readers with material things in a new way. Joyce elaborates on the connection between these items and abstract poetry itself:

Even though abstract poetry is obscure, Moore poses, it is worth our attention because it is no more difficult to understand than anything else around us: it remains a reflection of the changes in our culture.

The notion of abstraction is especially important for modern poetry, and for Moore’s own writing, which, like T. S. Eliot’s and Wallace Stevens’s, is dense with allusions and requires readers to be active participants in the meaning-making process. In this sense, the poem is validation, justification, and an example of the very ideas it espouses. Unlike concrete images, which provide a mental picture of the material world and evoke its sensuous qualities, abstractions denote qualities or attributes of things and are based in the world of ideas. In the early part of the twentieth century when Moore wrote this poem, abstraction was becoming more and more fashionable in the arts and in poetry. In painting, artists such as Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky composed wholly abstract paintings based upon ideas and theories rather than what they saw with their eyes, and in theater dramatists such as Eugene O’Neill and Frank Wedekind wrote plays that featured representative types rather than particular people with distinct personalities.

The genuine, for Moore, then, did not mean just the real or the original, at least not in any surface- level way. The writing of others was as important to her own work as her perceptions of worldy things. This is evident in her allusions to Leo Tolstoy and William Butler Yeats to make her argument. Tolstoy struggled to say where poetry ended and prose began, and Yeats argued that William Blake was a “literalist of the imagination” in his belief that figures conjured by the imagination had real observable properties. Moore’s poem, then, an example itself of the genuine, achieves its effects not only through its concrete and detailed imagery but also by referring readers to other writers. In this way, she draws on tradition while simultaneously helping to reshape it. Quoting and alluding to other writing is a key feature of intertextuality, the notion that all texts are related and ultimately depend upon one another for their meaning. In Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions, Bonnie Costello argues that Moore’s strategy in quoting others is part of her broader strategy of evasion, of scrupulously examining something—an object, an animal, an idea—but never defining it precisely, a strategy seemingly at odds with her own reputation for precision and accuracy. Costello writes that in “Poetry,” Moore

posits an ideal in which the genuine is absorbed into form, reference into poem, the real into the imaginary. In the meantime poetry turns out to be a magic trick that does not quite succeed, but which absorbs us in its dazzling sleight-of-hand, in which we think we glimpse the genuine before it turns into the poet once again.

For Costello, then, Moore is an illusionist, which means that Costello, as critic, is the one who “unmasks” her tricks. This is an intriguing reading of the poem, given Moore’s own description of critics in this poem and others. It is interesting that Moore revised “Poetry” a number of times, and that her last revision, published in her Complete Poems (1967) consisted of just three lines, thereby giving critics paradoxically both more and less to work with. It is more because critics can now focus on Moore’s practice of revision and the evolution of her thinking about poetry, and it is less because three lines is fewer than twenty-nine.

Critics have paid more attention to her numerous revisions of the poem than the poem itself. Bonnie Honigsblum, for example, in “Marianne Moore’s Revisions of ‘Poetry,’” argues that Moore revised her poem through the years because she was influenced by other writers, and that Moore’s idea of the possibility of poetry itself evolved. Focusing on Moore’s notes to the poem, what literary theorists sometime refer to as its “paratextuality,” Honigsblum claims that what Moore left out in terms of explanatory notes, rather than what she included, tells readers more about her reasons for revision than the revisions themselves. It is in this extra-literary material that researchers have looked for clues to Moore’s intentions and meanings. This is fitting, considering that Moore considered her writing part of the world-as-text around her, instead of merely an expression of individual genius, as other poets might claim. The clearest expression of what she meant by the “genuine” in poetry is best summed up by her own words, written in a letter to a college student (reprinted in The Marianne Moore Newsletter), Thomas P. Murphy, who had asked her what she meant by the term.

I meant by the genuine, a core of value—expressed in whatever way the writer can best express it. Like you, I prefer rhyme to free verse; I like a tune and I feel that one should be as clear as one’s natural reticence allows one to be. The maximum efficiency of expression in poetry should be at least as great as it could be in prose; certainly, one should be natural. The reversed order of words seems to me poetic suicide.

Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “Poetry,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2003. Semansky is an instructor of literature and composition.

It is a truism that all poems are “about” poetry. At least the next nine pieces in Complete Poems are more or less direct treatments of poetry itself and of the poet and his critics. In “Poetry” Moore stated something of her own artistic creed; in “Pedantic Literalist,” “Critics and Connoisseurs,” and “The Monkeys,” she commented upon criticism; in “In the Days of Prismatic Color,” “Peter,” “Picking and Choosing,” “England,” and “When I Buy Pictures,” she presented particular aspects of her aesthetics.

In its complete form “Poetry” contains Moore’s most comprehensive reflections on her art. Since she customarily made decisions for artistic reasons, it is most likely that she became dissatisfied with the poem’s views or with the way it expresses them. It is also possible that she was tired of the endless rehashing of the poem by critics. Whatever her motive, in her last revision she retained only two and a half of the first three lines of the 1951 version. The resulting fragment amounts to an abstract summary of her position, lacking the detail that made the position vividly comprehensible. The editors of the 1981 collection complied with her wishes by publishing the abbreviated version in the text; fortunately, in the view of most readers, they gave the full version in the notes. I will discuss this version. The beginning assertion that “I, too, dislike it” is sometimes quoted as evidence that Moore was a good sophisticate who did not take her art seriously, that under the skin she was essentially a middle-class intellectual without unmodish convictions. But to so read her is to read quite wrongly. Though the remark is on the face of it ironic, it is more than a simple comment of obvious indirection. She was declaring her disgust with the common view of poetry as a way of prettifying standard opinions, usually those of intellectual liberalism. The critics who read her as having contempt for all poetry are thus hoisted on their own petard: the kind of poetry she disliked is, or includes, that which they commonly prefer. What she liked is “the genuine”; the rest of “Poetry” is an effort at explanation of this quality.

Her speaker declares, in lines reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” that vivid presentation of the specific details of a subject is important not because it may lead to “high-sounding interpretation” but because it is “useful”: because it can lead to the “genuine.” But if these details are only “derivative,” removed from the actuality of the experience, none of us will admire them. The “us” is delightfully and pointedly represented as creatures engaged in a variety of activities; the passage deftly scores the “immovable critic” as a horse to whom the work of art is a flea. No one, the poem is saying, is likely to be diverted from his usual concerns by anything other than the accurately presented. All the “us” are possible subjects; even the business and schoolroom documents sometimes excluded from the canon of literary material may be used for poetry.

Yet, as these inclusions would indicate, the mere thing in itself is not a poem: “half poets” who celebrate the humdrum detail for its own sake do not thereby make poetry. What is important is that the poet be true ultimately, not to fact but to his imagination; poets must be “literalists of the imagination,” above the insolence of expecting presentation of the trivial to be poetry. The poet must give “‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’”—a populace of real objects that, taken together, will produce an imagined experience. Perhaps no one at present has achieved such art; meanwhile, one may qualify as being “interested in poetry” if he demands fulfillment of the objectivist paradox that “rawness,” the accurate presentation of the thing itself, must be the basis for, the material of, a “genuine” garden that is more than the sum of its physical components.

This theory is, of course, ultimately a neoromantic one; for it requires something more than realism of observation. It does insist, however, that one start from the accurately realized object. In Moore’s creed, poetry must climb to heights beyond realism, but it must begin its ascent on a stairway of fact. The enameled kylin of “Nine Nectarines” was a better object of art than the painted fruit, though delineated with perhaps equal inaccuracy because his creator perceived the spirit within him.

In rhetorical form “Poetry” follows one of Moore’s common patterns; moving from an artfully casual beginning to a climax of feeling in the nextto- last stanza, it then ends almost off-handedly with a final, fairly direct comment upon what has been presented. As a work of art, it is its own exemplification. Though it deals more directly with an abstract subject than most of her work, it is grounded on a sufficient quota of such specificities as “hair that can rise,” a bat upside down, a “wild horse taking a roll.” Because it is provided with these concrete details, it is much more successful than “In This Age of Hard Trying, Nonchalance…” in which the subject is equally abstract but the incident the poem is based upon is not clearly delineated.

Each of the remaining eight poems on poetry works through a particular object or set of circumstances. The injunction in “Poetry” that one must be a “literalist of the imagination” does not, of course, mean approval of the “Pedantic Literalist” who is disparaged in the poem of this title. The chief error of the mundanely minded is illustrated as deceptiveness: his failure to perform what he seems to promise. Such a literalist is termed in the opening line a “Prince Rupert’s drop” (a blob of glass so treated that it appears attractive but flies apart when handled) and a “paper muslin ghost,” a spurious spirit that would crumple if embraced. A further comparison is to a heart that, failing to give warning of its weakness, caused its owner’s death. The result of long practice at deception—perhaps of trying vainly and unimaginatively to make poetry out of the merely literal—is that the spontaneity with which even the “literalist” is born turns into wood.

The “hardihood” that resists spontaneities is the topic of “Critics and Connoisseurs,” a poem opening with the somewhat resounding remark that there is “a great amount of poetry in unconscious/ fastidiousness.” Certain “products” of conscious fastidiousness are “well enough in their way,” the poem continues, but such spontaneous attempts at careful procedure as a child’s efforts to right a toy and to feed a puppy are better acts of art because they are unforced. Another example of overdone fastidiousness is a swan remembered as reluctant to give up its “disbelief,” its false dignity, in order to eat food thrown to it. In the third stanza the poem turns to “you,” the critics and connoisseurs who, like the swan, have “ambition without understanding.” An illustration of the fault is furnished by the behavior of an ant that foolishly continued attempts to find a use for burdens that could contribute nothing to ant goals. The poem ends with an inquiry: of what use are such ambitions as those of the swan and the ant, ambitions to maintain an impenetrable reserve or to demonstrate that one has struggled for a useless trophy? Remembering the comment in “Poetry” that objects are good if in some sense useful, we may deduce that critics, like the swan, and connoisseurs, like the ant, are guilty of adopting attitudes and of choosing goals that could be valuable if intended to serve some useful purpose but are often clung to without understanding. The poem is recommending more attention to the spirit, less to the letter.

“The Monkeys” makes it clear that, though the artist is to find a “spirit” in the object his enterprise is not to be an expedition into the “arcanic.” The poem, which begins with comments upon sights observed during a long-past trip to a menagerie (or a parliament of literary critics?) remarks on the difficulty of recalling in detail the reasons for the impression of “magnificence” that remains. But one creature will not be forgotten, a large, kingly cat who perhaps represents those described at the end of “Poetry” as “interested in poetry.” He, it seems, gave the indignant speech of the last two stanzas of “The Monkeys,” a protest against critics’ imposition of “inarticulate frenzy” and their insistence on almost “malignant” depths in poetry. Moore, an impressionist in her own criticism, was again arguing for the spontaneous rather than the codified and pseudo-profound that she apparently believed typical of the “immovable” critic of “Poetry,” the “consciously fastidious” interpreter of “Critics and Connoisseurs.”

The ease with which she had a cat deliver a comment, almost a diatribe, on literary criticism demonstrates the art in the seemingly casual beginning and an ending that give a rightness to the choice of a feline spokesman. Having an animal convey the message provides a neat irony; the poem’s original title, “My Apish Cousins,” made somewhat more obvious the ironic comparison of human and animal.

(The unimaginative literalist was again a target in “Melanchthon,” a work printed in 1951 but omitted from the 1981 book. It closes with a question that amounts to an assertion of the belief that the depth of a life and of a poet’s work will not be perceived by one who fails to sense the “unreason” or mystery that Moore believed to lie behind all experience.)

Yet though the poet is not be “consciously fastidious” and is to see an “unreason,” he is nevertheless to be clear. “In the Days of Prismatic Colour” declares that early in creation color was “fine” or exact, not because of art but because of its closeness to its origins. Even “obliqueness,” indirection, was apparent and understandable, not hidden. But now the oblique is no longer accessible, and color no longer holds its purity; original simplicity has been replaced by “complexity.” Though there is nothing wrong with complexity when it reflects actual perception, it is wrong when indulged in to the point that it obscures. And it is especially wrong when made an end in itself, when a poet values the vehemence instead of the worth of what he is saying, and insists that all truth must be dark. Such insistence, being “principally throat,” is a “sophistication” that is the direct opposite to truth.

Sophisticates, it appears, view the truth as something like a monster of Greek myth, crawling, gurgling, and darksome. “To what purpose!,” she exclaims, are the perverse misunderstandings that see truth as complex and even as monstrous. Truth is “no Apollo / Belvedere, no formal thing”: it is, we gather, spontaneous and unconscious. Though complexity may appear in it, not this but courage and endurance are its chief characteristics. The “wave” of critical fashion, of philosophical challenge, may roll over it; but, like the cliff in “The Fish,” it will survive.

The virtue of being “natural,” of doing without pretense or alibi what one is designed to do, is celebrated with appropriate playfulness in “Peter,” a presentation of a cat belonging to two of Moore’s women friends and a demonstration of her ability to exemplify in a poem the virtues she was meditating upon in the process of writing it. The observations of Peter that she sets down are those identified with what might be called his cat-ness: complete relaxation, narrowed eyes, obvious nightmares, and lack of concern with judgment that would condemn him for possessing the claws and tail he was born with. Emphasis is upon his animality, his unself-conscious turning from the coddled to the clawing and back again. The poem has been read as an attack on Catholicism, the cat representing the church that claims to have been founded by the apostle Peter and that to some Protestants has appeared as both lethargic and rapacious. The poem has even been read as a feminis attack on Catholicism’s failure to ordain women. But it takes a considerable stretch to read into the piece an attack on another Christian church: the focus is on the cat in his cat-ness, not on use of him as a symbol, and when the poem appeared in 1924 neither Moore’s own Presbyterian church nor other mainline denominations were ordaining women. Remaining unabashed by the “published fact”—his obvious animality—and willing “to purloin, to pursue” as instinct bids him, Peter the cat is a living example of natural behavior.

That naturalness is essential for the literary critic, who should see literature as “a phase of life,” is the assertion of “Picking and Choosing.” The advice is, as in “In the Days of Prismatic Colour,” that we should not approach literature with fearful reverence. And, as in the passage in “Poetry” dismissing “half poets,” we must not come to it as though it were merely commonplace. In his statement the critic must use the “true” word, avoiding the murky and the faked. As examples of the kind of “fact” that critcs should give, the speaker presents capsule comments on Shaw and Henry James that mention flaws in their work but also point to virtues. (The comment on James has changed several times. The first version said flatly that James “is not profound”; later versions say that James is all that he is said to be “if feeling is profound”; the 1981 book reads “James / is all that has been said of him”.)

Moore concludes the passage with lines observing that Thomas Hardy, for example, should be seen not primarily as either novelist or poet but as a writer conforming to a dictum like T. S. Eliot’s assertion that one should interpret life through “the medium of the emotions.” “The Monkeys” shows Moore’s own preference for criticism that has an emotional basis and her scorn for merely intellectual methods. She did in “Picking and Choosing” concede that, if the critic must have an opinion, he may be permitted to “know what he likes.” The next lines admit Gordon Craig and Kenneth Burke to the rank of good critic, both apparently having impressed Moore as knowing what they like.

Thought of Burke brings up the phrase summa diligentia, which Moore translated (in the essay “Humility, Concentration, and Gusto”) as “with all speed.” These words remind the speaker of the schoolboy mistranslation of the Latin as meaning “on top of the diligence,” an example of one kind of bad literary criticism. In a tone of reasonableness the poem then comments that “We are not daft about the meaning but that the “familiarity” critics exhibit with “wrong meanings” is puzzling. The next several lines address those who exhibit such familiarity, adjuring them that, for example, the simple candle should not be seen as an electrified mechanism.

The last six lines ostensibly are addressed to a dog yapping to the world at large his daydream that he has caught a badger. He is told that he should remember that, even if he had really accomplished the feat, he would scarcely need to make such a clamor about it. The moral is that the critic should give hints, a few spontaneous reactions, not mystification and not boasts of imagined retrievals. The poet is recommending the process named in her title: the “picking and choosing” that she considered to be primarily a task for the emotions, not for powers of abstraction and analysis. We may note that Moore could be reasonably impersonal in her opinions of critics, for her work had been praised since the 1920s by Yvor Winters, R. P. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, Eliot, Stevens, and Williams—a range including “new critics,” impressionists, and eclectics.

Source: Bernard F. Engle, “The Armored Self: Selected Poems,” in Marianne Moore, rev. ed., Twayne’s United States Authors Series, Twayne, 1989.

Marianne Moore’s decision to cut her wellknown anthology piece “Poetry” down to an unremarkable three-liner bearing the same title has baffled readers and critics alike. Such a histrionic, exhibitionistic gesture—like a woman taking scissors and roughly shearing off an admired head of hair. (No sexism intended here—I’m referring to a celluloid archetype.) Clearly it was an act of some kind of loathing, a deed perpetrated against the self. My guess is that Moore wished to inflict a symbolic injury upon a sensibility that could produce poetry only of a certain kind. Never mind that it was a poetry that had won for her a near-universal adulation. It was as if she knew in her heart wherein lay the real soul of poetry—in the genuine—and she knew that her own work could never get there. The disfiguring truncation of one of her best-loved poems was her way of incising the recognition directly into the body of that work. From the Selected Poems of 1935, as preserved in The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, we can cull a rather interesting set of aesthetic statements:

“Taller by the length of
a conversation of five hundred years than all
the others,” there was one, whose tales
of what could never have been actual—
were better than the haggish, uncompanionable
drawl
of certitude; his byplay
was more terrible in its effectiveness
than the fiercest frontal attack.
The staff, the bag, the feigned inconsequence
of manner, best bespeak that weapon, selfprotectiveness.
—from “In This Age of Hard Trying, Nonchalance
Is Good and”

Prince Rupert’s drop, paper muslin ghost,
white torch—“with power to say unkind
things with kindness, and the most
irritating things in the midst of love and
tears,” you invite destruction.
—from “Pedantic Literalist”

There is a great amount of poetry in unconcious
fastidiousness. Certain Ming
products, imperial floor-coverings of coach
wheel yellow, are well enough in their way but I
have seen
something
that I like better—a
mere childish attempt to make an imperfectly ballasted
animal stand up,
similar determination to make a pup
eat his meat from the plate.
—from “Critics and Connoisseurs”

complexity is not a crime, but carry
it to the point of murkiness
and nothing is plain. Complexity,
moreover, that has been committed to darkness, instead
of
granting itself to be the pestilence that it is, moves
all about
as if to bewilder us with the dismal
fallacy that insistence
is the measure of achievement and that all
truth must be dark. Principally throat, sophistication
is as it always
has been—at the antipodes from the
initial great truths.
—from “In the Days of Prismatic Color”

Small dog, going over the lawn nipping the linen
and saying
that you have a badger—remember Xenophon;
only rudimentary behavior is necessary to put us on
the scent.
“A right good salvo of barks,” a few strong wrinkles
puckering
the skin between the ears, is all we ask.
—from “Picking and Choosing”

—a collection of little objects—
sapphires set with emeralds, and pearls with a
moonstone,
made fine
with enamel in gray, yellow, and dragon-fly blue;
a lemon, a pear
and three bunches of grapes tied with silver: your
dress a
magnificent square
cathedral tower of uniform
and at the same time diverse appearance—a
species of vertical vineyard rustling in the storm
of conventional opinion. Are they weapons or
scalpels?
Whetted to brilliance
by the hard majesty of that sophistication which is
superior to
opportunity,
these things are rich instruments with which to experiment.
But why dissect destiny with instruments
more highly specialized than components of
destiny itself?
—from “Those Various Scalpels”

Perceiving that in the masked ball
attitude, there is a hollowness
that beauty’s light momentum can’t redeem;
since disproportionate satisfaction anywhere
lacks a proportionate air,
he let us know without offense
by his hands’ denunciatory
upheaval, that he despised the fashion
of curing us with an ape—making it his care
to smother us with fresh air.
—from “Nothing Will Cure the Sick Lion but to
Eat an Ape”

I could go on citing passages. Indeed, I could argue—some probably have—that the whole of Moore’s oeuvre is an aesthetics, a careful establishing through example and commentary of both what is seemly for human conduct and what is essential for true artistic expression. It is the latter that interests me here, especially since Moore appears to propose values that are at odds with her own poetic performance. “Are they weapons or scalpels?” she asks of the hypertrophied refinements of civilization. We may well ask the same about her own lines. The first citation, from “In This Age of Hard Trying, Nonchalance Is Good and,” would suggest weapons, but of a defensive, not a first-strike, variety. Moore praises the power of indirection over the “haggish, uncompanionable drawl / of certitude,” but then she mitigates that praise somewhat by tracing the origin of that power back to “selfprotectiveness” and revealing it, ultimately, as a byproduct of vulnerability. But this is nothing more than the age-old view of art as compensation. Weapons or scalpels? Scalpels they assuredly are not. For the scalpel is an instrument designed to cut through surfaces; its purpose is to get the user inside. And Moore’s art is anything but interior. She is a taxonomist, a gleaner, a weaver. The most thrilling feature of her poetry is its attentiveness and deliberation—the way she ranges over the intricate surfaces of the material and textual worlds, drawing forth what she needs with an avian fastidiousness. Moore’s poems are not written from within; they are appliquéd. She subjects what she has elicited from the near-infinite plenitude of the out there to the stringent ordering system of her syntax. She produces her effects through shocks of precision and shocks of juxtaposition. Our diffuse imaging of the world collides with her insistently accurate ordering of things. If she strikes an occasional depth, if she produces what appears to be a penetration, it is not by virtue of any probing action of her own. This comes about, rather, because we, as readers, are forced to make an inference out of certain bits of adjacent information. We make the sequences yield sense—we do the penetrating. How odd it is, then, that Moore should on so many occasions adumbrate artistic values that her own craft belies. Reading over these quotations, we can abstract a clear preference for frankness over duplicity, simplicity over ornamentation and needless complexity, directness over sophistication, and “unconscious” naturalness over the straining for effect that is artifice. A preference, in short, for the genuine. But Moore’s own poetry is nothing if not ironic and oblique. Her detailings are almost blindingly precise, but their accumulation produces a sly indirection. Moore is ornamental and deliberately disproportionate. When she inspects destiny, she does so with instruments more specialized than destiny itself. She is, herself, “principally throat”—and in this resides her idiosyncratic magic. The tension between her beliefs—or, to use a Moore word, “preferences”—and her practice is immediately evident in these quoted passages. It manifests itself as a pervasive irony. Listen as she militates against complexity in a series of lines that are themselves semantically, syntactically, and prosodically complex:

Complexity,
moreover, that has been committed to darkness, instead
of
granting itself to be the pestilence that it is, moves
all
about as if to bewilder us with the dismal
fallacy that insistence
is the measure of all achievement and that all
truth must be dark.

What is this self-reflexive rhetorical stratagem but an effort to distance and disarm a truth that she is compelled to iterate? There is a second, even more obvious sign of her tension, her peculiar entrapment between preference and practice. Moore relies heavily on displacement. She speaks with a domino held in front of her features. She assigns the burden of speaking the truth to some creature (a cat, for instance, in a poem I did not cite here—“The Monkeys”), or to some incorporated literary source, like Xenophon. When she does use her own voice, as in “Critics and Connoisseurs” or “Those Various Scalpels,” the linguistic screen—complexity—is securely in place. For Moore could not turn her recognitions directly upon herself without thereby negating her sensibility and her poetic mode—the work could not survive. And yet this is precisely what she has done in her one act of self-mutilation. She has pronounced her truth directly, in the first person, and the second version shows us what results when the poet abides by her own strictures. The piece might make more sense if it were called “My Poetry.” . . . If the original version of “Poetry” was the symbolic site of Moore’s aesthetic assault upon herself, then we may reasonably regard it as rep- resenting the poetic sensibility that a part of her despised. The poem is, in fact, a kind of anthology of the attributes and techniques that readers have most cherished in Moore—the very ones that made her the revolutionist she was. The original is prosy, prosodically sprawling; it is syntactically complex, to the point of near unintelligibility in places; it shows off Moore’s taxonomic fetish, her delight in drawing together creatures from the various phyla of the natural and human worlds (“a tireless wolf … the baseball fan”); it incorporates textual material from other sources (Tolstoy and A. H. Bullen on Yeats)—thereby sabotaging self-containment, and opening the poem out to the continuum of the printed word; it is rhetorically strategic, in the way that so many of her poems are, starting with a straightforward assertion, building and cantilevering sense outward until it almost evaporates (e.g., the sentence that begins, “When they become so derivative …”), then rounding to some clear assertion; it encloses, here more fully than elsewhere, an aesthetic formulation: a justification of what is now fashionably called framing. The revised “Poetry” has eliminated everything but the prosiness. A short poem that is a shaved-down version of a well-known longer poem is not the same thing as an independent short poem—that should be obvious. Moore’s second “Poetry” cannot be read except against the original text. It makes no declaration of independence. Indeed, Moore saw fit to include the first “Poetry” in the notes to her Complete Poems. We are asked to read her gesture, to puzzle out her reasons for disapproving of the original. There are two ways of looking at the matter— unless, of course, we ascribe her move to pure whimsy. If we think of the second version as a rewrite, then the poem has to be seen as a replacement, effectively canceling the first version. But then Moore would not have included it in her Complete Poems even as a note. More tellingly, the modifications made are not those of a rewrite, but an edit. She did not alter a single word. The words (most of them) have been struck out; only punctuation and spacing have been altered. We are compelled, therefore, to regard the second “Poetry” as an operation performed upon the first. A cut, an erasure—our choice of words here carries large implications, determines whether we regard her action as one of subliminal violence, or some mere agitated impatience. . . . If the short poem is an edit, then what interpretation can we make? One benign possibility is that Moore recognized, as an editor might, a prolixity; she saw “Poetry” as verbose and she moved to rectify the matter. She made her cuts in a spirit of “Enough said!” But this does not get rid of the larger symbolic statement. For according to that criterion, the bulk of Moore’s work is marred by a similar abundance. It is her very method: to harvest and arrange. Trim one detail and you are soon throwing everything out the window. The other possibility, to which I incline, is that Moore was deliberately repudiating everything that followed the first two sentences. Not just verbal superfluity, but manner and tone as well. The word “genuine” is placed for maximum impact. Moore was henceforth connecting genuineness with simple, direct, unsophisticated utterance. She was establishing it as the primary moving force of all real poetry. So much the worse that she could not attain it in her own work. At the core of the issue is irony. Moore’s poetry— and her “Poetry”—is the apotheosis of ironic discourse. It belongs to “civilization” as opposed to “culture,” which means, according to the Spenglerian definition I’m using, that it represents vital forces embalmed, order and intellection set above instinct and energy. All ironic usage implies selfconsciousness on the part of the speaker. An ironic statement does not fully coincide with itself—it incorporates a play between what is said and the underlying intention, between utterance and implication, between the content and the means. The etymology of the word gives us, from the Greek, “dissimulation” and “feigning”; an ironist is one who “says less than he thinks or means” (Skeat). Irony is, to put it bluntly, the inverse of the genuine. We have Moore’s statements on the matter. Using the image of the “drop,” or concealing cloth, in “Pedantic Literalist,” she asserts in no uncertain terms that duplicity—seen here as the gulf between affect and true feeling—is seen as inviting “destruction.” In “Nothing Will Cure the Sick Lion,” she strikes against the “masked ball attitude.” Examples could be multiplied. And while in neither case is she addressing irony per se, she might as well be. Irony, like duplicity, depends upon a distance between feeling and expression; the difference between them is merely one of degree. Irony, then, is the opposite of the “unconscious fastidiousness” that Moore celebrates in the child’s attempt to prop the faltering pet (children, of course, are notoriously incapable of dissimulation). It shares nothing in common with the dog’s reac- tion, the “few strong wrinkles puckering the skin between the ears,” that she fastens upon in “Picking and Choosing.” In poem after poem, as it turns out, she aligns herself with the naïfs, simple creatures and beings that coincide with themselves, that bear no taint of self-consciousness. We can change what we do, but we cannot really change what we are. Moore was imprisoned— by disposition, by sensibility—in a condition of ironic self-consciousness. She could fully comprehend its limitations, but she was powerless to achieve the poetic simplicity and force she admired. Consciousness moves along a unidirectional path— it can strive to evolve, but it cannot undo previous evolutionary attainments. Moore was stuck. Moore was not, however, a two-face. She did not say one thing while meaning another. No, her distinctive irony was the product of a disjunction between means and ends. Her technique, which we can see as her effort to come to terms with the gap between her belief and her natural endowment, was to render up the mind’s motion, its progress toward some realization or certainty—even though, especially though, that realization finally argued against the hesitant discursiveness of the process. Moore set out after simplicity along the only route she could take: that of complexity. She stalked unsophisticated truths in a sophisticated manner. She could not help herself. But when her eye beheld what her hand had done, she had to cry out against it. The mere tension between expression and content was not enough. One time, and one time only, she excised as superfluous the manneristic approach to truth and gave just the truth itself. The truth she gave—her recognition of the genuine— reflected directly on her deed. And vice versa: The deed was the warranty for the words. Considered by itself, without the ghost-text of the original, the short version of “Poetry” is Moore’s worst poem. We should be happy that she did not thereafter insist that Dichtung and Wahrheit are always the same thing. She continued to spin out her delightful and sublimely ironic poems for a good many years. Though she had cut off all of her beautiful hair, it did grow back again. Source: Sven Birkerts, “Marianne Moore’s ‘Poetry’: She Disliked It, She Did,” in The Electric Life, William Morrow, 1989, pp. 127–37.