Randall Jarrell
THOUGHTS ABOUT MARIANNE MOORE
Miss Moore's poems judge what is said about them almost a.s
much as poems can, so that even one's praise is hesitant, uncertain of
its welcome. As her readers know, her father used to say, "The deepest
feeling always shows itself in silence;/ not in silence, but restraint"; and
she herself has said,
"If
tributes cannot/ be implicit, give me diatribes
and the fragrance of iodine." Quotation is a tribute as near implicit as
I can get; so I will quote where I can, and criticize where I can't. (My
father used to say, "The deepest feeling always shows itself in scratches;/
not in scratches, but in iodine.") And I have found one little hole
through which to creep to criticism, Miss Moore's
"If
he must give an
opinion it is permissible that the/ critic should know what he likes." I
know; and to have to give an opinion is to be human. Besides, I have
never believed her father about feeling; "entire affection hateth nicer
hands," as Spenser says, and I should hate to trust to "armour's under–
mining modesty/instead of innocent depravity." And that last quotation
isn't Spenser.
It felt queer to see all over again this year, in English reviews of
Miss Moore's
Collected Poems,!
those
sentences~entences
once so fam–
iliarly American-saying that she isn't a poet at all. I can understand
how anyone looking into her book for the first time, and coming on an
early passage like "Disbelief and conscious fastidiousness were the
staple/ ingredients in its/ disinclination to move. Finally its hardihood
was/ not proof against its/ proclivity to more fully appraise such
bits/ of food as the stream/ bore counter to it," might make this mis–
take; but what goes on in the mind that experiences
And Bluebeard's Tower above the coral-reefs,
the magic mouse-trap closing on all points of the compass,
capping like petrified surf the furious azure of the bay,
where there is
no
dust, and life
is
like a lemon-leaf,
a green piece of tough translucent parchment,
1.
Macmillan. $2.50.