The Model Stanza: The Organic Origin of Moore's Syllabic Verse

Abstract

In the poems that she published between 1932 and 1936, Marianne Moore revived the syllabically based stanza form that she had developed in many of her earlier observations. During the early Twenties she had begun experimenting with free verse by rearranging, for example, the long twenty-two and thirty-two syllable lines of 1918's A Graveyard in the Middle of the (which became A Grave) and 1920's England into the irregular lines of the free form. The great 1923-24 trio of longer poems-Marriage, An Octopus, and Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns-was also published in free verse. Why then did she return in the early Thirties to the syllable mode? The five-year foray (1920-25) into free forms made virtually no difference in the sound, the spoken dimension, of Moore's verse, since the natural rhythms of speech and written prose had already been accommodated by her avoidance of regular metrics and her preference for the inaudible syllabic measure. But what free verse did override was one important element of her poetry's textual dimension, the stanza form visibly repeated on the printed page. In the Thirties, when Moore returned from editing The Dial to her own poetry, she turned neither to her early meters nor to free verse but to the syllabically measured stanza. What follows here is an exploration of the nature of that syllabic form, its origin, its role as a textual format, and its implications within the larger context of modernism. We know that in Moore's process of composing her verse syllabic design was a secondary consideration. The stanza form for any one