Introduction 19MARIANNE MOOREFor Plato the only reality that mattered is exemplified best for us in the
principles of mathematics. The aim of our lives should be to draw
ourselves away as much as possible from the unsubstantial, fluctuating
facts of the world about us and establish some communion with the
objects which are apprehended by thought and not sense. This was the
source of Plato’s asceticism. To the extent that Miss Moore finds only
allusion tolerable she shares that asceticism. While she shares it she does
so only as it may be necessary for her to do so in order to establish a
particular reality or, better, a reality of her own particulars.
—WALLACE STEVENSAllusion was Marianne Moore’s method, a method that was her self. One of
the most American of all poets, she was fecund in her progeny; Elizabeth
Bishop, May Swenson, and Richard Wilbur being the most gifted among
them. Her own American precursors were not Emily Dickinson and Walt
Whitman—still our two greatest poets—but the much slighter Stephen
Crane, who is echoed in her earliest poems, and in an oblique way Edgar
Poe, whom she parodied. I suspect that her nearest poetic father, in English,
was Thomas Hardy, who seems to have taught her lessons in the mastery of
incongruity, and whose secularized version of Biblical irony is not far from
her own. If we compare her with her major poetic contemporaries—Frost,
Stevens, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Aiken, Ransom, Cummings, H.D., Hart
Crane—she is clearly the most original American poet of her era, though not
quite of the eminence of Frost, Stevens, or Crane. A curious kind of
devotional poet, with some authentic affinities to George Herbert, she
reminds us implicitly but constantly that any distinction between sacred and
secular poetry is only a shibboleth of cultural politics. Some day she will
remind us also of what current cultural politics obscure: that any distinction
between poetry written by women and poetry by men is a mere polemic,
unless it follows upon an initial distinction between good and bad poetry.
Moore, like Bishop and Swenson, is an extraordinary poet-as-poet. The issue
of how gender enters into her vision should arise only after the aesthetic
achievement is judged as such.
Moore, as all her readers know, to their lasting delight, is the visionary
of natural creatures: the jerboa, frigate pelican, buffalo, monkeys, fish,
snakes, mongooses, the octopus (actually a trope for a mountain), snail,
peacock, whale, pangolin, wood-weasel, elephants, race horses, chameleon,
jellyfish, arctic ox (or goat), giraffe, blue bug (another trope, this time for a