A History of American Literature

Making It New: 1900–1945 387

in black and white: and one in red

and white says

Danger.

The steeple-jack may be dressed in a flamboyant color, stand high above the town;

he may even seem to be “part of a novel.” But, after all, he is not a hero, epic or exotic.

He is an ordinary man, performing his duties with the minimum of fuss and wasted

effort, devoted to his craft and doing his best to avoid all the dangers he can during

the course of his day. Within the limited space marked out by his signs, his words,

he has created an area of freedom; he has devised his own humble example of the

spiritual – and, as it happens, physical – poise.

On the subject of poetry, Moore declared, in a poem simply called “Poetry”

(1935), “I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.”

But then she added this:

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,

one discovers in

it after all, a place for the genuine.

For Moore, as she goes on to explain, “genuine” poetry is the opposite of the

“ high-sounding”; it is “useful” just as Whitman believed it was – in the sense that all

things necessary to the perpetuation of life are. Everything is the stuff of poetry, even

“business documents and / school-books.” “All these phenomena are important,”

she says; only “half poets” make the mistake of thinking otherwise. So Moore can

make her poetry out of the world of nature (“The Pangolin” (1941)) and art (“No

Swan So Fine” (1935)), out of the activities of everyday life (“When I Buy Pictures”

(1935)) and special moments of meditation (“What Are Years?” (1941)), out of

places (“England” (1935)), institutions (“Marriage” (1935)), or people (“The

Student” (1941)). What matters is the how of poetry: how a thing is perceived, how

it is felt, experienced, imagined.

The range of Moore’s work shows how closely she followed her own prescription

for “genuine” poetry. Each of her best pieces constitutes an act of imaginary posses-

sion, in which she perceives an object carefully, and with reverence, and then

attempts to absorb it – to grasp its significance in her mind. There is no imperialism

of the intellect here. The essential properties of the object are not denied; on the

contrary, it is precisely because the poet acknowledges them that she can then go on,

in language that is all sinew, severe and pure, to discover ulterior meaning. Many of

her poems concerned with inanimate objects, such as “An Egyptian Pulled Glass

Bottle in the Shape of the Fish” (1935), are what William Carlos Williams called

“anthologies of transit ... moving rapidly from one thing to the next” and thereby

giving “the impression of a passage through ... of ... swiftness impaling beauty.”

They depend, in effect, on their deftness of vision and lightness of touch, their

absolute refusal to moralize in the conventional way. In turn, her animal poems are

notable for the refusal to anthropomorphize. In “The Frigate Pelican” (1935), for

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