THOUGHTS ABOUT MARIANNE MOORE
691
as unfamiliar colors, in unfamiliar combinations, seem impossibly vivid.
She is
the
poet of the particular--<>r, when she fails, of the peculiar;
and is also, in our time,
the
poet of general moral statement. Often, be–
cause of their exact seriousness of utterance, their complete individuality
of embodiment, these generalizations of hers seem almost more particular
than the particulars.
In some of her poems Miss Moore has discovered both a new sort of
subject (a queer many-headed one) and a new sort of connection and
structure for it, so that she has widened the scope of poetry; if
poetry, like other organisms, wants to convert into itself everything
there is, she has helped it to. She has shown us that the world is more
poetic than we thought. She has a discriminating love of what others
have seen and made and said, and has learned (like a burglar who
marks everything that he has stolen with the owner's name, and then
exhibits it in his stall in the marketplace) to make novel and beautiful
use of such things in her own work, where they are sometimes set off
by their surroundings, sometimes metamorphosed. But for Miss Moore
I'd never have got to read about "the emerald's 'grass-lamp glow,''' or
about the Abbe Berlese, who said, "In the camellia-house there must
bel
no smoke from the stove, or dew
onl
the windows, lest the plants ail ..
.
1
mistakes are irreparable and nothing will avail," or about "our clasped
hands that swear, 'By Peace
I
Plenty; asl by Wisdom, Peace,''' or about
any of a thousand such things-so I feel as grateful to her memory as
to a novelist's. Novelists are the most remembering of animals, but
Miss Moore comes next.
Her poems have the excellences not of some specialized, primarily
or exclusively Poetic expression, but of expression in general; she says
so many good things that, call it prose or poetry or what you will, her
work is wonderful. She says, for instance:
...
The polished wedge
that might have split the firmament
was dumb. At last it threw itself away
and falling down, conferred on some poor fool, a privilege.
Is this an aphorism in the form of a fable, or a fable in the form of an
aphorism? It doesn't matter. But how sadly and firmly and mockingly
so
it
is,
whatever
it
is;
we don't need to search for an application.
Miss Moore speaks well, memorably well, unforgettably well, in
many different ways. She is, sometimes, as tersely conclusive as Grimm:
