Not Silence, but Restraint

Abstract

Holding on Upside Down: Life and Work of Marianne Moore by Linda Leavell Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. 480 pages Critical curiosity, which has fussed over so many twentieth-century pages, has tended leave Moore's poems approvingly uninvestigated, noted Hugh Kenner 1963--a crying shame, he thought, because has accomplished things of general import maintenance of that no one else has had patience, skill, discipline, or perfect unself-conscious conviction adumbrate (115). Kenner here echoes T. S. Eliot, who 1935 put all his considerable critical heft behind judgment that Miss Moore's poems form part of small body of durable poetry written our time; of that small body of writings, among what passes for poetry, which an original sensibility and alert intelligence and deep feeling have been engaged maintaining life of English language (109). Moore's last collection, 1967 Complete Poems, wears Eliot's words like armor, and they appear again as sole blurb on 2003 of Marianne Moore. Eliot's judgments may carry peculiar authority (for reasons more contingent than inherent, but that's another story), but blurb-hunters would have no trouble finding equally high praise for Moore writings of poetic peers like William Carlos Williams, H. D., Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, as well as those of their later twentieth-century critical epigones like Kenner, R. P. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, and Randall Jarrell. And yet. first words of Linda Leavell's new biography of Moore are, Greatly beloved yet little understood, highly esteemed yet barely known outside of English departments (xi). In other words, from 1963 2013, state of Moore's reputation had hardly improved. Hence impulse, which I share with other would-be defenders of Moore, pile on praise at start of any general assessment of her life and work. One feels need take prophylactic measures against complacently incurious. In fact, Moore herself, always hyper-sensitive critical response, anticipated this need, which her poems would come be embodied, as she wrote 1915, in such of those tough-grained animals as have outstripped man's suppose / them ephemera, and have earned that fruit of their ability endure blows (Becoming 64). Still, question remains, why must her poetic personae always come thus armored against blows? (Another armored animal, she sighs at beginning of 1936 poem, The Pangolin [Complete 117].) Whence persistent reflexive whim dismiss Moore and her as ephemera? In preface and final chapter of her book, Leavell rehearses most common explanations that have been given for problematic character of Moore's reputation. First (and perhaps also last) there is work's formidable difficulty. Moore's early-to-mid-career poems are unaccommodating (xiii) even by comparison with those of her notoriously difficult peers; they are for connoisseurs only, too good, said Eliot approvingly, to be appreciated anywhere (qtd. Leavell xii). In later life, poems became ever more fluid and technically proficient but process lost the verve of her earlier work (xii), thus gaining Moore a wider audience for a time, but also putting off some of her fans among cognoscenti. Then, there is that self-inflicted wound, omissions and inexplicable revisions Moore's Complete Poems (381), last edition overseen by poet herself, which left readers with a severely limited view of Moore's achievement. Moore's practice of repeatedly reworking her poems and moving them and (mostly) out of her published oeuvre may be seen, as Rachel Blau Duplessis put it, as a salutary outrage upon a fundamental textual institution: 'copy text,' with its iconization of any given of art (10). But one may embrace texts' instability and still concede that their mutable condition makes them fiendishly hard edit. …