Moore footnotes this painting as the subject of “The Magician’s Retreat.” She had seen it in the New York Times Magazine for January 19, 1969. The painting evokes various titles, but the one 
in the newspaper was “Domain of Lights, 1953-54.” It appeared in an article by Grace Gluck on the Venice collection of Peggy Guggenheim. From the Guggenheim’s website comes this description of the work (now called “Empire of Light”):
“In Empire of Light, numerous versions of which exist (see, for example, those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels), a dark, nocturnal street scene is set against a pastel-blue, light-drenched sky spotted with fluffy cumulus clouds. With no fantastic element other than the single paradoxical combination of day and night, René Magritte upsets a fundamental organizing premise of life. Sunlight, ordinarily the source of clarity, here causes the confusion and unease traditionally associated with darkness. The luminosity of the sky becomes unsettling, making the empty darkness below even more impenetrable than it would seem in a normal context. The bizarre subject is treated in an impersonal, precise style, typical of veristic Surrealist painting and preferred by Magritte since the mid-1920s.”
Marianne Moore: Poetry 
Many critics think her later poems don’t stack against her earlier poems. I think they stack. I like this one, the Camperdown Elm, and many other “occasional” poems based on an incident, or a newspaper article.
Do you think they stack?
Comment by Kirby Olson — November 4, 2010 @ 12:03 pm |
I think the last poems are somewhat jarring in that they differ greatly from those of her middle years. I think their intense topicality–like the Camperdown Elm–lead some readers to find them simplistic, compared to the very complex poems. That being said, I find a number of them rewarding and thought-provoking, such as “Charity Overcoming Envy” and “Tipoo’s Tiger,” addressing the same kind of large themes as the earlier work. I’d never dismiss them, but I probably wouldn’t teach them if it meant I had to sacrifice work from the “high modernist” period.
Comment by moore123 — November 5, 2010 @ 11:31 am |