Modern American Poetry

(^36) Kenneth Burke
It is, then, a relation between external and internal, or visible and
invisible, or background and personality, that her poems characteristically
establish. Though her names for things are representative of attitudes, we
could not say that the method is Symbolist. The objects exist too fully in
their own right for us to treat them merely as objective words for subjects.
T.S. Eliot says that her poetry “might be classified as ‘descriptive’ rather than
‘lyrical’ or ‘dramatic.’” He cites an early poem that “suggests a slight
influence of H.D., certainly of H.D. rather than of any other ‘Imagist.’” And
though asserting that “Miss Moore has no immediate poetic derivations,” he
seems to locate her work in the general vicinity of imagism, as when he
writes:
The aim of ‘imagism,’ so far as I understand it, or so far as it
had any, was to introduce a peculiar concentration upon
something visual, and to set in motion an expanding succession of
concentric feelings. Some of Miss Moore’s poems—for instance
with animal or bird subjects—have a very good spread of
association.
I think of William Carlos Williams. For though Williams differs much
from Miss Moore in temperament and method, there is an important quality
common to their modes of perception. It is what Williams has chosen to call
by the trade name of “objectivist.”
Symbolism, imagism, and objectivism would obviously merge into one
another, since they are recipes all having the same ingredients but in
different proportions. In symbolism, the subject is much stronger than the
object as an organizing motive. That is, it is what the images are symbolic ofthat
shapes their treatment. In imagism, there would ideally be an equality of the
two motives, the subjective and objective. But in objectivism, though an
object may be chosen for treatment because of its symbolic or subjective
reference, once it has been chosen it is to be studied in its own right.
A man might become an electrician, for instance, because of some deep
response to electricity as a symbol of power. Yet, once he had become an
electrician and thus had converted his response to this subject into an
objective knowledge of its laws and properties, he would thereafter treat
electricity as he did, not because each of his acts as an electrician would be
symbolic like his original choice of occupation, but because such acts were
required by the peculiar nature of electricity. Similarly, a poet writing in an
“objectivist” idiom might select his subject because of some secret reference
or personal significance it has had for him; yet having selected it, he would