The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore by Marianne Moore

First published: 1967; rev. ed. 1981

Type of work: Poetry

Form and Content

The 1981 edition of The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore is the “Definitive Edition, with the Author’s Final Revisions” of a 1967 collection of the same title, and includes five additional poems written in her last years. It contains all the poems the poet wished to preserve, 125 in all, along with a handful of her translations from the Fables (1668-1694) of Jean La Fontaine.

These are poems of immaculate phrasing, metrically and formally intricate, containing frequent quotations from a variety of sources and dealing in many instances with animals and athletes. There is nothing quite like them. They are a woman’s poems: Marianne Moore’s poems, the poems of a very particular woman. Moore was born in 1887 near St. Louis—T. S. Eliot was born in St. Louis less than a year later—and grew up without a father. She was extraordinarily close to her mother, to whom she dedicated her collected poems. It was of her mother that she wrote, “In my immediate family there is one who ‘thinks in a particular way,’ ” and “Where there is an effect of thought or pith in these pages, the thinking and often the actual phrases are hers.”

They are the poems of someone who would declare of poetry, “I, too, dislike it,” but who nevertheless “discovers in it . . . a place for the genuine.” They are, in a sense, reluctant poems—poems that forced themselves on their author. “I certainly never intended to write poetry,” she once told an interviewer. “That never came into my head.”

They are the poems of one who was not considered particularly good at her chosen majors, English and French, while at Bryn Mawr College, one who spent most of her time in the biology laboratories and thought about studying medicine. Many of them deal with Moore’s minute observance of many different species of animals, ranging from the arctic ox to the chameleon, from the porcupine to the giraffe, from the nautilus to the critic (not forgetting also the two species of unicorn by land and sea).

They are the poems of one who once taught the American Indian athlete Jim Thorpe, winner of the pentathlon and decathlon medals in the 1912 Olympic Games. Many of them deal with athletics, athletes, and her beloved baseball; one of them—“Hometown Piece for Messrs. Alston and Reese”—graced the front page of the New York Herald Tribune on the first day of the 1956 World Series.

The composition of The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore is itself complex; George Nitchie notes that it has “an oddly attractive wheels-within-wheels look to it.” As with the texts of her poems themselves, Marianne Moore tinkered compulsively with her choices and arrangements whenever she made a collection. Part 1 contains poems from Collected Poems (1951). These in turn include forty-five poems from the Selected Poems of 1935, which Nitchie points out is “the earliest stage Miss Moore wishes to preserve” of her “cumulative consolidating of the past,” together with poems from two volumes published after Selected Poems but before Collected Poems, What Are Years? (1941) and Nevertheless (1944), and nine poems first collected in Collected Poems itself. Part 2 contains Like a Bulwark (1956), O to Be a Dragon (1959), Tell Me, Tell Me (1966), nine “hitherto uncollected” poems, four of which are present in the original 1967 edition, five of them new to the definitive edition, and five translations from La Fontaine.

This much the table of contents reveals; yet the wheels within wheels have hidden wheels within them: Selected Poems in turn contains work from Poems (1921) and Observations (1924), which itself contained some of the poems from Poems. The form and content of this collection, in short, are as much subject to the poet’s perfectionist diamond-cutter’s eye as are the individual poems themselves.

The poems, too, have gone through countless changes to find their final forms here. The first poem, “The Steeple-Jack,” ran seventy-eight lines on its first magazine appearance in Poetry (1932), seventy-two in Selected Poems, forty-five in Collected Poems, seventy-eight again (almost the same as the original version) in A Marianne Moore Reader (1961), and seventy-eight (again, slightly altered) lines in the 1967 edition of The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. In the definitive 1981 edition, it again runs seventy-eight, this time differently hyphenated—and without the misleading note, “Revised, 1961,” which it had in A Marianne Moore Reader and in the 1967 Complete Poems. One can only sympathize with Nitchie’s sense that putting together all the variant versions of Moore’s’ poems would be somewhat like reassembling Humpty Dumpty: “But what a variorum edition it will be.”

Context

Despite her early publication in little magazines alongside such modern masters as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams, the modernism in Moore is all her own. As Eliot wrote, “Miss Moore had no immediate poetic derivations.” Her tone, style, and voice, for reasons discussed above, are unique. This in turn has made it hard to follow her. As John Unterecker notes in his foreword to George Nitchie’s book Marianne Moore: An Introduction to the Poetry (1969), “to be ‘influenced’ by Marianne Moore’s devices would be to produce conspicuously imitative work. Her extreme peculiarities isolate her from her admirers, preserve her from founding a tradition.”

As Harold Bloom has shown in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), however, the creative misreading of an earlier poet by a later allows a kind of influence that is far from imitative. Joanne Feit Diehl in Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore: The Psychodynamics of Creativity (1993) explores the use Bishop has made of her older friend and mentor, Moore. Diehl cites Robert Lowell approvingly for his assertion “that Elizabeth Bishop is impossible to imagine without Marianne Moore.” Bloom suggests that Richard Wilbur and May Swenson should also be counted among the American poets whom Moore influenced.

Bibliography

Choice. XVIII, June, 1981, p. 1418.

Christian Century. XCVIII, April 29, 1981, p. 487.

Diehl, Joanne Feit. Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore: The Psychodynamics of Creativity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Proposes a theory of influence based on Melanie Klein’s work to replace Bloom’s Oedipal theory and the revisionist Freudianism of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (1988-1989). Useful as a reading of the two poets in conjunction, “intertextually.” With notes and an index.

Library Journal. CVI, June 1, 1981, p. 1226.

Merrin, Jeredith. “Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop.” In The Columbia History of American Poetry, edited by Jay Parini. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Emphasizes the differences between the two poets, concluding, “It is time that each poet had a chapter of her own.”

Moore, Marianne. A Marianne Moore Reader. New York: Viking Press, 1961. A useful introduction to the poet’s work, containing as it does a generous selection of her poems, a larger selection of the Fables of La Fontaine than is available in The Complete Poems, and twenty prose pieces. With notes and an index.

The New Republic. CLXXXIII, August 23, 1980, p. 33.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVI, March 15, 1981, p. 7.

Nitchie, George W. Marianne Moore: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Particularly interesting on the ways in which Marianne Moore reworked her poems from one collection to the next—as also on the ways in which she chose and sorted them differently. A straightforward introduction, emphasizing the poet’s moral intelligence. Includes notes, a bibliography, and an index.

Stapleton, Laurence. Marianne Moore: The Poet’s Advance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. Stapleton’s was the first study to benefit from full access to Moore’s manuscripts, notebooks, and correspondence, and it is on these that he bases his interpretations of the poems. He thus reaches further back in the compositional process than Nitchie. Includes a reading of her prose, along with notes, bibliography, and index.