Difficult Ground: Poetic Renunciation in Marianne Moore’s “Walking-Sticks and Paperweights and Watermarks”

Abstract

Even most intrepid reader of Marianne Moore might be forgiven for declining to engage her poem and Paperweights and .The last poem Moore published in 1930s, it did not fare well in her own editing of her work. She published it first in Poetry in November 1936 and then revised it for What Are Years? in 1941. Thereafter she never published it again, so it is missing from both her Collected Poems (1951) and her Complete Poems (1967) and has been mostly invisible to Moore scholarship, to say nothing of general readership. (1) As her extensive draft material and correspondence demonstrate, Moore put great deal of work into poem and was never satisfied with it. Criticism has agreed: cited as an example of the tendency of Moore's verse to puzzle her readers (Hadas 72), being perhaps too cluttered and digressive in its associations to be finally successful (Costello 105), and exemplifying tripartite metonymies that (in another context) Moore's mother deemed bizarre, poem is, even for Moore, difficult. (2) It is also beautiful, however, in its spiky and strangely jointed way, and intensity of its tangle of aesthetic pleasures and frustrations is more than incidentally interesting in history of Moore's poetics: it is sign of poem's status as boundary marking end of one phase of Moore's writing life and beginning of another. As we shall argue, some of poem's difficulties resolve nicely when reader knows about objects and exchanges to which they refer. That resolution, however, introduces its own kind of difficulty; and Paperweights and Watermarks may only make sense to one who knows about all experiences, including exchanges of material objects, that went into making it, and poem knows this and is troubled by it. By end of 1930s Moore still believed in level of poetic meaning, traditionally called visionary, that transcends material particularity of texts; however, she had also come to see assertion of poets visionary as directly inimical to web of material, social, and ethical relations that that exists, ideally, to illuminate. Read in light of this tension, we argue, published poems of 1930s that were eventually abandoned, especially and Paperweights and Watermarks, become signs of decisive act of renunciation in Moore's career. The complexity and subtlety of Moore's work up through 1930s has often been contrasted favorably with relative straightforwardness and didacticism of work that followed, particularly in those poems that she revised for her 1951 (Collected Poems. (3) Various persuasive explanations, including Moore's despair at rise of fascism and her own mother's decade of ill health and 1947 death, have been offered to account for change. However, reading of and Paperweights and Watermarks we offer here proposes that that act of renunciation is best understood not solely in psychological, moral, or biographical terms; it suggests instead that there was reasoned philosophical motivation for transformation in and of her work. Our hypothesis is that at end of 1930s Moore decided that conversion of experience into thought (as Emerson has it) is achieved at too great cost to fabric of social relations and material circumstance in which poet lives. Simultaneously, she decided that transformation of genius into practical (as Emerson also has it) would no longer be her poetry's purpose. Emerson calls intellect's conversion of experience into thought a strange process, comparing it to a mulberry leaf [being] converted into satin (60). In celebrated conclusion to Experience, the transformation of genius into practical power is called the which world exists to realize (492). (4) Moore's guiding hope in Walking-Sticks is that poem can participate in both transformations at once, aligning tonus of artisanal production (including papermaking, glass working, and molding of wax into seals) with visionary world of true romance in which beautiful is reliable sign of good. …