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Making It New: 1900–1945 385

seems unique, with its own particular rhythms and adjustments – its own special

way of turning the world into words. One of the finest of Stevens’s later poems,

for example, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, explores his familiar subject: “The

imagination, the one reality / In this imagined world.” But it creates its own separate

“mundo,” full of noise, color, and movement; and, rather than any argumentative

structure, it is this “mundo,” strange, illogical, and quite unpredictable, which ena-

bles the reader to see the world in a new light. It ends, as “Sunday Morning” does,

with a hymn to the earth, the “fat girl” as Stevens calls her. Her changeableness, her

extraordinary vitality and variety, he concludes, can be caught for a moment in a

single, crystalline image. With that image, “my green, my fluent mundo,” he says,

“will have stopped revolving except in crystal.” The revolving crystal is, of course, an

image of an image: a fictional embodiment of the kind of imaginative fiction that

can at once recover the world about us, in all its plenitude, and raise it to a higher

power, a superior dimension of reality. It summarizes in the only way possible for

Stevens (that is, in an imaginative way) what was for him the central fact of life and

the continuing concern of his work: the ability of the mind to achieve a kind of

redemption – by working with the world to abstract something of value out of that

world, and so, as Stevens himself put it once, build a bridge between fact and miracle.

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) knew both Stevens and Williams well and

commented acutely on their work. Of Williams, for example, she observed that he

was a poet supremely “able to fix the atmosphere of a moment.” But she was very

much her own woman and her own poet. “We must,” she once declared, “have the

courage of our peculiarities”; and she showed that courage herself. She was always

willing to be different and to embody that difference in poetry. Born in Missouri and

brought up in Pennsylvania, Moore published her first poems in 1915. Three years

later, she moved to New York City and remained there for the rest of her life. Her first

volume, Poems, was published in London in 1921 without her knowledge by two

friends, one them being H.D. Several other collections followed, among them

Observations (1924), Selected Poems (1935), and What Are Years? (1941); and her

Collected Poems (1951) was followed by three further collections and a Complete

Poems five years before her death. All of her work demonstrates that stubborn

determination to be oneself that she saw as the core of personality and poetry. She

was willing to risk eccentricity if it meant the creation of her own measure, and

the results were original and inimitable. Just as in life she had her own vivid, odd

presence, instantly recognizable because of the black cape and black tricorn hat she

habitually wore, so, in her own work, she had her own distinctive, unique voice, as

this opening stanza from her poem “The Steeple-Jack” (1935) illustrates:

Dürer would have seen a reason for living

in a town like this, with eight stranded whales

to look at; with the sweet air coming into your house

on a fine day, from water etched

with waves as formal as the scales

on a fish.

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