We Want Moore

Marianne Moore was a modernist or some would argue a post-modernist, American poet and writer, known particularly for her irony, and wit. Her poetry expresses her moral strength and artistic mastery, and can be studied at different levels of complexity. She uses paradoxes, and nature imagery to force two dominating forces in ambiguous way to make a point, which is exemplified in her poem titled “Poetry.”

The poem begins with its speaker making a rather ironic comment about her distaste for poetry, “I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all, this fiddle.”(Moore 438) This comment is contradictory, because while she does not prefer poetry, the speaker nonetheless expresses herself through the medium of a poem. It becomes briefly clear with the use of the word “fiddle.” Apparently, the speaker believes that poetry can be trifling, or that poetry-writing process involves too much petty tampering. The speaker’s conversational opening of the poem allows for a tone that seems casual, yet it one that is marked by witty intelligence.

Lines 2-3 contains a statement that argues with the one in lines one and two. Here Moore admits that although one might think oneself perfectly despising poetry or poetry-writing process “ Reading it however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine”(Moore 438) To Moore, “the genuine” represents the most essential attribute of good art. She is a difficult poet, but not obscure one; on the contrary she is very clear, but my difficulty at times is her insistence that we think and think well at every point. Similar to William Carlos Williams she shoots what is beautiful in itself and not part of the whole. For both artists imagination is placed in opposition to intellection. The raw material for poetry abounds, it is everywhere, is anything, but it must be imaginatively grasped.

As Elizabeth Joyce refers to “Imagination proceeds from a deeper source than intellection. When in “Melanchthon,” Miss Moore speaks of the “beautiful element of unreason” underlying the poet’s tough hide, I think she is talking about the place where imagination grows. The element is “genuine” because it cannot be otherwise, its source mysterious, hidden under layers of the rational mind. Poetry then when it is genuine, is a collision of this private vision with the outside world. It is an imaginary garden full of real toads.” (Joyce 1)

“Poetry” makes the case for attribution of authority to traditionally “secondary” texts in its insistence that “business documents and schoolbooks” may be poetry. “Throughout Moore’s work her many quotations from secondary sources- precisely the realm of “business documents and school-books” argue for the value of such sources by claiming her work’s dependence on them for its (redefined) authority.” (Gregory 4)Marianne Moore is a very distinctive poet from many of her time, yet there is still an ever going debate about whether to label her a modernist or post-modernist and yet I still don’t have an answer. She embodies and utilizes both forms of art.

Works Cited

Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry

Blackmur, R. P. 'The Method of Marianne Moore." The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidatio. New York: Arrow Editions, 1935.

Bogan, Louise. "American Timeless." Quarterly Review of Literature 4 (1948): 151.
Braithwaite Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Costello, Bonnie. Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981.

Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975.

Daiches, David. The Novel and the Modem World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939.