Modern American Poetry

Helmet of Fire: American Poetry in the 1920s 267

cause, the prose rails against the false values of a rootless, materialistic society
and calls for the annhilation of old values and forms. Against this
materialistic malaise Williams poses the compensating imagination: “To
refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live
there is but a single force—the imagination.”^42 There are poems of great
visual accuracy and precision, lyrics in which familiar objects are clarified and
presented in a fresh context, such as the red wheelbarrow upon which “so
much depends” and the flowerpot “gay with rough moss” (11). The primary
subject of the poems in Spring and Allis the difficult struggle to be reborn.
The introductory poem sounds the call for a new world, describes the way
the plants, still dazed and “lifeless in appearance,”

... enter the new world naked,

cold, uncertain of all

save that they enter....^43

Later they “grip down and begin to awaken.” In these poems consciousness
and the world permeate each other. Subject and object are fused, and
oppositions disappear between the inner world of the self and the outer
world of things. This is Williams’s central post-Romantic breakthrough. All
of his work in the next decades would build on the basic premises and
fundamental achievement of Spring and All.^44
Marianne Moore’s first pamphlet of twenty-four poems, Poems
(London: Egoist Press, 1921) was published without her knowledge at the
instigation of her friends Bryer and H.D. Her first American book,
Observations(1924), contained all but three of the poems in the original
pamphlet and added some thirty-two others. For Moore, poems were
observations. Her poems have an acute visual sense, motivated as if by a
painter’s eye and a biologist’s curious scrutiny. To borrow one of her phrases,
her observations have a “relentless accuracy.” She is a precisionist
meticulously rendering visual phenomena, and her policy of exact
comparison and the perfect word serves the facticity of the world. Her poems
consist of scrupulous, and many separate, acts of attention to small and
otherwise unnoticed animals and things. It is, as Hugh Kenner says, “the
poetic of the solitary observer” confronted by a mute world that “seems to
want describing.”^45 Moore writes as if seeing things for the first time,
defamiliarizing the natural world. Her descriptions of things-as-they-are
stands as a corrective to the overhumanizing impulse to turn the world into
a mirror for human beings. The testimony of the eye constitutes the basic
premise of her ethics. In her early work both her morals (and all of her work