388 Making It New: 1900–1945example, Moore first insists on the bird’s remoteness from man, “a less / limber
animal.” It has been difficult, we are told, to find “the proper word” for this creature;
furthermore, it is impossible to equate it with human standards of morality, because
it lives in a way that we might well regard as makeshift and ruthless – by bullying
other birds, the “industrious crude-winged species,” and forcing them to surrender
what they have caught. Only when Moore has established this difference does
she then go on to make the moral discovery. “The unconfiding frigate bird,” the poet
tells us, “hides / in the height and in the majestic / display of his art.” The creature
may exist apart from human concerns but in the very act of doing so he seems to
offer what John Crowe Ransom called “an exemplum of rightness and beauty”:
his capacity for going his own way can, after all, be translated into strictly human
terms. He has the courage of his own peculiarities: he follows the dictates, the truths
and limitations, of his nature. So, paradoxically, the bird is “like” the good man
in being so “unlike” him – like the good man and, Moore might have added, like
the good poet, too.
“Ecstasy affords / the occasion and expediency determines the form.” Moore’s
memorable formulation could serve as an epitaph to her work. For that matter, it
could serve as an epitaph to the work of a number of other writers who, like Moore,
used formal structures to channel and so intensify feeling. Elinor Wylie (1885–1928),
for instance, was a memorable practitioner of the classical lyric, using it to create an
art that was, to use her own words, “elaborate, neat, enameled, elegant, perhaps
exquisite.” “Avoid the reeking herd” begins one of her poems; and this expresses one
of the major impulses in her poetry – the longing to escape a malicious, stupid
world, where “The rumbling of the market-carts / The pounding of men’s feet”
bruise the soul, and to seek out some private realm where it may be possible to “Live
like that stoic bird / The eagle of the rock.” The realm may be a pastoral one (“Wild
Peaches” (1932)); it may be one of pure artifice (“The Fairy Goldsmith” (1932)), or
of sleep and death (“The Coast Guard’s Nephew” (1932)). Whatever form it assumes,
it is shaped by the rapt, hermetic nature of Wylie’s vision, her peculiar ability to
mingle sensuousness and spirituality. In some of her later work, Wylie became, at
times, more frankly sexual (as in “One Person,” a series of autobiographical sonnets
addressed to a lover (1943)) and, at others, more openly visionary (as in “Chimera
Sleeping” (1943), where the poet talks of pursuing a “foreknown and holy ghost”
that dissolves as she pursues it). Even these later poems, though, have that quality of
dreamy sensuality, erotic mysticism that characterizes her earlier poetry – and that
sense of dark passions lurking beneath a bright, brittle surface that Wylie herself was
probably thinking of when she declared, “All that I / Could ever ask / Wears ... / ...
a thin gold mask.”
Several of Wylie’s poems are addressed to “that archangel,” Percy Bysshe Shelley.
He is the subject of one of her novels, and members of her family tried to promote
the legend that Wylie was a female Shelley of the twentieth century. If Shelley’s
presence does indeed hover behind Wylie’s writing then Lord Byron, in turn, is a
ghostly presence in the work of another skillful manipulator of classic lyric
forms, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950). Like Byron, Millay combined a livelyGGray_c04.indd 388ray_c 04 .indd 388 8 8/1/2011 7:53:53 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 53 AM