The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore by Marianne Moore

First published: 1986

Type of work: Essays

Form and Content

In 1908, as a junior at Bryn Mawr College, then one of the most progressive women’s colleges in the United States, Marianne Moore published a story in the student literary magazine in which she expressed one of the most fundamental contradictions operating in the life of an artist obsessed with a task. “There are times,” she wrote, “when I should give anything on earth to have writing a matter of indifference to me.” Thus at the age of nineteen she acknowledged with characteristic ardor and reluctance the major motivating force of her life. While contending that she never intended to be a writer, explaining that everything she wrote was “the result of reading or of interest in people,” Moore realized early in her life that her development as a person would be inextricably bound to some form of artistic expression, and that the moral and social issues that concerned her would have to be addressed through the formulation of insights, which required the mastery of a singularly individual language. She has been rightfully acknowledged with T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens as one of the great poets of the modernist era, but her critical and appreciative essays, written across a wider arc of time than her poetry, are a revealing complement to the poems, expressing a sensibility and intelligence that shaped and reflected the cultural complex of which she was an important element for half a century.

Born in the year following Emily Dickinson’s death, Moore was reared by her mother and her mother’s family in an ethos of propriety, decorum, and intellectual freedom. Like Dickinson, she was pressed toward a private existence by the compulsion of circumstance and by inclination. Unlike Dickinson, she determined how she might set the terms of both her removal from and active engagement with the vital social issues of her times. She had been deeply influenced by M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr, whom she described in tribute as “for woman an impassioned emancipator.” She was strongly encouraged by her family to act on her convictions, especially with respect to woman’s suffrage and a woman’s right to “educational opportunities so freely offered to young men.” Living with her mother until the elder Moore’s death in 1949, the poet fashioned a public persona of demure but distinctive, even stylistic eccentricity, which permitted her to move freely among the most radical artists of the first half of the twentieth century while writing incisive critical essays about their work for the most adventurous journals of the period.

Moore began to publish reviews in The Egoist, Poetry, and The New York Times in 1916. Her first essay appeared in The Dial in 1921, and in 1926 she began a three-year term as its editor. Right from the start, her critical work spoke with an authoritative voice, functioning under the implicit assumption that gender is irrelevant in measuring intellectual discernment. Whether she was writing about men or about women, she applied the same rigorous aesthetic criteria. By not even considering the issue of a woman’s competence to judge the most serious artists of the era, she effectively finessed objections that might have been raised about her confident assumption of a position of authority occupied almost exclusively by men since medieval times. Similarly, she chose as subjects for scrutiny the writers, painters, musicians, and other artists who seemed to her to be doing the most interesting, innovative, culturally significant work at that moment, and she based her selections on a mastery of craft that she equated with artistic excellence. Accomplishment for Moore was the equivalent of a moral statement, and she turned her attention to men and women of widely diverse political positions, including Pound and Williams, E. E. Cummings and Wallace Stevens, H. D. (her classmate at Bryn Mawr, Hilda Doolittle) and Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), examining their work as it appeared in the 1920’s and then returning to consider subsequent publications through the next few decades.

She wrote initially for an avant-garde periodical, but as her public stature grew she began to contribute to journals with a more centrist aesthetic stance, reviewing books for the New York Herald Tribune and The New Republic, writing an appreciation of Anna Pavlova for Dance Index, and covering historical novels for The Saturday Review of Literature. By the 1960’s, she was famous enough to write essays on the borough of Brooklyn for Vogue, on jewelry for Harper’s Bazaar, and on fashion for Women’s Wear Daily. Most of her best work, however, continued to appear in relatively limited-circulation editions, such as the commentaries she delivered on contemporary poets at Bryn Mawr in the 1950’s. Until the separate pieces were gathered in a single volume by the superb Moore scholar Patricia Willis in 1986, the range and depth of her thinking were apparent only to careful, thorough students of her work. The complete prose “commands attention as the work of a major intelligence of gifted subtlety and complexity,” Willis observes. The continuing timeliness of Moore’s immediate responses to the writing of many major (and important lesser) authors is a testament to the keenness of her perceptions and the visionary power of her language—“the writing of a poet about poetry,” as Eliot said about Pound, praising another idiosyncratic, original figure.

Context

The emergence of a focused feminist consciousness in literary studies in the middle of the twentieth century has led to the development of a much more complete understanding of Marianne Moore’s work, but it has not diminished debate concerning her importance in women’s literature. As Sandra Gilbert points out, Moore was “fetishized” as a woman poet as her reputation grew, and she was compelled to work with or against the public conception of a “feminine” writer, “simultaneously impersonating and analyzing . . . the newly public role of ‘poetess’ laureate.” While some critics such as John Slatin have noted the difficulties in trying to speak “publicly as a woman” when every form of discourse available was already “marginal” and sympathized with her efforts to redefine such concepts as heroism and pull into a field of vision the culturally marginal and repressed, Suzanne Juhasz in 1977 described what she considered an avoidance, if not a betrayal, of crucial feminist concerns on Moore’s part.

Juhasz’s critique depends upon a supposition that Moore was “trying to get into the tradition,” not start her own, and that she translated her experience into “masculine forms and symbols” that a male cultural hierarchy deemed correct. Juhasz has been directly challenged by Tess Gallagher, who has examined Moore’s poetry in conjunction with her essays, letters, and unpublished but extensive personal data—the widening angle of vision available to Moore scholars now—and who regards Moore as a pioneering feminist writer considerably beyond a “crumpled first step toward the Acropolis of Plath.” Gallagher contends that Moore’s insistence on “maintaining the means and terms of her living” is “something progressive in the literature of women,” and that Moore’s reticence, plus her enthusiasm and responsiveness in her essays, was a part of a sophisticated, complex response to a culture in which marriage “was tantamount to signing one’s artistic death warrant.”

Along these lines, Gilbert and Susan Gubar see Moore as an editor exercising influence on the careers of male writers and as a woman raised by the most accomplished male writers of her time. Other observers note Moore’s place as an “empowering mother” and as a part of a network of friendship. Bonnie Costello’s point that Moore tried to “avoid all complacencies of mind” is an accurate summation of Moore’s developing sense of expanding possibility. In a review of a novel by Bryher in 1921, she notes that for the heroine “silence under fire is a victory.” By the time she wrote her celebratory tribute to M. Carey Thomas, Moore spoke of one who “gloried in combat and movement” and who fought “crusade after crusade to free the mind from legal and other barriers.” When Moore decried someone as “femininely lazy,” she was attacking a cultural stereotype; when she counseled young readers not to regard art as “effeminate,” she meant that gender typing was pointless. The ideal she envisioned was strikingly practical. “We must push on until [women] have complete recognition and high employment,” she quoted Thomas as saying, reiterating an essential precept of an outlook that would not accept any restricted version of feminism no matter what an individual’s—especially her own—choices might be. As she said in answer to a query about her most paradoxical quality: “Like to be inconspicuous but look well.”

Bibliography

Goodridge, Celeste. Hints and Disguises: Marianne Moore and Her Contemporaries. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989. A critical study of Moore’s work as a critic “reconstructing the public dialogue” she had with the writers she admired.

Martin, Taffy. Marianne Moore: Subversive Modernist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. A lucid, perceptive, intellectually challenging study of Moore’s development as a critic and a poet.

Molesworth, Charles. Marianne Moore: A Literary Life. New York: Atheneum, 1990. The first biography of Moore, a thorough, factually accurate account that deftly connects her life and thought to all of her writing.

Parisi, Joseph, ed. Marianne Moore: The Art of a Modernist. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Press, 1990. The transcripts of a symposium that covered Moore’s public persona and reputation, with a survey of the writing gathered in The Complete Prose. Enthusiastic if not always completely informed about Moore’s life and work.

Willis, Patricia C., ed. Marianne Moore: Woman and Poet. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1990. An excellent collection of critical essays, expertly edited by Willis, who provides a good introduction. Includes an indispensable annotated bibliography by Bonnie Honigsblum, covering work done from the 1970’s to 1990 on Moore.