More 'More Moore'

Something quite satisfying there is about a solid, good condition, 400 page hardback. It feels substantial and, on the subject of Marianne Moore with a supporting cast of all those pioneer American modernists, it is.

Unlike pop singers and musicians, poets are not generally glamorous young gunslingers. For every Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Rosemary Tonks, Mina Loy or Christopher Marlowe there is any number of Larkins, Emily Dickinsons, Stevie Smiths or Christina Rossetti and Marianne Moore belongs with those of the more withdrawn nature,

With her mother beside her, Marianne 'sat back in her chair'...a Marco Polo stayed at home, twisted to silence by some strange repression.  

Life for such people is elsewhere and for poets it is in their poems, not that life isn't often also elsewhere for non-poets.

The most consistent theme through all the reviews is that her poems come from the head rather than the heart.....'Emotion in her is calcined to a thin ash', wrote an appreciative one.

So strongly did Moore feel misjudged on this point that she henceforthdefended the presence of 'gusto' in her own writing...

In 'Novices', ...the suave young sophisticates dismiss as boring 'the detailless perspective of the sea'. Little do they suspect what lurks beneath that placid surface

but they aren't the first or last to struggle to fully appreciate her art. 

Part of the ever-elusive charm of 'poetry' is surely some elusive quality in the best of it. That which submits to easy summary and explanation without suggesting more beyond is unlikely to survive the repeated readings that good poetry encourages.

A poet's selectiveness must have 'more elasticity than logic'...and yet it 'knows where it is going' as surely as electricity flies along to 'areas that boast of their remoteness'

 

It was a good idea to extend C20th further into America rather than just include those Americans who came to Britain. It isn't just to baulk it up a bit in order to make it closer to book length. Before writing anything vaguely coherent, one has to do a bit of reading and check it out. I thus now have a clearer idea of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and even Robert Frost by looking again with some purpose in mind. C20th might not prove all that useful to anybody who ever reads it but it's been of use to me to write it.

And so the wider enquiry into what is exactly going on when one person writes something and others read it continues.