Modern American Poetry

(^448) Bonnie Costello
was becoming a commodity, something we could collect to enhance our
image and permit our complacency about the present. By emphasizing
historical place we create the illusion that our origins are natural and
inevitable, and that historical meaning is a static set of images. But Moore’s
poetry insists that all human institutions are subject to the contingencies of
historical process. And all landscapes are historical, shaped and marked by
the human history that has traversed them. She responds, particularly, to the
tendency of Americans to convert historical sites to tourist “sights,”
flattening history with received, abridged images. When history becomes a
sight, an object of tourist consumption or national myth, it flattens out.
Moore seeks to return a certain depth to history by discovering from the
surface its dense network of meanings. Historical sites speak not so much of
a sanctified, living heritage as of the profundity of the historical process itself.
History is not heroic narrative or divine fiat but a set of contingencies, “what
has come about” (CP, 109) in the mingling of human intentions with nature’s
ways. History is the opposite of still life. Moore is a descriptive, not a
narrative poet. But description in her work resists mythic formations. Again,
she makes a place for the genuine by reading with a certain contempt.
The triad of poems called “Part of a Novel, Part of a Poem, Part of a
Play” included, besides “The Steeple Jack,” “The Student” and “The Hero,”
two poems that examine American distinction without succumbing to
American bravado. “The Hero” in particular (CP, 8–9) speaks to this
difference between luminous sites and superficial sights. The hero is listed
among those variously “at home” in the seaside town of “The Steeple Jack,”
and it is clear that Moore invests some hope in his presence. But for him to
be “at home” is not to be complacent or provincial, but on alert. And he is
not a conventional hero of bold feats and reckless courage. Theodore
Roosevelt went looking for danger. This hero “shrinks” and does not like
“deviating headstones / and uncertainty.” Moore’s personal hero was George
Washington, whom she mimicked with her tricorn hat and cape. But while
the popular image saw him crossing the Rubicon, Moore might remember
that his strategy was retreat. Washington was, as she said of the hero of
another poem, “hindered to succeed.” “The hero” here is an appropriate heir
to Washington, a type of the Christian soldier “that covets nothing that he
has let go.” But he is not a “natural,” at least not a biological or social, heir
to Washington, since his embodiment in this poem is African-American. He
is not interested at all in surfaces, the thrilling surfaces of the romantic
wilderness or the charming surfaces of seaside retreats. He is intent on “the
rock crystal thing to see,” “brimming with inner light.” In this inward
relation toward place and its meaning, he is “at home” even though his racial