690
PARTISAN REVIEW
magnificence of "the conjunction of the Monongahela and the Al–
legheny," but none of the rest of us saw that it was part of a poem--our
America was here around us, then, and we didn't know. And isn't the
conclusion of Miss Moore's poem the best and truest case that can
be
made out for Americans?
It is most barbarously unjust to treat her (as some admiring critics
do) as what she
is
only when she parodies henelf: a sort of museum
poet, an eccentric shut-in dealing in the collection, renovation, and
exhibition of precise exotic properties. For she is a lot more American
a writer (if to
be
an American is to
be
the heir, or heiress, of all the
ages) than Thomas Wolfe or Erskine Caldwell or-but space fails me;
she looks lovingly and knowingly at this "grassless, linksless [no longer],
languageless country in which letters are written/ not in Spanish, not
in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,! but in plain American which
cats and dogs can read!" Doesn't one's heart reverberate to that last
phrase "as to a trumpet"?
Miss Moore is one of the most perceptive of writers, sees extra–
ordinarily-the words fit her particularly well because of the ambiguity
that makes them refer both to sensation and intelligence. One reads, at
random anlong lines one likes:
But we prove, we do not explain our
birth;
reads about the pangolin
returning before sunrise; stepping in the
moonlight,! on the moonlight peculiarly;
reads,
An aspect may deceive;
as the/ elephant's columbine-tubed trunk/ held waveringly out-/ an at
will heavy thing-is/ delicate) Art is unfortunate./ One may be a
blameless/ bachelor, and it is but a/ step to Congreve.
One relishes a
fineness and strangeness and firmness of discrimination that one is not
accustomed to, set forth with a lack of fuss that one is not accustomed
to either; it is the exact opposite of all those novels which present, in
the most verbose and elaborate of vocabularies, with the greatest and
most obvious of pains, some complacently and irrelevantly Sensitive per–
ceptions. How much has been left out, here! (One remembers Kipling's
A cut story is like a poked fire.)
What intelligence vibrates in the
sounds, the rhythms, the pauses, in all the minute particulars that make
up the body of the poem! The tone of Miss Moore's poems, often, is
enough to give the reader great pleasure, since it is a tone of much wit
and precision and intelligence, of irony and forbearance, of unusual
moral penetration-is plainly the voice of a person of good taste and
good sense and good will, of a genuinely humane human being. Because
of the curious juxtaposition of curious particulars, most of the things that
inhabit her poetry seem extraordinarily bright, exact, and there--just
