Marianne Moore: Poetry

“‘We create

values in the process of living, daren’t await

their historic progress.’

. . . . . . . . . .

 . . . Values in use,

‘judged on their own ground.'”

              “Values in Use,” Partisan Review 23 (Fall 1956):506.

      During the summer of 1956, Moore attended the Harvard Summer School Conference on “The Little Magazine in America.” She was joined there in late July by Elizabeth Hardwick and Philip Rahv. She reported on the event in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop: “Philip Rahv gave a stern A-One talk on values in use as over against mildewed dictatorial culture.”* She must have applied herself to writing “Values in Use” soon because Philip Rahv’s own Partisan Review published it in its fall issue. There, the poem had a footnote: “The first two quoted phrases are taken from a rousing address that Philip Rahv gave on July 27, 1956 in Alston Burr Hall, Cambridge. –M. M.”

Philip Rahv

     The following year, Moore included the poem in the Faber edition of Like a Bulwark . There, an end note identified the occasion and place and added: “‘Partisan Review standard for stories–‘maturity, plausibility, and the relevance of the point of view expressed.’ ‘A work of art must be appraised on its own ground; we produce values in the process of living, do not await their historic progress in history.'”

      As if to indicate that the poem needed precise documentation, its note in Complete Poems also referred back to the magazine version’s note, encouraging readers to “See Partisan Review, Fall, 1956.”

      Why all the addenda? While Rahv is remembered today as an extraordinary founding editor of his magazine, he was an anti-Stalinist Marxist who saw fiction as an imaginative response to social and political history. As Mary McCarthy wrote of him, disguised as Will Taub in The Oasis: his “whole sense of intellectual assurance rested on the fixed belief in the potency of history to settle questions of value.”

      Elizabeth Hardwick summed up Rahv’s impact in a statement she read at his funeral: “The outstanding theme of Rahv’s efforts was, I think, a contempt for provincialism, for the tendency to inflate local and fleeting cultural accomplishments. This slashing away at low levels of taste and at small achievements passing as masterly, permanent monuments was a crusade some more bending souls might have grown weary of. But he was not ashamed of his extensive ‘negativism’  and instead went on right up to the end scolding vanity and unworthy accommodation.”**

      While Moore’s politics might not have intersected with Rahv’s, her college background in history, politics, and economics may have laid the groundwork for her interest in his view of art and history. At the conference, her task was to summarize the talks of the other speakers and, according to Robert Lowell, “she spoke of Philip Rhav ‘looking volumes each time an intention of the Partisan Review was misconstrued.'”* And she probably would have agreed with Lowell when he said of others in the audience, “After all these years they have discovered that Phlip Rahv isn’t just tonic.”

*The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008, pp. 184 and 182.

** Brandeis University, December 24, 1973. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1974/01/24/philip-rahv

“like the apteryx-awl

                as a beak, or the

kiwi’s rain-shawl

                          of haired feathers, the mind

                          feeling its way as though blind,

walks along with its eyes on the ground.”

                                   –The Nation, 157 (December 1943), 250-251

Moore gave Louise Crane a manuscript copy of this poem and at the bottom of the page, traced the image of a kiwi from a Kiwi Boot Polish Can, including the word “waterproof.”

Here is the original apteryx, also known as a kiwi,

Moore and Cassius Clay, as the boxer was then known, at Toots Shor’s restaurant, New York City, in 1966. On the Vanity Fair blog for June 5, 2016, Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonnell writes that George Plimpton had introduced The Champ, in 1966, “to the great poet Marianne Moore, who was 79 at the time. George had written about how they had agreed to write a poem together and Mrs. Moore said, ‘We will call it “A Poem on the Annihilation of Ernie Terrell.” Let us be serious but not grim.’ It had gone very well . . . .”

In 1963, Moore agreed to write liner notes for Clay’s verse album for Columbia Records, I Am the Greatest! She said in part: “At a crucial moment–rather often indeed–altitude is saved by a hair from being the flattest, peanuttiest, unwariest of boastings; saved might one say with Shakespeare, by ‘one of Caesar’s hairs.'” (Complete Prose, 659)

“A kind of monkey or pine-lemur

not of interest to the monkey,

but to the animal higher up which resembles it,

in a kind of Flaubert’s Carthage, it defies one-

this ‘Paduan cat with lizard,’ this ‘tiger in a bamboo thicket.'”

–“The Monkey Puzzler,” The Dial, 78 (January 1925), 8, ll 1-5.

One of the magazines Moore consulted during the time she wrote this poem was The International Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art published in New York by John Lane and Company. While the issue of this title is not yet fully visible on line, there are some “work-arounds” to suggest what Moore saw and what inspired the “Paduan cat with lizard.” A supplement  in an issue from Volume 76, 1923, discusses “a realistically treated cat seated with a lizard in its mouth . . . This is a Paduan work of the Fifteenth Century.” At that time, this small bronze sculpture belonged to the Heseltine Collection of London;  in the 1940s it was acquired by Lt Col. the Hon. M.T. Boscawen, whose sister, the Hon. Mrs. Pamela Sherek, bequeathed it to the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1995. The reason for reporting this extended provenance is to tie together today’s Fitzwilliam cat with the one Moore saw in The International Studio in 1923.

When Moore met the cat, it was considered a work of Renaissance Padua. Today it is listed as from southern Germany, 17th century. The image below, taken from the Fitzwilliam collection via the article “The Boscawen Collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge: Supplement,” in The Burlington Magazine,Vol. 139, No. 1137 (Dec., 1997), pp. 907-912. The figure, below in the upper left photograph, is on page 911.

21st-Century Moore
March 19-22, 2015
University of Houston
Call for Papers
In March 2015, the University of Houston
will host the first meeting in a decade to focus on the writings
of the major Modernist poet Marianne Moore.
Scholars, poets, and artists will convene to discuss, debate, and celebrate Moore’s work,
laying the groundwork for the future of Moore studies.
In light of the past decade’s work on Moore,
including variorum and facsimile editions of her early and middle-period work
and a ground-breaking new biography by Linda Leavell,
the conference will examine Moore’s place
in the twenty-first century’s understanding of Modernism.
Papers are invited on any aspect of Marianne Mooreʼs work,
including its role in the development and progress of Modernism,
or in the history of international and/or American poetry and poetics,
and along diverse lines of inquiry, such as textual scholarship, influence studies,
and cultural, eco-critical, age, queer and science studies.
The format will allow all attendees to hear all papers, for a fully engaged discussion.
The organizers invite interested parties to submit abstracts (no more than 250 words)
for scholarly and creative presentations.
Please send abstracts with brief resumé and MOORE ABSTRACT in the subject line
to egregory@uh.edu by July 15th 2014.
Steering Committee:
Fiona Green, Elizabeth Gregory, Stacy Hubbard, Cristanne Miller, Heather White
Please forward this Call to others who might like to participate.

“no freakishly

Over-drove Ox drawn by

Rowlandson, but the Indian buffalo,

albino-

footed, standing in the mud-lake, with a

day’s work to do.”   

“The Buffalo,” Poetry, 45 (November 1934), 62-63, ll . 35-40.

In writing a poem about bovines, Moore compares the Indian buffalo, or water buffalo, to other members of the group, turning to painting, photographs, lithographs, and sculpture for her images. One comparison begins with the “Over-Drove Ox,” a satirical print by English artist Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827). Moore had in hand a clipping from page 127 the New York Times for February 12, 1933, a review by Elizabeth Luther Cary of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that featured this Rowlandson work. In Cary’s words

Rowlandson supplies humor based upon human traits and independent of passing incident. As in the case of most good prints and numberless bad ones, you can read plenty of English history on his flowerlike pages of gaming tables,  horse races, health resorts and sailors; snug harbors, but it is the history of the people not of the political stage.

The print at the Metropolitan is the one called “The Over-Drove Ox” and shows one of these gentle animals running amuck in a crowded street, driving terror into the minds of all and various. In a wholly indescribably way Rowland manages to make us see the rampaging creature as just a downtrodden ox which, for one splendid. exasperated moment, fancies itself a raging, powerful bull, capable of turning all humanity into a mush of panic, and the fancy almost turns to truth, horses rear, dogs bark, the crowd goes down like ninepins, kicking and sprawling, clutching and howling. What a grand success!

Bold type here represents the sentence Moore circled.

Rowlandson’s “Over-Drove Ox”

The other half of the comparison arose from a clipping from the New York Times for April 24, 1927, page 103. Moore cut out the image and its caption: “Water Buffalo from Eastern Asia: A Group of Animals[.] Shot by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt on the William V. Kelly-Roosevelt Expedition. Now on Exhibition at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.” While it is not possible to reproduce the clipping from the Times, the photograph of the diorama from which it was made is present in the online collections of the Field Museum and is shown here:

Water Buffalo Diorama at the Field Museum

When she came upon this image, Moore wrote to her brother, Warner, that had she not seen it, she would have had to sacrifice her entire description of the water buffalo if she could not use “the word albino as a rhyme.” [TLS  23 April 1934, Rosenbach] Thus, the “Indian buffalo / albino- / footed.”

Does  yonder mouse with a grape in its hand

and its child in its mouth, not portray

the Spanish fleece suspended by the neck?”

“Camellia Sabina,” Active Anthology, 1933,  p 190. ll. 38-40

Golden Fleece Ornament

While Moore provides a note for the mouse with a grape, a reference to a photograph in The National Geographic,

Wellington

,she offers no help for “Spanish fleece.”  Here she refers to the “toison d’or’” the symbol of the Order of the Golden Fleece, a Catholic knighthood founded in Burgundy in the 15^th Century to uphold the Catholic religion in Europe. Over time, this Hapsburg order split between Spain and Austria giving rise to two sections. Sovereigns, dukes, and other nobility were the usual recipients but over time, the rule was relaxed and protestant Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, was admitted in 1812 and Japan’s Emperor Hiro Hito in 1928.

The insignia was a golden fleece, indeed “suspended by the neck,” from a decoration that included the letter “B” for Burgundy.

Moore does not give an explicit clue as to how the “Spanish fleece” figures in the poem other than, perhaps, as it shares the same  position on its decoration as does the baby mouse in its mother’s mouth.  One might speculate about Wellington, an Anglo-Irish hero who might have joined Moore’s list of Irish heros. Comments welcome!

“Enough, 1969”

The New Yorker, 46 (January 17, 1970), p. 28.

This twelve-line poem appeared first in the magazine, next in the second edition of Complete Poems, 1981, p. 245. Moore sent the poem to the New Yorker probably in late 1968, to judge by letters she received from editor Howard Moss in early 1969. Moore titled the poem, in manuscript, “Enough, 1969.”

In his first letter, January 21, 1969, Moss reports that the magazine would take the poem and attends to some housekeeping duties, rewording line 9 for syntax, quotation marks around Jonson’s “Discoveries,” and the like. In his third letter, February 20, Moss says that fact checkers have found that Moore misquoted Jonson by omitting the word “and” in the last line. Moore agreed to it all.

But in his second letter, February 11, which accompanied a galley proof with more questions, Moss tells Moore that he doesn’t like the “1969” of the title because it suggests that the poem is suitable only to that calendar year (perhaps he knows that the poem will not see print until 1970) and that it more universal meaning than that implies. So, “1969” disappears.

What Moss did not see, and what Moore did not insist on, was that this “Enough” echoes another “Enough” with the subtitle “Jamestown, 1607-1957,” published in the Virginia Quarterly Review in 1957. A meditation on the Jamestown settlement at the time of its 350^th anniversary, what it shares with the later poem is the question of permanence, survival, the ship “Discovery” and Ben Jonson’s “Discoveries.”

When the poem was reprinted in Complete Poems 1981, the year “1969” was restored and the last line returned to Moore’s original wording.

There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious

Fastidiousness.  Certain Ming

Products, imperial floor coverings of coach

Wheel yellow . . . .

“Critics and Connoisseurs, ” Others 3:I (July 1916), ll. 1-4.

Ming Dynasty Carpet

These opening lines concerning connoisseurs’ possessions that “are well enough in their way” set up Moore’s contrast with critics, portrayed as a self-defending swan and a frustrated ant. We may never know where Moore saw Ming rugs or yellow coach wheels but we can enjoy images that are probably similar to something she encountered.

Coach with Yellow Wheels

“The egg piously shown
        as Leda’s very own
from which Castor and Pollux hatched,
was an ostrich-egg”

 “He Digesteth Harde Yron,” Partisan Review 8 (July-August 1941), 312, ll. 30-33.

“Castor and Pollux were the offspring of Leda [the wife of the king of Sparta] and the Swan, under which disguise Jupiter had concealed himself. Leda gave birth to an egg from which sprang the twins. Helen, so famous afterwards as the cause of the Trojan war, was their sister.”

Thomas Bullfinch. The Age of Fable or the Beauties of Mythology. Vol. I. New York: Review of Reviews Company, 1914, p. 158.

Moore kept a copy of The Open Court, “a monthly magazine devoted to the science of religion, the religion of science, and the extension of the religious parliament idea,” for May, 1926 (Vol. XL, No. 5). In it she read the article by Berthold Laufer on “Ostrich Egg-Shell Cups from Mesopotamia” that described the finds from a dig in Kish, Iran, sponsored by the Field Museum (Chicago) and Oxford University. The article pictured an egg-shell cup with the following description:

“The Field Museum’s by Text-Enhance” href=”http://fieldmuseum.org/explore/crnewsletter/collections-and-research-news-week-december-7-2012″>loan objects include bead necklaces of semi-precious and common stones, shell, and glass, ceramic vessels, and an especially rare ostrich egg-shell cup (pictured here). All were excavated between 1923 and 1933 at the site of the ancient city of Kish in Iraq during joint archaeological expeditions by The Field Museum and Oxford University.”

The egg-shell cup pictured in the magazine has not been placed in a formal holder but is set in a simple three-legged brace. It appears that the cup was later fitted out with decorative pedestal and lid, as shown in this image from the collection of the Field Museum where it is identified as the same object as the one on page 260 of The Open Court.

On page 267 of the same article, Moore has underlined a passage from the following paragraph, clearly the source of the poem’s title:

“The fondness for metals has obtained for the bird the name of the ‘iron-eating ostrich.’” In 1579 Lyly wrote in his Euphues that “the estrich digesteth harde yron to preserve his health.”

“Love in America?”

“It is at the inception of any great work of art: in

Aristotle’s  contemplation of the bust

of Socrates which is animated

by what seems a glow from nearby fire.”

Saturday Evening Post, December 31, 1966, p. 78.

These lines were included in a draft of “Love in America?” written at the request of editor Thomas Congdon who selected that theme (minus the question mark) for the New Year’s Eve issue of The Saturday Evening Post in 1966.  On the manuscript, an editor circled “Socrates” and wrote in the margin “Not Homer? Or are we missing something?” Below the question Moore wrote: “Homer.” In the context of this version, “It” refers to “Love in America.” This page survives in her archive at the Rosenbach, and because it does, it clearly was not returned to the magazine. Moore rewrote the poem; the version that appeared in late 1966 is identical to that in Complete Poems.

“Aristotle with a Bust of Homer,” Metropolitan Museum of Art

In rewriting, Moore dropped the first half of her poem, including the Rembrandt passage. Had she retained it, amending Socrates to Homer, she would have reminded readers of a recent New York and very American story: the purchase by the Metropolitan Museum of Art of Rembrandt’s masterpiece, “Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer” (1653) at Parke-Bernet Galleries for $2,300,000 on November 15, 1961. The Rembrandt lot had as underbidder the Cleveland Museum. The directors of both museums had long known the painting, having seen it  at the Century of Progress World’s Fair in 1933 or at Knoedler’s Galleries in New York in 1941. Owned by Alfred W. Erickson and his wife, it was sold by the latter’s estate. The competition for the painting and the enormous price became newsworthy; the New York Times ran a story on November 16, the day after the auction,  announcing that the price was the highest ever paid for any picture at a private or public sale and that the bidding lasted four minutes. More than 20,000 people had visited Parke-Bernet to view the painting  while it was on display and 2,000 attended the sale, some through closed circuit television.  The paper followed this article with another on January 7, 1962: “The Rembrandt: Battle Strategy,” describing the process by which the Met agreed to bid on the painting, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin rushed into its January issue a lead article by curator Theodore Rousseau, touching on the painting’s use of light and its unusual qualities compared to the Met’s 31 other Rembrandts.

Moore certainly saw the cover of the Bulletin with its color illustration of the painting for she owned a copy. Not only was she likely to have seen news articles about the Rembrandt but the December 1, 1961 issue of The New Yorker lists two events for the week under “Museums and Libraries:” The Met’s “’The Stone Guest: Dialogues  between Persons and Statuary,” a showing of prints, drawings, and photographs on the colloquy between Aristotle and the bust of Homer and other encounters between people and sculpture” and, at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, “manuscripts, books, and other material by Marianne Moore in celebration of her seventy-fifth birthday.”

Meredith

Moore composed “Flints, Not Flowers” (see Schulman, pp. 49 and 403) before she left Carlisle in 1916. The manuscript makes clear with asterisks that the title comes from The Letters of George Meredith , New York: Scribner’s, 1912, Vol. 1, p 45 where Meredith writes to his friend Augustus Jessup: “[My poems] may not please you, but I think you will admit that they have a truth condensed in them. They are flints perhaps, and not flowers. Well, I think of publishing a volume of Poems in the beginning of ’62, and I will bring as many flowers to it as I can.”

Another pair of asterisks connects the lines

How far more cunningly than Keats has placed

His toy, that poor hack

Flung you up as he walked round

to another letter  on page 280 in the same volume to Admiral Frederick Maxse: “As for me, I fear I am again condemned to trot round my circle, like an old horse at a well, everlastingly pulling up the same buckets full of a similar fluid. I may be precipitated abroad by incapacity to continue writing; and once or twice the case has looked like it, though I have recovered in a middling fashion: but not to do the work I call good—rather the character of work one is glad to leave behind, however glad to have accomplished.” Here, Meredith bemoans the quality of his work and finds himself hesitant to publish a volume of poems, having had so little success thus far in his career.

While no mystery surrounds the sources of the Meredith quotations,  Keats’s “toy” remains problematic. There seems to be but one appearance of

Keats

the word “toy” in all of Keats:

XXXVII

“I thought you guess’d, foretold, or prophesied,

That’s Majesty was in a raving fit?”

“He dreams,” said Hum, “or I have ever lied,

That he is tearing you, sir, bit by bit.”

“He’s not asleep, and you have little wit,”

Replied the page: “that little buzzing noise,

Whate’er your palmistry may make of it,

Comes from a play-thing of the Emperor’s choice,

From a Man-Tiger-Organ, prettiest of his toys.”

This stanza from Keats’s unfinished (and unsuccessful) fantasy “The Cap and Bells” tempts a connection for any reader of Moore’s 1964 “Tippoo’s Tiger” about the same toy.