Modern American Poetry

(^38) Kenneth Burke
us feel its properties as accurately as possible, the fact remains that, after you
have read several of her poems, you begin to discern a strict principle of
selection motivating her appraisals.
In Selected Poems, for instance, consider the poem, “People’s
Surroundings,” that gives us a catalogue of correspondence between various
kinds of agents and the scenes related to their roles. The poet is concerned
to feature, in a background, the details that are an objective portrait of the
person to whose kind of action this background belongs. “A setting must not
have the air of being one”—a proscription one can observe if he makes the
setting the extension of those in it. Here are relationships among act, scene,
and agent (I use the three terms central to the philosophy of drama embodied
in Henry James’s prefaces). And among these people who move “in their
respective places,” we read of
... the acacia-like lady shivering at the touch of a hand,
lost in a small collision of orchids—
dyed quicksilver let fall
to disappear like an obedient chameleon in fifty shades of mauve
and amethyst.
Here, with person and ground merged as indistinguishably as in a pontillist
painting by Seurat, the items objectify a tentative mood we encounter
throughout Miss Moore’s verses. The lines are like a miniature impression of
her work in its entirety. And when, contemplating a game of bowls, she
writes, “I learn that we are precisians, not citizens of Pompeii arrested in
action / as a cross-section of one’s correspondence would seem to imply,” she
here “learns” what she is forever learning, in her contemplation of animals
and natural and fabricated things, as she seeks to isolate, for her appreciation
and our own, the “great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.”
I think appreciation is as strong a motive in her work as it was in the
work of Henry James. “The thing is to lodge somewhere at the heart of one’s
complexity an irrespressible appreciation,”he says in his preface to The Spoils
of Poynton.And: “To criticise is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take
intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticised thing
and make it one’s own.” It is a kind of private property available to
everyone—and is perhaps the closest secular equivalent to the religious
motive of glorification. It is a form of gratitude. And following out its
possibilities, where one might otherwise be querulous he can instead choose
to be precise. This redemption or transformation of complaint is, I think,
essential to the quality of perception in Miss Moore’s verse. (Rather, it is an