THOUGHTS ABOUT MARIANNE MOORE
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restraint, the odd propriety of her imagination, her gifts of "natural
promptness" (I use the phrase she found, but her own promptness is
pretematural)-all these stood in her way and will go on standing in
her way.
These people who
can't read modern poetry because it's so-this
or that or the other-why can't they read "Propriety" or "The Mind Is
an Enchanting Thing" or "What Are Years" or "The Steeple-Jack"?
Aren't these plain-spoken, highly-formed, thoughtful, sincere, magni–
ficently expressive-the worthy continuation of a great tradition of
English poetry? Wouldn't the poet who wrote the
Horatian Ode
have
been delighted with them? Why should a grown-up, moderately in–
telligent reader have any trouble with an early poem like, say, "New
York"? The words that follow the title, the first words of the poem, are
the savage's romance-here
one stops and laughs shortly, as any–
body but a good New Yorker will. (Her remark about Brooklyn, "this
city of freckled/ integrity," has a more ambiguous face.) She goes on,
by way of the fact that New York is the center of the wholesale fur
trade, to the eighteenth century when furs were the link between the
Five Nations and Bath, between Natty Bumppo and the Trianon:
It is a far cry from the «queen full of jewels"
an,d the beau with the muff,
from the gilt coach shaped like a perfume-bottle,
to the conjunction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny,
and the scholastic philosophy of the wilderness
to combat which one must stand outside and laugh
since to go in is to be lost.
And she finishes by saying about America-truthfully, one thinks and
hopes-that "it is not the dime-novel exterior,/ Niagara Falls, the
calico horses and the war-canoe" that matter, it is not the resources
and the know-how, "it is not the plunder,/ but 'accessibility to ex–
perience.' "
The only way to combat a poem like this is to stand outside and
laugh-to go in is to be lost, and in delight; how can you say better,
more concretely and intelligently and imaginatively, what that long
central sentence says? Isn't the word
scholastic
worth some books?
Of course, if the eighteenth century and the frontier don't interest
you,
if
you've never read or thought anything about them, the
poem will seem to you uninteresting or incommunicative; but it is
unreasonable to blame the poet for that. In grammar school, bent over
the geography book, all of us lingered over the unexpected geometrical
