Friendships and Poetry |Marianne Moore

 

Photo: Moore with her close friend Muhammad Ali. Yes, she really was that cool.

now this is extraordinary but who was aware that Muhammad Ali knew Marianne Moore? And she considered them friends!? 

All of the modernist poets had mottoes or credos that pointed to their philosophy of poetry.

a.  Robert Frost said a “poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom,” and a poem is “a momentary stay against confusion.”

b.  Ezra Pound said, “Make it new” and “Go in fear of abstractions.”

c.  T.S. Eliot wanted to “shore up the fragments against the ruins.”

d.  William Carlos Williams said, “No ideas but in things” (meaning exists in the world).

e.  Wallace Stevens said, “Poetry is the supreme fiction” and “Not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself” (there is no meaning in the world except that which is created by the poet’s imagination).

Marianne Moore’s most famous credos were:

a.  “Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”  This combines Williams’ location of meaning in the external world with Stevens’ location of meaning in the poet’s imagination.

b.  “Ecstasy affords the occasion and expediency determines the form.”  This shows how we get from Frost’s “delight” to “wisdom.”

There are three major principles at work in Moore’s poetry:

1.  Her poetry reads exactly like prose.  She felt that prose was better written than poetry, that it contained precision, verbal economy, directness, and logic unimpeded by the demands of poetical devices.  She wanted to write poetry that was cold, hard, exact, clear, and literal.  She called herself a “literalist of the imagination.”  She wanted to remove from poetry all fuzziness, convention, romance, self-indulgence, and beauty—everything that interferes with or distorts perfect communication with the reader.

2.  Her poetry even tries completely to remove the meter and rhyme that Frost held onto.  She avoided metrical feet—what she disparaged as the “tick-tock of the metronome,” and even any accented words or syllables (if you try to scan her poems, you cannot).  Her line division, in the absence of meter and cadence, is purely arbitrary.  She governs her line breaks only by her desire to highlight or play down certain naturally occurring rhymes that go unnoticed in ordinary speech and prose.  Often, her stanzas are governed only by a syllable count.

3.  Not only was her poetry like prose—with a didactic moral point to it—but she believed, like her close friend Williams, that anything was a fit subject for poetry, including business documents, baseball statistics, school reports, and scientific data (these are the “real toads” in her “imaginary garden”).  Stevens believed that the imagination of the poet created order out of the chaos of things.  Even Williams’ “no ideas but in things” at least left the poet free to discover ideas in those things.  But Moore leaves the poet only the function of shifting around the “real toads” in some sort of pattern in her “imaginary garden.”  Hers is the most astringent, self-effacing poetry ever to appear in America.

"Poetry" (1919) by Marianne Moore 

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.

   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in

   it after all, a place for the genuine.

      Hands that can grasp, eyes

      that can dilate, hair that can rise

         if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are

   useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the

   same thing may be said for all of us—that we

      do not admire what

      we cannot understand. The bat,

         holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under

   a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—

   ball fan, the statistician—case after case

      could be cited did

      one wish it; nor is it valid

         to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction

   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,

   nor till the autocrats among us can be

     “literalists of

      the imagination”—above

         insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have

   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—

   the raw material of poetry in

      all its rawness, and

      that which is on the other hand,

         genuine, then you are interested in poetry.