Modern American Poetry

(^20) Harold Bloom
pony), all of La Fontaine’s bestiary, not to mention sea and land unicorns,
basilisks, and all the weird fabulous roster that perhaps only Borges also,
among crucial modern writers, celebrates so consistently. There is something
of Blake and of the Christopher Smart of Jubilate Agnoin Moore, though the
affinity does not result from influence, but rather is the consequence of
election. Moore’s famous eye, like that of Bishop after her, is not so much a
visual gift as it is visionary, for the beasts in her poems are charged with a
spiritual intensity that doubtless they possess, but which I myself cannot see
without the aid of Blake, Smart, and Moore.
I remember always in reading Moore again that her favorite poem was
the Book of Job. Just as I cannot read Ecclesiastes without thinking of Dr.
Johnson, I cannot read certain passages in Job without recalling Marianne
Moore:
But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls
of the air, and they shall tell thee:
Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of
the sea shall declare unto thee.
Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath
wrought this?
In whose hand is the soul of every living thing ...
This, from chapter 12, is the prelude to the great chant of Yahweh, the
Voice out of the whirlwind that sounds forth in the frightening magnificence
of chapters 38 through 41, where the grand procession of beasts
comprehends lions, ravens, wild goats, the wild ass, the unicorn, peacocks,
the ostrich, the sublime battle-horse who “saith among the trumpets, Ha,
ha,” the hawk, the eagle, and at last behemoth and leviathan. Gorgeously
celebrating his own creation, Yahweh through the poet of Job engendered
another strong poet in Marianne Moore. Of the Book of job, she remarked
that its agony was veracious and its fidelity of a force “that contrives glory for
ashes.”
“Glory for ashes” might be called Moore’s ethical motto, the basis for
the drive of her poetic will towards a reality of her own particulars. Her
poetry, as befitted the translator of La Fontaine and the heir of George
Herbert, would be in some danger of dwindling into moral essays, an
impossible form for our time, were it not for her wild allusiveness, her zest
for quotations, and her essentially anarchic stance, the American and
Emersonian insistence upon seeing everything in her own way, with
“conscientious inconsistency.” When her wildness or freedom subsided, she