaware,’ said Miss Moore.”¹¹ And this persona suited many of the poems of the fifties and early sixties admirably, as we shall see.

The Fables were published in 1954, and Predilections, a selection of her prose, in 1955. By 1956 Moore had accepted three more honorary degrees, had been a visiting lecturer and recipient of the M. Carey Thomas Award at Bryn Mawr, and had published her seventh volume of original verse, Like a Bulwark. All the events of this crowded time—the loss of her mother, the years of translating La Fontaine, and her sudden national celebrity—had their various effects on the work that Moore produced in her sixties and seventies.

The poems of what I call roughly the fable years, the mid-forties to the mid-fifties, are in many ways a unique group within the larger company of Moore's later verses. First, their compression is even greater than that of the lyrics that precede them. The average length of these poems is twenty-two lines, down from thirty-eight lines in the early forties and about a third of the average length of seventy-six lines in the thirties. (This brevity lasts only during the years of the fables, however, for by the mid-fifties the verses are already expanding again toward an average of thirty-five lines in 1956-66.) A second distinctive feature of these poems is their use of end-rhyme. Over half of them rhyme three-quarters or more of their lines, whereas only a fourth of the lyrics of the forties and a fourth of the verse of the late fifties and sixties have such a high proportion of rhyming lines. And finally, this group of verses is set apart by a tendency toward abstract diction, uncentered construction, and a heightened internal musicality of rhyme.

Although they focus on many of the same types of subject as their predecessors, these poems of the fable years clearly reflect both the personal loss and the more public life to which Moore was adjusting. The five short pieces of 1947 and 1948—“A Face,” “Voracities and Verities Sometimes Are Interacting,” “Efforts of Affection,” “At Rest in the Blast,” and “By Disposition of Angels”—all have recurrent elegiac moments and share the dominant motifs of love and perseverance. In the poems of the fifties that followed these, we find (as we did among the lyrics of the war years) verses undertaking to define or concretize an idea, to anatomize a problem—“Armor's Undermining Modesty,” “We Call Them the Brave,” “Then the Ermine,” “Style,” “Logic and ‘The Magic Flute,’” and “Blessed Is the Man.” There is also a generous offering of poems written about artifacts and animals, such as “The Icosasphere,” “Pretiolae,” “Apparition of Splendor,” “Tom Fool at Jamaica,” “The Sycamore,” and two pieces written on commission, “Rosemary” and “The Staff of Aesculapius.” These poems on concrete subjects differ significantly from those of the thirties and forties, for in her work of the fable years Moore has shifted her customary balance of concrete and abstract materials toward a new texture, a more abstract emphasis than in her earlier work. Although it permeates nearly all the poems, this shift is most clearly noticeable in the pieces on artifacts and animals, for they can so easily be set beside similar subjects of the thirties and forties for comparison.

Nearly all of the qualities that distinguish Moore's work of the fable years are announced in the dozen lines of “A Face,” one of the earliest poems of the group. The two halves of this piece, its first eight and last four lines, are a combination of the two epigrammatic styles that appear in the Bryn Mawr and Carlisle poems. These two styles are similar in texture to the two styles of imagery that we found in the lyrics of the forties, the fugal complexity of sensuous metaphors versus the hymnic simplicity of plain statement of an idea. The two styles of the fifties, however, are both ways of presenting ideas. In “A Face” the analytic spirit proceeds first on its musically circuitous way through a thicket of abstractions:

“I am not treacherous, callous, jealous, superstitious,
supercilious, venomous, or absolutely hideous”:
                    studying and studying its expression,
                    exasperated desperation
                                        though at no real impasse,
                                        would gladly break the mirror;
when love of order, ardor, uncircuitous simplicity
with an expression of inquiry, are all one needs to be!

The parade of abstract adjectives at the opening is reminiscent of the way “To a Steam Roller” opens with its heavy abstractions,

The illustration
is nothing to you without the application,

and closes with its cacophanous alliteration of “conceive … question … congruence … [and] complement.” In “A Face” the end-rhyme and internal rhymes of “expression … exasperated … desperation … [and] impasse” is reminiscent of the rhyming abstractions of “Injudicious Gardening,” in which

the sense of privacy,
          indeed might deprecate
          offended ears, and need not tolerate
effrontery.

The abstract, polysyllabic density of the first part of “A Face” is then countered with “uncircuitous simplicity” as recommended in line seven:

Certain faces, a few, one or two—or one
face photographed by recollection—
                    to my mind, to my sight,
                    must remain a delight.

Here the music of internal rhyme is monosyllabic and even metrical in the closing anapests. It reminds one of the early Bryn Mawr lines, “If you will tell me why the fen / appears impassable, I then …” (“Progress”) or of the couplet from “In Distrust of Merits,” “O / quiet form upon the dust, I cannot / look and yet I must.”

Abstract language like that of the first part of “A Face” also appears in the other three “love poems” of 1947-48, poems with a tone or an explicit theme of love. Even their titles are more complex than most of Moore's and attest to her abstract approach at this time—“Voracities and Verities Sometimes Are Interacting,” “Efforts of Affection,” and “By Disposition of Angels.” Where the poetic voice of What Are Years and Nevertheless used ringing moral terms like “courage,” “justice,” “fortitude,” and “humility,” Moore now bypasses “greed” and “truth” in favor of “Voracities and Verities.” Many lines of the later forties reach for fine distinctions like the final one of “Efforts of Affection”:

                              Thus wholeness—
wholesomeness? say efforts of affection—
attain integration too tough for infraction.

As in “A Face” this effect of abstract density is heightened by contrast with the simpler diction and rhythm of the preceding lines:

Truly as the sun
can rot or mend, love can make one
bestial or make a beast a man.

Each of the key concepts of “Efforts of Affection” are stated twice, once simply and once in more Latinate conceptual form: “love's … stubbornness” becomes “efforts of affection,” and “wholeness” becomes “integration.” Likewise in “By Disposition of Angels,” the center of each stanza turns on a repetition and re-inflection of abstract terms:

                    Above particularities,
these unparticularities praise cannot violate.
                    Mysteries expound mysteries.
Steadier than steady, star dazzling me, live and elate.

These two pivotal passages are connected across the stanza break by the rhyme of their unaccented endings.

Like the alliterative titles “Voracities and Verities” and “Efforts of Affection,” many of the Latinate abstract terms in these four poems come to have a music of their own. Identical suffixes create an effect of echo on the upbeat, either immediately as in “treacherous, callous, jealous, superstitious” (in “A Face”) or intermittently as in “distraction … integration … inspection … obsession … attraction … affection … infraction” (in “Efforts of Affection”). We have seen this music of syncopated syllables in the “unconscious fastidiousness” of “Critics and Connoisseurs” and in the “conscientious inconsistency” of “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing,” but during the fable years this sound is deepened from a passing verbal level to a structural level. The repetition of suffixes multiplies and seems to carry passages along in its own lilt. W. K. Wimsatt reminds us that the classical rhetoricians recognized this useful effect as homoeoteleuton or “like endings” (homoeo, similar, and teleute from telos, end).¹² As Wimsatt points out, this echo of like endings plays a very different role than does rhyme, a role that will support the growing emphasis on thought that underlies the abstract tendency of Moore's later work.

Wimsatt writes that, “Stylistic parallels or forms of meaning of this [homoeoteleutonic] sort seem to come fairly to the aid of logic.”¹³ Each echoing Latin suffix “has the same meaning, or is the same morpheme, and each supports the logic of the sentence by appearing in a certain place in the structure.” In contrast Wimsatt points to the “alogical character of rhyme,” especially when rhymed words clearly differ from one another in sense or part of speech. This “alogical character of rhyme,” he concludes, when wedded to the logical sense of the passage, can “save the physical quality of words,” a physicality of which we tend to lose awareness in “daily prose usage.”¹⁴ Certainly the physicality of words, the patterns and delight of speech sounds, is a fundamental resource for any poet. But particularly at this time in her career, when rhyme is highlighted more than at other times, Moore's work offers us a case study in what Viktor Shklovsky has called the “special dance of the organs of speech.”¹⁵

First of all, we can see in these four love poems of the late forties that “like endings” is a different resource for the English writer than it was for the Latin writer. Like endings in English tend to produce an effect of abstract discussion, largely because of the kinds of words to which such endings are usually appended. As a language with far fewer suffixes of declension and conjugation than Latin has, English lends itself only in a limited way to homoeoteleuton. One is confined to such morphemes as -ion, -y, -ness, -ence, -ing, and -ied, which function largely as syntactic adjustments for our more abstract terms: simplicity, inquiry, steadiness, darkness, occasion, obligation. A majority of our concrete nouns do not usually carry such endings—face, mirror, mind, star, fir, hay, elephant-ears, diamonds—they do not carry the endings the declined Latin nouns do.

These first four poems of the fable years carry an especially heavy load of abstract terms with echoing endings. Their concrete nouns are fewer, and those are usually simple and unqualified by adjectives: the harp, the cattle, a saint, the sun. The effect is of basic or elemental things embedded in an elaborate composition of thought. Observation in these poems is transformed from description of visible objects to meditation upon intangible matters. And the delight of words themselves, their patterns of sound, becomes even more pronounced than it has been in Moore's work so far. In fact, it becomes so prominent that we are left with certain new difficulties in the realm of sense.

The abstract quality of what Wimsatt calls the “minimum rhyme” of word endings¹⁶ contributes appropriately to the texture of “The Icosasphere” of 1950. The first rhymed sound, the long e occurring twice in each of the three stanzas, is carried down the lines by a chain of wholly abstract words, “density … efficiency … perjury … economy … geometrically … vertically.” The poem contrasts wasteful greed with certain economical but mysterious feats of construction, and so its rather technological subject seems well enough served by such a web of conceptual terms. It is more telling, however, to find a similar chain of abstractions with echoing suffixes introducing the animal poem “Apparition of Splendor”:

Partaking of the miraculous
                    since never known literally,
Dürer's rhinoceros
                    might have startled us equally
                    if black-and-white-spined elaborately.

And this poem's closing address—

Shallow oppressor, intruder,
insister, you have found a resister,

—displays both the internal rhyme (here in the last line of every stanza) and the polysyllabic music of this group of verses.

In fact, it is not easy to discern whether the creature intended as the “Apparition” is an egret or a porcupine or both. The grammatical subject of the second stanza is the shape of the bird—

Like another porcupine, or fern,
                    the mouth in an arching egret
was too black to discern
                    till exposed as a silhouette

—the “double-embattled thistle of jet” referring to its two long, pointed head-feathers. The pronoun of “Was it / some joyous fantasy” still refers grammatically to the egret, but “eider-eared” and “spines” suggest that Maine's animal intended here is the porcupine. This poem differs from the animal and artifact poems of the thirties in its emphasis on ideas at the expense of the visual clarity of its animal subject. We are not shown the habits and behavior of the egret or the porcupine in the way we are shown the behavior of the jerboa, the pangolin, or the ostrich. Compression moves the poem more directly past its images to its thought. “Apparition of Splendor,” published in 1952, is actually a war poem, for the context of language like “double-embattled,” “shot,” “fight,” and “oppressor” is the Korean War. “As Maine goes …” becomes the unspoken thrust of this poem about choosing not to fight. The “Splendor,” the delicacy and fantastic quality of a peaceful creature, is of more concern to the poet than the literal actuality of the animal.

Other poems of the fifties show this new contrast with the animiles even more clearly. In “Rosemary,” for example, the minimum rhyme of word endings reinforces the abstract nature of the poem's concern. All eighteen lines of the poem rhyme with the final long e of “rosemary”:

Beauty and Beauty's son and rosemary—
Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly—
born of the sea supposedly,
at Christmas each, in company,
braids a garland of festivity.

Abstract rhyme-words predominate—“differently … originally … memory … legendary … pungency … reality”—while the few concrete rhyme-words are plain and unadorned: “Mary … sea … bee … tree.” Only one line of this whole poem is devoted to description of the physical appearance of the plant itself, “With lancelike leaf, green but silver underneath,” though reference is made to its “blue” flowers. But after the elaborately specified “blue-pink dregs-of-wine pyramids” of “Smooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle” and the “gray-blue-Andalusian-cock-feather” pansies of “Virginia Brittania,” the adjective “blue” here is spare and general. It is clear that to Moore in the fifties the Christmas theme, the idea that the rosemary flowers imitate the robe of Mary, is more important than sensuous rendering of the special hue of the flower.

This is not to say that attention to sensuous detail has disappeared from the verses of the fable years. The familiar attributive metaphoric complexes depict the moth of “Armor's Undermining Modesty” with its

                              backgammon-board wedges interlacing
on the wing—
                              like cloth of gold in a pattern
                              of scales with a hair-seal Persian
                              sheen.

And Tom Fool's “suede nostrils,” the silk-shirted jockeys as “animated Valentines,” and Fats Waller's “giraffe eyes” vivify the champions of “Tom Fool at Jamaica.” But emphasis on the visual surface gives way to the thought and conceptual imagery in many of these poems, and their brevity does not allow them to wander the avenues of extended description or factual report.

A prime illustration and suggestive explanation of this conceptual turn is a poem of place, “The Web One Weaves of Italy.” This poem has as enticing and musical a title as one could wish for, and it offers one of Moore's most haunting conceptual figures, the “nonchalances of the mind.” But compared with earlier poems of place, with the perceptual fullness and variety of “New York,” “An Octopus,” “Virginia Brittania,” or “Spenser's Ireland,” these twelve lines make a very economical web. It would be a disappointing poem if one came to it expecting a continuation of the earlier plenitude and catalogues. In this 1954 poem, the web that leaves one “charmed” is not so much the country of Italy as the mind and its weaving. In fact, Italy is presented in an alliterative but very compact list of only five items:

                    The crossbow tournament at Gubbio?
For quiet excitement, canoe-ers
or peach fairs? or near Perugia, the mule-show;
                    if not the Palio, slaying the Saracen.

Indeed, the advisability of attempting a fuller inventory of worldly multiplicity is doubted at the very outset of this poem, for the web “grows till it is not what but which, / blurred by too much.” In this opening sentence Moore offers us a vital clue to a reason for her renewed insistence on compression in the lyrics of the early forties and especially in the early short poems of the fable years.

Observation of the external world, its sensuous and factual details, can extend indefinitely. We have witnessed how Moore's early compact style expanded in the twenties and thirties with accessibility to large new realms of experience in New York, with travels to the West Coast and Virginia. The plenitude of the world clearly had an exhilarating effect on the imagery of those poems, and it made their sense of value more open, genuinely inquiring, and generous. But sensuous detail, as enticing and infinite a resource as it may be, also poses the danger of distracting, even overwhelming, the susceptible observer. The mass of material, data, detail, and qualifications can grow till it is “blurred by too much,” till it begins running away with a poem, spinning its imitations of inexhaustible nature on indefinitely, even past the realm of form. We may remember here Moore's repudiation of the two very long catalogue pieces, “Pigeons” and “Walking-Sticks,” toward the end of the animiles, just before her return to compression in the lyrics of the early forties. This is part of the import of the lines “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing / is an enchanted thing”—that there is peril as well as magic in the “power of strong enchantment.”

At the center of “The Web One Weaves of Italy” is the mind. Moore quotes her own translation of La Fontaine's fable “The Monkey and the Leopard” in her third stanza of “The Web”:

                    One salutes—on reviewing again
this modern mythologica
esopica—its nonchalances of the mind,
                    that “fount by which enchanting gems are spilt.”

La Fontaine's fable depicts the competition between the fancy-coated leopard and the quick-witted monkey, between body and mind, to capture a carnival audience, ending with the moral that

                                        Exterior diversity
Can never charm as the mind can, to infinity—
That sparkling fount by which enchanting gems are spilt.(17)

Moore recognized the poetic limits of “exterior diversity,” and her poems of the fable years reflect her renewed allegiance to the “fount” of the mind. The blur of “too much” echoes her subtitle to the Romans' and Egyptians' material plenty in “The Jerboa,” and she appears now to be aiming more at the “simplified creature” that is its counterpart.

We can discern, then, these two apparently contrary trends in the poems of the late forties and early fifties—on the one hand, a renewed severity evident in the brevity of the verse and the abstract nature of its diction, and on the other hand, a certain density of texture and heightened musicality of rhyme, especially of like feminine endings. The virtue of a certain severity was already on Moore's mind by the time she was finishing the animiles of the thirties, for in September of 1936 she wrote to a poet who had sent her his work for comment,

Since there is severity at some points—of a kind natural to my imagination—the pages where there is not this severity are against my taste.¹⁸

We might well wish to see in the work she was commenting on the precise elements of the severity that Moore felt was “natural” to her imagination. But we have discerned some of its elements directly from this work of the early fable years: brevity, fine abstract distinctions, and two qualities which are only apparently contradictory—the cryptic and the didactic elements of her verse.

The cryptic nature of some of the verse of this time stems, as it does in the earlier Carlisle poems, from the poet's willingness to be private in public. In those early apostrophes and again in these verses, Moore refers to persons and situations that appear to be quite specific and yet unspecified. Whose is the “one / face photographed by recollection” that is the climactic image of “A Face”? The star of “By Disposition of Angels” is “like some we have known; too like her, / too like him,” but we can only guess who they are. And practically all of “Voracities and Verities” seems prompted by offstage figures and circumstances. “Poets, don't make a fuss” makes us wonder which poets and what fuss, and is the fuss meant to be the “gratitude” that is “trying,” and is that the same as the diamonds? “A tiger-book I am reading— / I think you know the one”—why would we know the one, or who is the “you” who would know it? Moore's note to this poem, printed at the foot of the page, attests to her supposition that the reader does not, in fact, know that she means James Corbett's Man-Eaters of Kumaon.

A tantalizing mystery is “Like a Bulwark” of 1948, which in its first published version states at its center,

                    You take the blame
                    And are inviolate—
                              Down-cast but not cast
Down.

Who is the “you” being addressed here, and what is the blame? It could be a third-person “you”—anyone taking any kind of blame—but the well-developed title simile is strongly reminiscent of the substantive metaphors of the Carlisle apostrophes. Stanley Baum has suggested that Moore's brother Warner was “her bulwark” but without overt reference to this particular poem.¹⁹ The poem's early title “At Rest in the Blast” may provide a key, for it suggests that the poem may have been inspired by Ezra Pound, who at the end of World War II was brought to the United States under a charge of treason and incarcerated in St. Elizabeth's Hospital. Blast was the Vorticist magazine of Pound and Wyndham Lewis, which during the First World War printed its outspoken manifestoes that “blast” the bad and “bless” the good. Moore had read this magazine in 1915, and from its pages she had copied into her diary, among other lines, a motif concerning boats. She then incorporated these lines into an unpublished poem entitled “Ezra Pound” that ends with her own manifesto of praise for

                    that page of Blast, on which
          Small boats ply to and
Fro in bee lines. Bless Blast.(20)

During the mid-forties Pound was certainly “taking the blame” for his wartime broadcasts, but failing further extra-poetic clues, we may never know for sure whether this poem is indeed a statement of support for her friend.

Poems of this period can be cryptic in a richer, less severe way, too, not only through unexplained private reference but also through what T. S. Eliot has called “a very wide spread of association.”²¹ Certain associative links in these verses are made with more suddenness and less interpretation than is usual in Moore's work. “Elephants” explains its emblem, “His straight trunk seems to say: when / what we hoped for came to nothing, we revived.” But in “Voracities and Verities” we move quickly into and past the image:

          Poets, don't make a fuss;
the elephant's “crooked trumpet” “doth write”;
                    and to a tiger-book I am reading—

Here the logic remains implicit—that even the elephant can write, in a sense, and therefore poets should not make a fuss about such a natural thing as writing—and the poem moves through the image as swiftly as did the poet's associative mind. Veiled or oblique reference at its richest can overleap the gaps in our factual knowledge. This effect shares some of the uncertainty and intensity of a Symbolist poem moving through a series of private symbols and correspondences.

Such swiftness of movement, privacy, and intensity are even more evident in “Then the Ermine,” as it goes from Clitophon's armorial device of the white ermine to the bat by daylight to Beaufort's motto Mutare sperno, “I don't change,” to the palisandre settee to Dürer's violets. The typescript of a deleted stanza supplies some connotations for the closing image of the violets:

Marine azures and heliotropes between
                    waves in motion, when effaced
by wind reassemble, then
die and again
change.(22)

Thus the first part of the poem espouses the armorial attitudes of “‘rather dead than spotted’” and Mutare sperno, “I don't change,” while the second half of the poem as it appeared in Poetry accepts the appearance of change embodied by the marine heliotropes effaced and reassembled, the chiaroscuro of velvet:

Change? Of course, if the palisandre settee can express
                    for us, “ebony violet”—
Master Corbo in full dress
and shepherdess
at once—

Master Corbo is La Fontaine's “Le Corbeau,” whom Moore translates as “Master Crow” and “Sir Ebony.” His “‘ebony violet’” and the implosive power of the “violets by Dürer” have a Symbolist-like intensity and mystery as embodiments of change. The “waves in motion” were dark counter-devices to the white, idealistic ermine.

What distinguishes this kind of poem from Moore's earlier work is its refusal to offer the reader an explicit center, an anchor in the form of a focal object or idea. The lines move as rapidly from image to image as those of “Nevertheless” or “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing” or “Propriety” but without providing their kind of clearly unifying concept. The centering concept in “Then the Ermine” is change, but this word has been deleted from the final version of the last three stanzas. The negative force of “frighten,” “Fail,” and “foiled” is overcome by the beauty of “‘ebony violet’” and the “violets by Dürer; even darker.” The images, the color, and even the paradoxical quality of the color does the work of expressing that “power,” the possibility of overcoming fear and failure.

A similar intensity and mystery appear in “Logic and ‘The Magic Flute,’” whose “winding stair” or “Wendeltrappe” and “theater” seem as if they are virtually inside the “abalonean gloom” of the wentletrap shell. A typescript of this poem affirms this new mode of imagery in its title—“Dream; or Dream: Logic and ‘The Magic Flute.’” The dreamlike conflation of the shell and the theater of the “telecolor trove” is a visionary combination rather than a visual observation:

                    Near Life and Time
in their peculiar catacomb,
abalonean gloom
and an intrusive hum
                    pervaded the mammoth cast's
small audience-room.

Now that she is turning away from the blur of “too much” sensuous and factual detail, Moore's factual observation gives way to this highly compressed, even impressionistic vision—the “lightning … on thistlefine spears” in “Apparition of Splendor,” the “‘ebony violet’” of “Then the Ermine,” and the “abalonean gloom” of “Logic and ‘The Magic Flute.’”

The turning inward of vision in these poems is accompanied by a distinct musicality of rhyme that is but one step away from the echoing feminine endings of the abstract terms. “Apparition of Splendor” with its internal rhymes is the most audible example, especially the fourth stanza with its

          “train supported by porcupines—
                    a fairy's eleven yards long”? …
as when the lightning shines
                    on thistlefine spears, among
                    prongs in lanes above lanes of a shorter prong.

Triple rhyme reappears in “Then the Ermine,” and a nearly quadruple effect is created by the simple and immediate echoes of “Logic and ‘The Magic Flute’”:

                              “‘What is love and
shall I ever have it?’” The truth
is simple. Banish sloth,
fetter-feigning uncouth
                              fraud. Trapper Love with noble
noise, the magic sleuth,
                              as bird-notes prove—
                              first telecolor trove—
illogically wove
what logic can't unweave:
                              one need not shoulder, need not shove.

This frequent, audible rhyme, both of the earlier abstract terms and of these strong monosyllabic chimes, is a feature of the verse of the fable years through the mid-fifties. Since it will disappear again in Moore's verse of the sixties, which is as lightly rhymed as much of the rest of her work, we should pause here to consider the meaning of this phenomenon.

It seems logical to assume that Moore's project of translating La Fontaine's fables influenced the frequency and audibility of the rhyme in her original verse of the time. As Laurence Stapleton has pointed out, “the pursuit of this difficult task gave birth to different energies in her own poems.”²³ La Fontaine exploited the many like endings of French, a language with far more rhyme possibilities—a wider choice of words available for each rhyme sound—than English. Moore was also aware of the rhythmic difference between her own verse and the French she was working with. She wrote to Walter Pistole at Reynal and Hitchcock, the publisher for whom she began the translation, that “although in La Fontaine sentences end at the end of the line, mine constantly carry over.”²⁴ Working with material whose end-stopped lines heighten the effects of readily available close rhymes must have tuned the poet's ear anew to a kind of rhyme sound which decades before she had chosen to de-emphasize in her own verse.

In Marianne Moore: The Poet as Translator, Rosalee Sprout has observed that “Nine years of struggling to find creative equivalents in English for La Fontaine's end-rhymes … had to have had some impact on Marianne Moore's approach to writing poetry.”²⁵ Sprout finds the rhyme in the poems composed during and after the Fables “more regular, more musical,” and she suggests how this came about:

Her method of translation, her determination to imitate La Fontaine's rhyme patterns and to reproduce the sounds of his rhymes must have established a new habit of mind which I think is reflected in the kinds of poems she wrote after the Fables.

This influence, the force of the French original, must have been rather strong, especially as Moore's grasp of the sounds and nuances of that language grew with the project. But to have a full picture of Moore's writing during these years, we need to see the other side of this notion of “influence.”

Influence assumes susceptibility, a passivity that can be swayed, a gap that can be filled. And surely there are many senses in which a work is written by its moment in history and by its predecessors, with the author as a consenting vehicle for the production. But just as surely, the writer is also an agent who writes down the material, the one who wrestles with its composition. If there is anxiety of influence, there is also the exhilaration of the act of making the poem—this particular poem, not just any. Each poem is an answer to anxiety by a thing accomplished, a transcendence of influence by the act of giving out or setting down the words. However far back the tumble of cause and effect, of pressure and choice extends, the poet also acts, writes down, deletes, makes choices that will—through this kenosis or relinquishing—recast the self as an author, as a name synonymous with its work.

Moore had many alternatives before her as she approached this project of translation. We know that she read and considered a number of quite different translations of the Fables: F. C. Tilney's prose translation for children (from which she had quoted “everything to do with love is mystery” in “Marriage”), Robert Thompson's reproductions of the fables' “contour and rhythm,” Elizur Wright's rendition in Victorian diction, and Sir Edward Marsh's colloquial free verse versions with some end-rhymes.²⁶ From a whole array of different forms of fidelity and beauty Moore, like each of her predecessors, chose what kind of English work to make of the original, chose what to keep and what to sacrifice. La Fontaine's moral to “The Frog and the Rat” (IV,xi).

La ruse la mieux curdie
Peut nuire à son inventeur,
Et souvent la perfidie
Retourne sur son auteur,

Moore renders

Snares woven impeccably
Can be the weaver's executioner;
And how often treachery
Brings doom on its practitioner.(27)

She let go of literal equivalence and chose to keep another exactitude, not only the rhyme patterns but also the rhyme sounds of the original. This undertaking, to make the English version rhyme with the French as well as with itself, posed enormous difficulties, but it also placed the highest possible premium on sound as a distinctive element of a poet's work. To render La Fontaine, Moore temporarily surrendered her own allegiance to enjambed and inaudible rhyme and placed herself in the service of the Frenchman's audible, end-stopped rhymes. Moore's interest in rhyme conditioned her translation as much as the translation conditioned the rhyme of her own poems.

Moore's strategy places more emphasis on rhyme than even the usual rhymed translation does: it assumes that there is a value to be preserved not only in the rhyme pattern but also in the sounds that carry the pattern. In other words, the poet's assumption here seems to be that the sounds themselves are a sufficiently autonomous element of verse to be actually transferable, and worth transferring, from one language to another. Perhaps “autonomous” has the wrong implications here: Moore's strategy may assume rather that sound qualities are so integral to the sense of a poem that they too must be rendered if the sense is not to be diminished. Sound is the non-conceptual component of sense.

Modern theorists of rhyme as an irrational or transrational phenomenon are thinking in terms of traditionally audible rhyme. In insisting on the “alogical character of rhyme,” Wimsatt distinguishes between “melodies” and “ideas,” assuming that rhyme is sensory, audible.²⁸ Emphasizing the necessary “wedding of the alogical with the logical,” Wimsatt calls the words of a rhyme “the icon in which the idea is caught.”²⁹ This recognition of the “wedding” of sound and sense in a poem is not beside the point, for two decades earlier the Russian formalists had effected something of a divorce on this traditional marriage by positing an “opposition between ‘poetic’ language and ‘practical’ language.”³⁰ Sounds in poetic language, the formalists claimed, have a certain “autonomous value.” Viktor Shklovsky wrote, “It may very well be that a large part of the pleasure poetry gives us stems from its articulatory aspect—from a special dance of the organs of speech.”³¹ Shklovsky continues, “Poetic language is distinguished from prosaic language by the palpableness of its construction,”³² and it is partly this “palpableness,” this foregrounding of the medium of words themselves as sensory things, that results in the defamiliarizing effect of art.

Marianne Moore's inaudible rhyme, however, does not entirely submit to this distinction of sound from communicative sense, for inaudible rhymes are perceived with the eyes on a written text or not at all. They are not available to the ear alone, and hence do not affect the spoken rhythm of the lines, as we have already seen. Instead, they discover for us the rhymes hidden in practical language without audibly or rhythmically foregrounding those rhymes. The difference in sound before and during the Fables becomes clear in two poems published only six years apart on similar subjects, “His Shield” of 1944 and “Armor's Undermining Modesty” of 1950. All of the lines of each of these poems are rhymed, but the rendering of a stanza from each in a prose format will demonstrate the change in sound. In 1944 Moore wrote, “Pig-fur won't do, I'll wrap myself in salamander-skin like Presbyter John. A lizard in the midst of flames, a firebrand that is life, asbestos-eyed asbestos-eared, with tattooed nap and permanent pig on the instep; he can withstand fire and won't drown.” The ear does not readily pick out the rhymes of “wrap” with “nap,” “John” with “on,” and “firebrand” with “withstand.” In 1950 she wrote, “Arise, for it is day. Even gifted scholars lose their way through faulty etymology. No wonder we hate poetry. …” Here one can hardly miss the chiming of “day” and “way,” “etymology” and “poetry.”

Moore's inaudible rhyme has thus been a way of overcoming the distinction between poetic and practical language in the poem as spoken, while preserving that distinction in the poem as a written text. The verse patterning is visually but not audibly stanzaic; its sensuous “dance” takes place outside, and often in tension with, the stanzaic pattern. At the same time, we are finding that so-called “practical” language can be far more sensuously patterned than the formalists' distinction would suggest. In the formalist view, sensuous patterning is incidental in practical communication, while it is integral to poetic utterance. But Moore's distinctive art has been to make the incidental patterns of practical language into a liberating principle of her verse.

We may now understand better why, after three experiments in audibly rhymed couplets in 1956 and 1957, Moore will virtually abandon for serious purposes the audible, end-stopped rhyme of the fable years and return to her own hidden patterns and to freer verse forms. Of those three experiments—“Values in Use,” “Hometown Piece for Messrs. Alston and Reese,” and “Enough: Jamestown, 1607-1957”—the last is the most serious undertaking and thus shows most clearly the alien nature of the idiom that henceforth Moore would reserve only for light verse. The central descriptive interlude of “Enough: Jamestown” has an Audenesque plain music that the poet never returned to after this piece:

The crested moss-rose casts a spell;
and bud of solid green as well;
old deep pink one with fragrant wings
imparting balsam scent that clings
where redbrown tanbark holds the sun—
path enticing beyond comparison.

This has more of the sound of poetry-in-general than of Marianne Moore. Auden confessed to having “stolen a great deal” from the “endless musical and structural possibilities of Miss Moore's invention.”³³ But he did not stay with his syllabic experiments any longer than Moore stayed with her serious venture into audible rhyme.

This venture may be compared in some ways with Moore's venture into free verse during the early twenties. Both strategies proved to be relatively short-lived detours that expanded the dimensions and enriched the musicality of her verse beyond what Moore eventually saw as compatible with her intent. The model she established in 1958, immediately after “Enough: Jamestown,” is the artist “Melchior Vulpius,” a composer of chorales, hymns, and anthems. “We have to trust this art,” she writes in the enjambed stanzas, slant rhymes, and unrhymed lines that resume the spare sound of her work before the fables. From now on, when the poet is writing playfully, as in “To Victor Hugo of My Crow Pluto” or in “Occasionem Cognosce” (retitled “‘Avec Ardeur’”), audible rhymes are part of her irony of technique. They press the lilt of poetry-in-general into the foreground, even while the poet assures us in “‘Avec Ardeur’” that “This is not verse / of course.”

Already by the poem “Style” of 1956, Moore's familiarly enjambed and inaudible rhyme is returning. Once again one can hardly hear the line breaks when they are not visually present: “There is no suitable simile. It is as though the equidistant three tiny arcs of seeds in a banana had been conjoined by Palestrina; it is like the eyes, or say the face, of Palestrina by El Greco.” One does not hear the distant, unaccented rhyme of “though” with “El Greco”; and the immediate but unaccented rhyme of “banana” and “Palestrina” is less noticeable than the chance internal chime of “simile” and “three.” None of these sounds are strong enough to press the rhythm of the utterance toward an end-stopped pattern. The sound of “Style” is Moore's syncopated alliteration—“Escudero's constant of the plumbline / axis of the hairfine moon” and Soledad's “black-clad solitude that is not sad”—a sensuous prose that audibly overrides the poem's end-rhyme pattern.

Just as the venture into free verse during the twenties ended with a return to the syllabic stanza form, so the venture into audible rhyme ends with a reaffirmation of the “unaccented syllable,” the light rhyme. In each case, the poet appears to be reasserting the strategy that preserves the tension between the poetic and the non-poetic, making something that looks like verse sound like the richest kind of practical language. Moore's characteristic syllabically shaped, inaudibly rhymed stanza is a verse that defies certain of our expectations of verse. In fact, the work of every distinctive poet is a construction in verse that deconstructs some other idea of verse. The purpose is to make the lines feel instead more like a song, a speech, a prayer, like ordinary talk or the newspapers or the muttering of the mind or, in Moore's case, educated writing and speech. The writing of verse is, in part, an act against itself, a doing that must undo itself if it is to result in anything more than poetry-in-general, that ground against which each poem must detach itself as a figure.

Verse must be written against itself because intertextuality is not only a fact; it is also a closed, circular, and therefore limited system. Language refers and responds not only to other language. The whole network of language in use operates at a frontier, at the border of the speechless. Utterance is a threshold. One cannot prove in language the existence of a non-linguistic realm or substance, nor can one prove its non-existence. We are left, with Dr. Johnson, kicking the stone—left, as Edward Said puts it, with a “worldliness [that] does not come and go,” but stays ineluctably.³⁴ And worldless actuality, that “ultimate subtext,” is by definition non-textual.³⁵ It is the changing nature of this non-textual actuality that makes, that is, the particularity of the text. The poet resists poetry in order to make the poem more than just “poetic language”; or, the text also attempts to serve its own ultimate subtext. The point is the same: verbal art takes words, textuality, as its materials, but what makes anything an art is that to us it is so much more than its materials.

Finally, then, Moore's poems of the fable years bring us back to the issue of value in a new way. In 1957 The Saturday Review carried this observation by Winfield Townley Scott on Like a Bulwark: “It has been remarked, but not sufficiently, that there is a strong streak of didacticism in Miss Moore's poetry. … There is the didactic so concentrated as to force moral statement into poetry.”³⁶ It is not quite clear whether Scott means by his final phrase “forcibly insert moral statement into the poem” or, let us hope, “press moral statement to the point at which it becomes art.” One thing which prompts recognition of the moral dimension of these poems is the more than usually prominent role played in them by imperatives. In Moore's earlier work we have encountered the imperative form in various rhetorical contexts that tended to mitigate its tone of command. In “To a Chameleon” the verb is actually descriptive in effect: “Hid by the august foliage and fruit of the grape vine / Twine / Your anatomy / Round the pruned and polished stem.” We find quoted instructions in “Camellia Sabina”—“‘Dry / the windows with a cloth’”—and mottoes in “The Frigate Pelican”—“Make hay; keep / the shop … Be gay / civilly.” The poet's editorial hand guides our glance in “Virginia Britannia”—“Observe the terse Virginian, / the mettlesome gray one.” And the imperative form has the force of a prayer in the lines of “In Distrust of Merits”—“Be joined at last, be / joined.”

Some of these strategies appear in the work of the mid-forties to mid-fifties. “Armor's Undermining Modesty” includes the motto, “Arise, for it is day,” of the John Day Company, a sixteenth-century printing house that incorporated the words into its title-page device, and “Voracities and Verities” offers the professional advice, “Poets, don't make a fuss.” But we find also in the poems of the fable years a number of quite definitely moral imperatives, particularly in “Tom Fool at Jamaica”:

                              Be infallible at your peril, for your system will fail,
and select as a model the schoolboy in Spain
          who at the age of six, portrayed a mule and jockey
                    who had pulled up for a snail.

The counsel of “Logic and ‘The Magic Flute’” to “Banish sloth” is borrowed from Ovid, but it is not presented as a found moral like those of “The Frigate Pelican.” The advisory voice continues to the poem's end, “one need not shoulder, need not shove.” We might at first wish to attribute this admonitory strain to Moore's long sojourn in the moral atmosphere of the fables, but in fact we saw this turn toward moral imperative in 1944 work that was completed before the work of translation was undertaken. “His Shield” urged us with the finality of a closing note to “be / dull. Don't be envied or / armed with a measuring-rod.”

Rather it is to the poet's early practice that we must look for the source of this imperative note, just as we looked there for her first experiments with close audible rhyme. The couplet containing the imperative in “To a Prize Bird” reminds us of both the rhyme and the judgmental strain that were Moore's point of departure:

Pride sits you well, so strut, colossal bird.
No barnyard makes you look absurd.

Perhaps it would be most accurate to say that the work on La Fontaine prompted the poet to try pressing some of her earlier techniques farther than she had in the past. The imperatives of the fable years are like a generalizing of the specific judgments of the Carlisle years. They are implicitly addressed to a second-person “you,” but this time not to an individual but to a universal “you”—to a reader rather than to the poem's subject.

Furthermore, the aphoristically moral titles of certain poems of the fable years are reminiscent of the aphoristic titles of a number of Bryn Mawr and Carlisle poems. The early adopted mottoes of some of her college poems—“Qui S'Excuse, S'Accuse,” “Tunica Pallio Proprior,” “Things Are What They Seem”—are followed by the longer and wittier title aphorisms of Observations like “Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight,” “In This Age of Hard Trying, Nonchalance Is Good and,” “Nothing Will Cure the Sick Lion but to Eat an Ape.” This practice largely disappears during the thirties when inquiry and ambiguity are undercutting such set maxims. And when aphoristic titles return in the lyrics of the war years, they have a new directness and simplicity: “What Are Years?”, “Light is Speech,” “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing.” In comparison with those, we can now see that the aphoristic titles of the fable years have a distinctly moral emphasis: “Voracities and Verities Sometimes Are Interacting,” “We Call Them the Brave,” “Blessed Is the Man.” When we remember that “Tom Fool at Jamaica” is actually Howard Moss's title and that Moore had written and submitted the poem with the title “Letter Perfect Is Not Perfect,” the larger admonitory context of its imperatives becomes clear.³⁷

A clue to the significance of this temporary cluster of imperatives and moral aphorisms lies in the generally negative form of most of the advice and precepts. “Don't make a fuss,” poets are advised; “Letter Perfect Is Not Perfect”; “Be fallible at your peril, for your system will fail”; and “Blessed Is the Man” who

                    does not sit in the seat of the scoffer—
          the man who does not denigrate, depreciate, denunciate:
                    who is not “characteristically intemperate,”
who does not “excuse, retreat, equivocate; and will be heard.”

This admonitory strain is probably another face of the moral feeling that was often expressed ironically in the animiles and in heroic terms in the war lyrics. Inquiry and ambiguity went only so far before the extremities of the war years gave detachment an inhuman air. The admonitions of the fable years are the reverse side of the appreciations for which Moore is so well known. But unlike the pointed judgments of her early work, the admonitions here are general in form, while the appreciations—of Tom Fool and Fats Waller, of Escudero and Etchebaster—are quite specific. She has praise for the person and warning of the universal pitfalls. Thus the return of the poetic voice's confident pronouncements is accompanied by a growth in generosity, a selective gentleness.

The judgmental and the admonitory are passing phases in Moore's ongoing development, but the appreciative is a constant. And the celebrative air of the last two volumes that she published will take us into a discussion of the wider import of aesthetic values in her work. There we shall leave behind several of the difficulties peculiar to the poems of the fable years—the occasionally extreme compression, the abstract diction and emphasis, the heavier than usual texture of rhyme, and the cryptic quality that balances this verse between its private reference and its public performance.

As “The Sycamore” reminds us, “there's more than just one kind of grace.” And in a way this poem is a parable: it guides us to the values and implications of the work around and after it. The unusual and towering “chamois-white” sycamore seems to afford the occasion for the poem, but the “little dry thing from the grass … retiringly formal” is the subject of the closing model stanza, Moore's determinant of form here. The graces of the grand and of the humble are joined by the graces of the living and the dead, of the flowers that “must die, and nine / she-camel-hairs aid memory.” These graces of art are reciprocal: that the little dry thing from the grass is “worthy of Imami,” the Persian miniaturist painter, places nature in the service of art; that art is memorial places it in the service of life.

Notes

1. Moore to Hildegarde Watson, August 13, 1946, Bryn Mawr College Library.

2. Moore to Hildegarde Watson, May 8, 1947, Bryn Mawr College Library.

3. Moore to Hildegarde Watson, June 29, 1947, Bryn Mawr College Library.

4. Moore to Hildegarde Watson, July 16, 1947, Bryn Mawr College Library.

5. Lewis Nichols, “Talk with Marianne Moore,” New York Times Book Review, May 16, 1954, p. 30.

6. Moore to Hildegarde Watson, May 21, 1954, Bryn Mawr College Library.

7. Moore to Hildegarde Watson, November 11, 1948, Bryn Mawr College Library.

8. The Thomas Years, ed. Caroline Smith Rittenhouse, bound typescript, Oral History Collection, Bryn Mawr College Archive, 1986, p. 25.

9. Hilton Kramer, “Freezing the Blood and Making One Laugh,” New York Times Book Review, March 15, 1981, p. 7.

10. Eileen Foley, “Genius at Work,” The Evening Bulletin (Philadelphia), Tuesday, October 26, 1965, p. 58B.

11. The Evening Bulletin (Philadelphia), Friday, November 17, 1972, p. 8B.

12. W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (The University Press of Kentucky, 1954), p. 154.

13. This and the immediately following quotation are also from Wimsatt, p. 154.

14. Wimsatt, pp. 165-6.

15. Quoted from Viktor Shklovsky, “On Poetry and Transrational Language,” in Boris Ejxenbaum's “The Theory of the Formal Method” in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1978), p. 10.

16. Wimsatt, p. 159.

17. The Fables of La Fontaine, trans. Marianne Moore (New York: The Viking Press, 1954), p. 211. The passage is from Book IV, fable iii.

18. Moore to Sidney Salt, September 26, 1936, copy in the Watson Collection, Bryn Mawr College Library.

19. S. V. Baum, “Moore, Marianne Craig,” in Notable American Women, The Modern Period, ed. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 491.

20. “Marianne Moore on Ezra Pound, 1909-1915,” Marianne Moore Newsletter, III, 2 (Fall 1979), p. 5.

21. T. S. Eliot, “Introduction” to Moore's Selected Poems (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1935), p. xi.

22. Typescript of “Then the Ermine,” poem file, Rosenbach Museum and Library.

23. Laurence Stapleton, Marianne Moore, The Poet's Advance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 166.

24. Moore to Walter Pistole, “4-7-45,” quoted by Rosalee Sprout in Marianne Moore: The Poet as Translator (Ph.D. Diss., Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1980), p. 22.

25. This and the two subsequent quotations are from Sprout, pp. 265-6.

26. Sprout quotes Moore's notes for a 1954 talk at Vassar College on p. 91 of her useful Chapter III, “La Fontaine and His Translators into English,” pp. 86-144.

27. Sprout quotes the French and English versions of this stanza on p. 99. I have taken the text from Fables of La Fontaine, ed. M. Félix Lemaistre (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1923), p. 97, and Moore's Fables, p. 88.

28. Wimsatt, pp. 165-6.

29. Wimsatt, p. 165.

30. This and the following phrase are from Ejxenbaum, p. 8.

31. Shklovsky is quoted by Ejxenbaum, p. 10.

32. Shklovsky quoted by Ejxenbaum, p. 14.

33. W. H. Auden, “New Poems,” a review of Nevertheless in The New York Times Book Review, October 15, 1944, p. 20. The article begins on p. 7.

34. Edward W. Said, “The Text, the World, the Critic,” in Textual Strategies, Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 165.

35. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 82.

36. Winfield Townley Scott, “A Place for the Genuine,” The Saturday Review, XL, No. 5 (February 2, 1957), 17-18.

37. Stapleton, pp. 189-90.