A Disjointed Distrust: Marianne Moore's World War II

Abstract

Most readers will agree that Marianne Moore, the premier poet of what she liked to call observations, presented in her work through the 1930s the 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them' recommended by the speaker in the early, unbutchered versions of her poem Poetry. One deduces that in such gardens the toads may be transmogrified into princes. But readers are also commonly aware that much of what she wrote after the early 1940s maintained the manner but not the steely precision of her earlier work. Her later work is notably more public, less intense: the gardens are less firmly imagined, their toads remain warted amphibians. Perhaps the turn from the great poems of precise observation is to be attributed to the middle-age blahs (Moore became fifty in 1937). A more rational view, however, is that World War II clouded her lenses. Her poems of the war years suggest that she found the war destructive to her comfortable understanding of the world as a place where though confusion is rampant and danger always exists as in her poem Steeple-Jack one may hope to survive by armoring the self with courage, fortitude, honesty, and other primary values. The war threatened to destroy not only her understanding, her ability to make the voyages of discovery that she enacts in her poems, but also her preferred persona, the self as moral observer that she had painstakingly created. Though all of her poems touching on the war indicate that her comprehension was under siege, the difficulty she found is most directly apparent in In Distrust of Merits (Complete Poems 136-38), a piece that has been both praised and damned. It was hailed at the time by W. H. Auden as the best poem of the war and was saluted in doggerel by Robert Penn Warren. It appears today in both the Norton and the