Modern American Poetry

Introduction 21

produced an occasional poetic disaster like the patriotic war poems, “In
Distrust of Merits,” and “‘Keeping Their World Large.’” But her greatest
poems are at just the opposite edge of consciousness: “A Grave,” “Novices,”
“Marriage,” “An Octopus,” “He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron,’” “Elephants,” the
deceptively light “Tom Fool at Jamaica.”
Those seven poems by themselves have an idiosyncratic splendor that
restores my faith, as a critic, in what the language of the poets truly is:
diction, or choice of words, playing endlessly upon the dialectic of
denotation and connotation, a dialectic that simply vanishes in all
Structuralist and post-Structuralist ruminations upon the supposed priority
of “language” over meaning. “The arbitrariness of the signifier” loses its
charm when one asks a Gallic psycholinguistifier whether denotation or
connotation belongs to the signifier, as opposed to the signified, and one
beholds blank incredulity as one’s only answer. Moore’s best poems give the
adequate reply: the play of the signifier is answered always by the play of the
signified, because the play of diction, or the poet’s will over language, is itself
constituted by the endless interchanges of denotation and connotation.
Moore, with her rage to order allusion, echo, and quotation in ghostlier
demarcations, keener sounds, helps us to realize that the belated Modernism
of the Gallic proclamation of the death of the author was no less premature
than it was, always already, belated.

T.S. ELIOT

Thomas Stearns Eliot is a central figure in the Western literary culture of
this century. His undoubted achievement as a lyric and elegiac poet in itself
would suffice to establish him in the main Romantic tradition of British and
American poetry that moves from Wordsworth and Whitman on to Geoffrey
Hill and John Ashbery, poets of our moment. There is an obvious irony in
such a judgment. Eliot’s professed sense of thetradition, his tradition, was
rather different, tracing as it did the true line of poetry in English from its
origins in medieval Provence and Italy through its later developments in
France (I borrow that remark from Northrop Frye). Eliot’s polemical stance
as a literary critic can be distinguished from his rhetorical stance as a poet,
and both postures of the spirit are fortunately quite distinct from his cultural
position, self-proclaimed as Anglo-Catholic, Royalist and Classical.
An obsessive reader of poetry growing up in the 1930s and 1940s
entered a critical world dominated by the opinions and example of Eliot. To
speak out of even narrower personal experience, anyone adopting the
profession of teaching literature in the early 1950s entered a discipline