O imagnifico,
wizard in words—poet, was it, as
Alfred Panzini defined you?
Weren't you refracting just now
on my eye's half-closed triptych
                    the image, enhanced, of a glen—

Marianne Moore, “The Mind, Intractable Thing”

D. H. Lawrence once observed that “it is hard to hear a new voice, as hard as it is to listen to an unknown language. … The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces many old experiences. And it is like trying to use muscles that have perhaps never been used, or that have been going stiff for ages. It hurts horribly.”¹ Although Marianne Moore's voice has been widely heard since her poetry was first published in 1915, it is a new voice in the sense in which D. H. Lawrence is speaking here. It is new not only because Moore was one of the few truly great technical originals that this century has produced but also because Moore used her verse to demonstrate a fresh, if age-old, epistemology. That way of knowing moved in a direction that still surprises her readers and continues to challenge her critics.

Just as D. H. Lawrence surmised it would be, hearing this new voice of Marianne Moore is difficult, almost like listening to an unknown language. And it is difficult for many reasons that most critics have never entirely understood. Even her staunchest supporters admit that Moore's works “can be exasperating in their allusions to the things we cannot quite grasp, filled with jarring combinations of images.”² I suggest that a central difficulty with understanding Moore's verse is that readers and critics have been measuring her work against the wrong experiential models, using yardsticks that simply will not work, instead of learning to appreciate the discourse from its own original perspectives. I am not sure that Moore herself always understood the revolution she was so quietly effecting, for although she maintained great confidence in her work and took a healthy if humble pride in it, she remained a product of her own milieu. She does not appear to have seen herself as any kind of early spokeswoman for feminism. And John M. Slatin is probably correct when he suggests in The Savage's Romance: The Poetry of Marianne Moore that Moore was continuously measuring her style and content against the models of her male contemporaries and accommodating her work to what she may have perceived as a master's voice. And she often heard that master voice in the criticism of T. S. Eliot.³ But her greatest successes always came when Moore followed her own instincts to produce poetry which told the truths (not merely the truth) about reality. “What is more precise than precision?” she asked in “Armor's Undermining Modesty.” Her answer: illusion.⁴ Moore was, it would seem, content to live with contradiction, paradox, ambiguity, intuition, ecstasy, and magic because those were far closer to the truth than anyone else's abstract precision.

I argue here that Marianne Moore came to poetry with the ways of knowing consonant with a woman's worldview, a woman's epistemology. At the same time, hers was a mind scientifically trained, one groomed for precision and innately attentive to detail. Moore took that training and that precision and turned it into something she herself perceived as nothing short of magical, for she discovered and to a real degree invented the means of speaking the truth about reality in a woman's voice that tended toward refracting (her own word choice in the epigraph above), bending, breaking apart, not toward the usual attempts at synthesizing and ordering the details of human perception.

In their landmark book Women's Ways of Knowing, researchers Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule argue that most studies of human epistemology have tended to omit women from their consideration and have typically been content to look for ways in which women conform to or diverge from patterns found in the model studies of men. Attributes typically associated with the masculine are abstract critical thought and the search for objective, or “scientific,” truth. The mental processes involved in considering the abstract and the impersonal have traditionally been labeled thinking and are attributed to men, while those that deal with personal and interpersonal experience as a route to thought fall under the rubric of intuition or even emotion and have tended to be associated with women.⁵ That is not to suggest that both men and women are not both thinking and intuitive human beings. But over time, the art of thinking and abstraction tended to be valued more highly than the less easily explained process called intuition. One must be careful not to perceive the ways of knowing under consideration here as merely the differences between deductive and inductive reasoning. Moore's sense of intuition, of what she humorously came to call her sense of illusion, was far more complex than simple induction. It is inextricably bound up in her own uniquely feminine method of comprehending her world.

In The Feminization of American Culture, Ann Douglas has suggested that part of the legacy of the Victorian past has been a move toward a literature of inclusiveness rather than a literature of limitation.⁶ That sense of inclusiveness, according to Douglas, marks an increasing awareness of the positive epistemological strategies one can learn from the feminine mind. Joseph Campbell has also suggested that the female represents what “in Kantian terminology we call the forms of sensibility. She is time and space itself, and the mystery beyond her is beyond all pairs of opposites. So it isn't male and it isn't female. It neither is nor is not. But everything is within her, so that the gods are her children. Everything you can think of, everything you can see, is a production of the Goddess.”⁷ Campbell's vision is another way of describing the feminine sense of inclusiveness. We are only beginning to understand the true symbiotic relationship of what the Chinese ancients called the yin and the yang as active parts of all human beings, male and female. Feminine thinking, including the tendency toward inclusiveness, can only add to human knowledge and to the broadening of human understanding.

As a great intellect and as a woman, Moore tended to operate in the world of intuition and inclusion quite naturally, and she happened very early onto the idea that human access to truth has many avenues, many voices. Carol Gilligan supports this very point in her study In a Different Voice, observing that “sensitivity to the needs of others and the assumption of responsibility for taking care lead women to voices other than their own and to include in their judgment other points of view. … The reluctance to judge may itself be indicative of the care and concern for others that infuse the psychology of women's development.”⁸

To look at it another way, Moore moved instinctively into what critic Mikhail Bakhtin has called polyphony, the freedom for the points of view of others to reveal themselves.⁹ But that very openness to various points of view and to ambiguities of meaning tends to confuse many of Moore's readers, especially those who are used to looking for a synthesis of meaning, for an abstraction, for what has been called a moral in a poem.

The perception that human access to objective truth might be relative is an important dimension of contemporary reasoning. There is evidence of a real effort in the last half of the twentieth century to move away from traditional learning as “banking,” wherein the active expert deposits “true knowledge” into the minds of the passive learner. The epistemology of our time comprehends that truth, at least to its human perceivers, is probably relative, that the meaning of an event depends on the context in which that event occurs; relativism pervades all aspects of life. Knowledge, even so-called scientific knowledge, is constructed, not given; contextual, not absolute; mutable, not fixed.¹⁰ Certainly such seemingly disparate avenues as the study of science or the development of the visual arts in the twentieth century explore that kind of relativity. It is also an important dimension of modernism.

Moore knew, as she herself put it in the titles of two essays, that she had a “burning desire to be explicit,” a “mania for straight writing.” But once she committed herself to telling the truth, her poetry seldom seemed explicit or straight. Rather it takes the careful reader into the interstices, into the highest level of human understanding, into the realm of what philosopher Henri Bergson called intuition. “All I can say,” Moore wrote, “is that one must be as clear as one's natural reticence allows one to be.”¹¹ If one would tell the truth, one must tell it as accurately and precisely as one can, even if that means admitting that those insights are fragmentary, incongruous, and kaleidoscopic, what Moore would come to see as image-laden, as imagination-induced—in short, as magical—all words from the same root and clearly connected, from Marianne Moore's point of view. Language is by its very nature a kind of magic because it puts names on what can be both seen (imaged) and then re-imaged in the mind (imagined).

In great music and dance, for example, one catches an occasional glimpse of the beautiful representation of truth, as in Mozart's Magic Flute. But the glimpse is so momentary, so fragmentary, as to leave only a flash of insight into the reality it signals. It cannot be held, only recalled, and then imperfectly. Any pursuit of the truth, of the genuine will always take the selective mind beyond what mere words or sounds or movements and the realities they represent and can capture, into a world just beyond the reckoning of the usual human consciousness, a world of something very much like magic. For Marianne Moore, illusion is more precise than precision. And that illusion, that magic of intuition, is an important part of a woman's way of knowing; it is a new epistemology only because so few women have ever had the opportunity to give it voice. But as D. H. Lawrence suggested about any new voice, the literary world is suspicious of and uncomfortable with the work of Marianne Moore because it represents a new experience and because by its very nature it displaces many old experiences.

The main purpose of this study, then, is to examine the poetic techniques of Marianne Moore to show how she executes a precision so exact that it can tap the real source of human creativity: the image, the imagination, magic—what Moore calls “divine fire, a perquisite of the gods.”¹² I will show that Moore's was a woman's way of knowing, an epistemology that valued both order and inclusiveness. I will argue further that Moore came to cast herself wryly as a wonder, a conjurer, an “imagnifico,” a “wizard in words.” Of profound impact on my vision of Moore's technique and her worldview is an awareness of her pervasive sense of humor, which permeates the work to a degree not yet explored by any critic, but long suspected by her admirers. As Donald Hall first pointed out in Marianne Moore: The Cage and the Animal, such disconnection of mind may be an affront to logic, but it is imagination's way of life. “Imagination sees a crazy, underlying connection, be it linguistic or visual, that permits seemingly disparate things to be conjoined in the mind.”¹³ Part of the facade of the magician, the spell Moore taught herself to cast, is an enchantment rich with an appreciation for the incongruous. She finds the joy of laughter, but a laughter of such a special kind that one must learn to recognize and enjoy it. Moore once spoke of a respected colleague's “susceptibility to happiness.” That susceptibility was shared by Moore herself. For Moore was a remarkably comic spirit, in the truest, most classical sense of the word. Hers were indeed “conjuries that endure,” another apparent contradiction in terms. Moore's magic was solid stuff; the power of the visible was the invisible; her imaginary gardens have real toads. What I am addressing here is the fact that like the work of any great magician. Moore's work was the result of a remarkable care, precision, and timing—and her magic show involved both an array of subjects and a volley of techniques unlike any attempted before her.

There is no doubt that Moore's discourse is worthy of effort, and yet it is still in real need of the critical tools to make it accessible. As early as 1918, Ezra Pound wrote to Moore, “You will never sell more than five hundred copies, as your work demands mental attention … [but] Your stuff holds my eye.”¹⁴ Hilda Doolittle (known as H.D.), who, along with Annie Winifred Ellerman (who took the byname Bryher), arranged for the first publication of a book of poems by Moore, wrote in 1916 that Moore “turns her perfect craft as the perfect craftsman must inevitably do, to some direct presentation of beauty, cut in flowing lines, but so delicately that the very screen she carves seems to stand only in that serene palace of her own world of inspiration—frail, yet as all beautiful things are, absolutely hard—and destined to endure.”¹⁵ T. S. Eliot, in his introduction to Moore's Selected Poems of 1935, makes the most famous pronouncement: “Miss Moore's poems form part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time.”¹⁶ He had responded even before to the publication of Observations by suggesting that Marianne Moore already had imitators and that her poetry was “too good to be appreciated anywhere.”¹⁷ William Carlos Williams said of her work, “It is the white of a clarity beyond the facts.” He was enchanted by her techniques from the beginning, writing that “Miss Moore gets great pleasure from wiping soiled words or cutting them clean out, removing the aureoles that have been pasted about them or taking them bodily from greasy contexts. For the compositions which Miss Moore intends, each word should first stand crystal clear with no attachments; not even an aroma.”¹⁸

Few would deny both Moore's excellence and her complexity, but as the poet Amy Clampitt declared in a paper presented at the Moore centenary in 1987, it is time that the world expends some energy “getting to know Marianne Moore.” Her poetry is worth our effort and badly in need of the visual, verbal, and syntactic tools to approach it. Three recent book-length studies—Bonnie Costello's Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions (1981), John M. Slatin's Savage's Romance: The Poetry of Marianne Moore (1986), and Margaret Holley's Poetry of Marianne Moore: A Study in Voice and Value (1987)—have made useful contributions to Moore study, with all three critics providing useful approaches to Moore's themes and techniques. In this book I examine representative texts themselves and offer the serious student of Marianne Moore some consistently successful strategies for dealing with the discourse from both technical and epistemological perspectives.

Each poem offers its own set of challenges; Moore never used the same set of techniques in exactly the same way twice. And one philosophical decision tended to build upon and to presuppose another; they are all-inclusive. But a systematic approach to her style, syntax, and strategies makes access possible. As T. S. Eliot warned in a letter to Moore in 1934, “At your simplest you baffle those who love ‘simple’ poetry; and so one might as well put on difficult stuff at once, and only bid for readers who are willing and accustomed to take a little trouble over poetry.”¹⁹

Bonnie Costello has suggested that Moore was very sensitive to the image, to the visual. Somewhat akin to Thoreau imagining himself the owner of various farm properties in “Where I Lived and What I Lived For” in Walden, in “When I Buy Pictures” Moore found herself considering those times when “I may regard myself as the imaginary possessor” of various objects d'art. Such possession gives Moore the chance to experiment with the ownership of something perfectly beautiful or something which may allow the pursuit of the genuine, the pursuit of truth, with what Moore calls her recklessness, her ardor. “How did I come to be an artist?” she responds to Donald Hall's question with one of her famous borrowed quotations (the many voices she always heard), her objets trouvés, this one from George Grosz, “Endless curiosity, observation, research—and a great amount of joy in the thing.”²⁰ For Moore it was, after all, a matter of taking an informed liking to things and choosing to like and to examine the many dimensions of most any object or idea.

This was certainly the worldview suggested by Henri Bergson, French philosopher and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1927. Bergson's studies of time led him to value what he saw as the highest level of human understanding: intuition—the world of the poet, the saint, and the philosopher. From one point of view, this is the world of magic, although not in the usual sense of the word. For this kind of enchantment is accomplished by excellence in conception and execution. Getting to such magic, regardless of the art form one uses, is done only with infinite care, timing, and precision. “Magic” is not made of mystery, but by hard and meticulous work, a labor of which the audience is not usually aware. This hard work is the true realm of the conjurer. Thus Bergson could praise the kind of “open society” which valued the intuitive mind of the poet, the prophet, the hero, and the saint, characters from Moore's own playbill. Never one to operate in the world of the expected, Moore's rabbit in the hat would become an elephant, a jerboa, a jellyfish, a frigate pelican, a pangolin, a whale, a snail, an ostrich, and a giraffe, although her preferences would frequently turn to dragons or plumet basilisks, which did, after all, portray “mythology's wish / to be interchangeably man and fish” (“The Plumet Basilisk”). (“Humor saves a few steps,” Moore wrote in “The Pangolin”—“it saves years.”)

Beneath, then, the veneer of this small and diffident woman lay one of the most remarkable poetic voices of the twentieth century, an artist for whom life proved an exhilarating experience. Many male critics have applauded Moore's poetry, although they frequently seem at some loss to explain its effectiveness. Andrew J. Kappel has called Moore's poetry a “triumphant demonstration of repeated mastery of the chaos that surrounds us.” Through her quiet and repeated acts of will, Moore devised the means, not of escaping the world as Eliot had, nor of savoring it as Stevens would, but of transforming it, and of doing so on her own epistemological terms—with gusto.²¹ Kappel is aware that Moore's ways of knowing connect with the world, with the earth, that they do more than merely intellectualize about it, but he does not stop to analyze the nature of what he calls her mastery. And although William Carlos Williams was consistent in his praise of Moore's work, he seems to marvel that a woman could have produced it. Marianne Moore's is a “talent which diminishes the tom-toming of the hollow men of a wasteland to irrelevant pitter-patter. Nothing is hollow or waste in the imagination of Marianne Moore. How so slight a woman can so roar, like a secret Niagara and with so gracious an inference, is one with all the mysteries, where strength masquerading as weakness—a woman, a frail woman—bewilders us. The magic name of Marianne Moore has been among my most cherished possessions.”²²

Reading her with a poet's perception, Donald Hall first asked that readers consider the common root in the words “image,” “imagination,” and “magic,” for it seems clear that Marianne Moore has made precisely that connection in her own work.²³ Actually most critics who think and write about Marianne Moore slip quite readily and almost unconsciously into a metaphor of magic. Moore scholar Bonnie Costello, for example, writes that her “poetry turns out to be the magic trick … which absorbs us in its dazzling sleight-of-hand, in which we glimpse the genuine before it turns into the poet once again.”²⁴ And Randall Jarrell writes in “The Humble Animal” that Moore's “forms have the lacy, mathematical extravagance of snowflakes, seem as arbitrary as the prohibitions of fairy tales; but they work as those work—disregard them and everything goes to pieces. Her forms, tricks and all, are like the aria of the Queen of Night: the intricate and artificial elaboration that not only does not conflict with emotion, it is its vehicle.” Jarrell likens Moore's methods and mannerisms to the Cheshire cat's smile, which bewitched one for some time after the smile was gone.²⁵

And Miss Moore herself offers great support for the critics' tendency to speak in such terms. Her own predilection for words of enchantment is evident in her poetry and prose. In fact, it is difficult to find a work by Moore without some kind of “magic” in it. Some of them are obvious: “The Wizard in Words,” “Diligence Is to Magic As Progress Is to Flight,” “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing,” “Logic and ‘The Magic Flute,’” “Conjuries That Endure,” “Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns,” “Sojourn in the Whale,” “Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers, and the Like,” “O to Be a Dragon,” “My Crow Pluto,” “Apparition of Splendor,” and “Puss in Boots.” Other words of enchantment appear in lines of the poetry itself, like the famous “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” (in “Poetry,” Selected Poems) or “the power of the visible is the invisible” (in “He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron’”). In “The Plumet Basilisk,”

          the basilisk portrays
mythology's wish
to be interchangeably man and fish.

“Spenser's Ireland” offers that

                              … their pride,
like the enchanter's,
is in care, not madness.

“Sojourn in the Whale” declares, “You have been compelled by hags to spin / gold thread from straw.” Moore spoke of “the conjuring wand of Henry James”²⁶ and suggested that Wallace Stevens's “method of hints and disguises should have Mercury as consultant-magician.”²⁷

Writing about the mystery of Anna Pavlova's dancing, Marianne Moore says, “One suggests that she so intently thought the illusion she wished to create that it made her illusive—hands and feet obeying imagination in a way that compensated for any flaw.”²⁸ In another essay, entitled “Subject, Predicate, Object,” first published in 1957, Moore says, “Dazzled, speechless—an alchemist without implements—one thinks of poetry as divine fire, a perquisite of the gods. When under the spell of admiration or gratitude, I have hazarded a line, it never occurred to me that anyone might think I imagined myself a poet.”²⁹ One must never take lightly Marianne Moore's use of any word. She always invites—demands—myriad considerations of a word and its origins, leaving us, as she does here, with disquieting ambiguity. Look at the phrase long enough, and the word “imagine” deconstructs itself into image and magic—and the famous Moore modesty takes on a new dimension. With startling legerdemain she presses the reader toward the truth, as Costello has suggested, and just for a moment we glimpse the genuine, in this case the fact that Marianne Moore is playing with the word “imagine” and we see an entirely opposite meaning in the passage. Moore's natural modesty may not be modesty at all. She imagined, imaged, made her work—as if by magic.

I will argue further that Miss Moore also taps the power of her own faith to establish a woman's sense of order and meaning over chaos, although her expression of that faith is almost always carefully camouflaged in the works. When discussing writing in her essay “A Burning Desire to Be Explicit,” Moore recalled Faulkner's ultimate defense of the whole business of writing: “It should help a man endure by lifting up his heart.” With characteristic aplomb, Moore added only, “It should.”³⁰ But to lift the human spirit, one must engage the power of the imagination to glimpse the reality beyond the obvious. Moore's method, like that of the great magician always involves precision. All execution must be perfectly and precisely timed, and the materials she chooses, although frequently common objects and words from daily life, must be meticulously arranged and turned so that the audience can be taken to the outer edges of perception and made to find the genuine, the “rock / crystal thing to see” (“The Hero”). This is indeed an enchanted thing. And as Moore herself so deftly says in “The Monkeys,” if such enchantment seems unusual or abnormal, she is “supreme in [her] abnormality.” She is the imagnifico, the wizard in words.

In support of this perception, consider that one of Marianne Moore's two final poems, written in 1970, just two years before her death at age eighty-four, is entitled “The Magician's Retreat.” Ostensibly the poem was occasioned by a small color reproduction of René Magritte's painting Domain of Lights from the New York Times Magazine. According to Moore scholar Patricia C. Willis, Moore also owned a copy of Arts Magazine, which carried an article about the work of an eighteenth-century visionary architect, Jean-Jacques Lequeu.³¹ On the cover appeared “Repaire des magiciens” (The magician's retreat), an eerie architectural drawing of a Gothic house complete with niches for magicians in pointed hats and elephant gargoyles on the facade. Evidently the two pictures took Miss Moore's fancy because she took the title from the drawing and wrote it at the top of the clipping showing Magritte's painting.

At first glance, the poem inspired by the painting and the illustration appears to describe an eerie house:

“THE MAGICIAN'S RETREAT”

of moderate height
(I have seen it)
cloudy but bright inside
like a moonstone,
while a yellow glow
from a shutter-crack shone,
and a blue glow from the lamppost
close to the front door.
It left nothing of which to complain,
nothing more to obtain,
consummately plain.
A black tree mass rose at the back
almost touching the eaves
with the definiteness of Magritte,
was above all discreet.

Had it not been for a repeated metaphor about Moore used by William Carlos Williams and preserved in his Autobiography and Selected Essays (and verified as existing in Miss Moore's consciousness by the Donald Hall interview of 1961),³² the reader might not perceive the subtle connection between the “consummately plain” little house, which was “above all discreet,” and Marianne Moore's poignant perception of herself. William Carlos Williams wrote that Marianne Moore was “like a rafter holding up the superstructure of our uncompleted building, a caryatid, her red hair plaited and wound twice about the fine skull … she was surely one of the main supports of the new order.”³³ (“I didn't hold anybody up,” Moore responded in the Donald Hall interview.) In his Selected Essays, Williams also described Moore as “straight up and down like the two-by-fours of a building under construction.”³⁴ It scarcely takes the leap of a jerboa or the quicksilver ferocity of a plumet basilisk to alert the Moore reader that the comic imagination had been called into play. Thus the house of “moderate height” which the poet has seen becomes the poet herself, cloudy on the outside, but “bright inside / like a moonstone.” With bright mind still glowing in the gathering darkness and blue eyes still shining, the poet, though “consummately plain,” leaves “nothing of which to complain.” With characteristic good humor, as she feels herself sinking into the “black tree mass” of infinity, Marianne Moore teases us into laughing with her that she is “above all discreet.” For if we have seen the final, real-life caricature Moore created for herself—her flowing cape and tricorne hat, her “yellow glow” of wit and humor—we know that her discretion, her armor, has always been part of the facade which has covered the performance of the imagnifico.

Moore's choice of the word “retreat” is also interesting. If indeed the poem is about her as well as it is about the two houses, she is characterizing herself as a magician—and not only speaking of the privacy of her own person but also sounding a retreat in another sense, that of her withdrawal, at the end of her life, from the active battle in which she had struggled for so long. And a battle it must have been, particularly for a woman whose intellectual credibility was sometimes in question merely because she was a woman. Representative of the kind of thinking common to some members of the Stieglitz circle, for example, Mexican caricaturist Marius de Zayas wrote a poem called “Femme!” for 291 in 1915. In the poem woman possesses “pas d'intellectuelisme,” “pas de forme,' and is “pas le miroir de son mâle.” She is instead “matérialité pure.”³⁵ By implication man is her opposite: “cérébral” and “intellectuel”; he possesses “forme” and is “spiritualité pure.” It took a woman of rare self-assurance to succeed in such a milieu and to create and maintain her own voice.

Researcher Carol Gilligan has written, “At a time when efforts are being made to eradicate discrimination between the sexes in the search for social equality and justice, the differences between the sexes are being rediscovered in the social sciences … the presumed neutrality of science, like that of language itself, gives way to the recognition that the categories of knowledge are human constructions.”³⁶ It is not so much the discovery of real differences between the sexes that one fears but instead the continued value judgment that one way of knowing is by its very nature superior to another, that to be successful in the arts or in the academy, one must “think like a man.” By walking a very delicate course, Marianne Moore succeeded in maintaining the credibility of her own epistemology while continuing to dazzle her critics with her conjuries. It is my contention that Marianne Moore's is a new discourse worth the struggle to understand because it speaks brilliantly in a woman's voice. Given the attention it deserves, that voice will continue to displace, as it already has displaced, many old experiences. Moore demonstrates what has seldom been demonstrated so effectively before: a woman's way of knowing. Illusion can be more precise than precision—if one is a wizard in words.

Notes

1. D. H. Lawrence, “The Spirit of Place,” in Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 7.

2. Patricia C. Willis, Marianne Moore: Vision into Verse (Philadelphia: Rosenbach Museum & Library, 1987), p. 18.

3. John M. Slatin, The Savage's Romance: The Poetry of Marianne Moore (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), chap. 4: “The Principle of Accommodation: Moore, Eliot, and the Search for Community,” pp. 120-35 passim.

4. All Moore scholars—and probably all Moore readers—would like to work from a definitive edition of Moore's poems. It would even be helpful if all of Moore's poems were still in print. Neither is, unfortunately, the case. One quickly discovers that the text of the “same” poem differs in small ways, and sometimes in great ways, from one edition to another. Occasionally a given poem appears in a new edition under an entirely new title. Unlike the case of the final and definitive editions of some poets, Moore's recently reissued Complete Poems does not provide a real basis for an intelligent discussion of her poetry. Certain of the works as they appeared in the first part of her career are markedly different from the later reworkings. I am not convinced that Moore ever thought of the later revisions as a means of perfecting the earlier work; they were merely reworkings done for reasons she chose not to explain. (One might make some analogies here to the various editions of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.) Citations to Moore's poems in this book thus vary. Unless otherwise noted, however, quotations of Moore's poetry are taken from The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Macmillan/Viking Press, 1981). See Bibliography for full publication details of other volumes of poetry cited.

5. Mary Field Belenky et al., Women's Ways of Knowing (New York: Basic Books, 1986), pp. 6-7.

6. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Press, 1988), p. 329.

7. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 167.

8. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 17.

9. See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in Critical Theory Since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1989), pp. 666-67.

10. Belenky et al., Women's Ways of Knowing, p. 39.

11. Marianne Moore, “Subject, Predicate, Object,” in Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite Steel and Other Topics (New York, Viking Press, 1966), p. 46.

12. Ibid.

13. Donald Hall, Marianne Moore: The Cage and the Animal (New York: Pegasus, 1970), p. 152.

14. Willis, Marianne Moore: Vision into Verse, p. 1.

15. Ibid.

16. T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Selected Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Macmillan; London: Faber & Faber, 1935), p. xiv.

17. T. S. Eliot, “Marianne Moore (1923),” review of Poems and Marriage, Dial 75 (December 1923): 595.

18. William Carlos Williams, “Marianne Moore: A Novelette and Other Prose, 1921-1931,” in Selected Essays (New York: Random House, 1954), p. 128.

19. T. S. Eliot to Marianne Moore, 20 June 1934, Rosenbach Museum & Library, V:17:25, Philadelphia (hereinafter designated Rosenbach).

20. Donald Hall, “Interview with Donald Hall,” in A Marianne Moore Reader (New York: Viking Press, 1961), p. 266 (hereinafter designated MMR). All references to Donald Hall's interview with Moore hereinafter designated Hall Interview.

21. Andrew Kappel, “Introduction: The Achievement of Marianne Moore,” Twentieth Century Literature 30 (Summer/Fall 1984): xviii.

22. Williams, Selected Essays, p. 292.

23. Hall, Marianne Moore: The Cage and the Animal, p. 179.

24. Bonnie Costello, Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 19.

25. Randall Jarrell, “The Humble Animal,” in Poetry and the Age (New York: Knopf, 1953), pp. 180-81.

26. Marianne Moore, “Henry James as a Characteristic American,” in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, ed. Patricia C. Willis (New York: Viking-Penguin Books, 1987), p. 317 (hereinafter designated Complete Prose).

27. Marianne Moore, “Conjuries That Endure,” in Predilections (New York: Viking Press, 1955), p. 34.

28. Marianne Moore, “Anna Pavlova,” in Predilections, p. 157. This essay appeared originally in Dance Index 3 (March 1944): 47-52.

29. Moore, “Subject, Predicate, Object,” p. 46.

30. Marianne Moore, “A Burning Desire to Be Explicit,” in Tell Me, Tell Me (New York: Viking Press, 1967), p. 6.

31. Willis, Marianne Moore: Vision into Verse, p. 100.

32. Hall Interview, MMR, p. 257.

33. William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 146.

34. Williams, Selected Essays, p. 292.

35. Marius de Zayas, “Femme!” 291 9 (November 1915), as quoted in Henry M. Sayre, The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 63.

36. Gilligan, In a Different Voice, p. 6.