688
PARTISAN REVIEW
and, dissatisfied, decides that it is prose? Aren't these lines (ordinary
enough lines for her) the work of someone even at first glance a poet,
with the poet's immemorial power to make the things of this world
seen and felt and living in words? And even
if
the rhythms were those
of prose-these are not-wouldn't we rather have poetry in prose
than
prose in verse? I wouldn't trade
Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid
oourted
by
Incapacity
for some epics.
Nowadays, over here, Miss Moore wins all the awards there are;
but it took several decades for what public there is to get used to her–
she was, until very recently, read unreasonably little and praised reason·
ably much. Even the circumstances hindered. The dust-jacket of her
Collected Poems
says: "Since the former volumes are out of print many
readers will now, for the first time, have the opportunity to own the
treasure of her poetry." This
is
a felicitous way for a publishing finn
to say that
it
has allowed to remain out of print, for many years, most
of the poetry of one of the great living poets. Miss Moore's prose-seem–
ing, matter-of-factly rhythmed syllabic verse, the odd look most of her
poems have on the page (their unusual stanzaic patterns, their words
divided at the ends of lines, give many of them a consciously, sometimes
misleadingly experimental or modernist look), their almost ostentatious
lack of transitions and explanations, the absence of romance and
rhetoric, of acceptedly Poetic airs and properties, did most to keep
conservative readers from liking her poetry. Her restraint, her lack–
her wonderful lack-of arbitrary intensity or violence, of sweep and
overwhelmingness and size, of cant, of sociological significance, and
so on, made her unattractive both to some of the conservative readers
of our age and to some of the advanced ones. Miss Moore was for a
lon~
time (in her own phrase about something else) "like. Henry
James 'damned by the public for decorum,' / not decorum but re–
straint." She demands, "When I Buy Pictures," that the picture5 "not
wish
to
disarm anything." (Here I feel like begging for the pictures,
in a wee voice: "Can't they be just a
little
disarming?" My tastes
are less firmly classical.) The poems she made for herself were so
careful never to wish to disarm anyone, to appeal to anyone's habitual
responses and grosser instincts, to sweep anyone resistlessly away, that
they seemed to
~ost
readers eccentrically but forbiddingly austere,
so that the readen averted their faces from her calm, elegant, matter–
of-fact face, so exactly moved and conscientiously unappealing as
itself to seem averted. It was not the defects of her qualities but the
qualities that made most of the public reluctant to accept her as more
than a special case: her extraordinary discrimination, precision and
