Modern American Poetry

(^432) Bonnie Costello
America’s anxiety about “the genuine” set in early, of course. The
country is continually “awakening” from the slumber of derivativeness.
Emerson complains in 1836 that “the foregoing generations beheld God and
nature face to face: we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an
original relation to the universe?” (Nature, 1).^1 Moore was herself a
persistent critic of her culture’s tendency, as she writes in “Poetry,” to
“become so derivative that it has become unintelligible” (CP, 267), unable to
awaken genuine response (“eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must”
[266]). Moore and her generation also worried about a citified and
suburbanized American society eschewing its rural and fundamentalist past
and living, as Frank Lloyd Wright complained, by imitation “spread wide
and thin over the vast surface of the continent” (quoted in Bogan, 1). But
America could hardly sustain the idea of the genuine on pre-industrial terms.
That “pioneer unprefunctoriness,” as Moore called it in “Love in America”
(240), must find a modern tenor. To be an American, she quoted Henry
James as saying, is “not just to glow belligerently with one’s country”
(Moore, Complete Prose,321). But civilizing America was not simply a matter
of suppressing its wildness and imposing models of elegance and civility. On
the contrary, America’s uncouth and unbridled spirit was not as large a
problem as its tendency to rely on received ideas and images.
I want to approach the subject of Moore’s America by way of a 1920 poem
called “England” (CP, 46–47) which reveals the relation of landscape to
language. England merits the title only as the first word of the poem, not as
the last word in good taste. As Moore conducts her Cook’s tour of European
excellence, she parodies the tendency to identify geography with specific
cultural traits. The gravitational center of this poem is America, and while
the avowed theme of the poem is that “excellence” knows no boundaries, the
agenda of the poem is patriotic (though assertively non-nationalistic). Moore
is wary of America’s tendency to adopt chauvinistically the very identification
with nature and the primitive that has driven intellectuals to Europe and
encouraged Continental haughtiness toward the uncivilized American scene:
and America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south,
where cigars are smoked on the street in the north;
where there are no proof-readers, no silkworms, no digressions;
the wild man’s land; grassless, linksless, languageless country
in which letters are written
not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,