Modern American Poetry

(^268) Edward Hirsch
has a moral inflection) and her ideas about things grow out of the primary
ground of her Objectivist aesthetic.
Moore’s poems are so clear and “objective,” her individual words so
concrete and singular, her descriptions so vivid and precise, that it is as if her
language had been cleaned and held up to the light at a slight distance.
Williams said of her language:
With Miss Moore a word is a word most when it is separated out
by science, treated with acid to remove the smudges, washed,
dried, and placed right side up on a clean surface. Now one may
say that this is a word. Now it may be used, and how?
It may be used not to smear it again with thinking (the
attachments of thought) but in such a way that it will remain
scrupulously itself, clean perfect, unnicked beside other words in
parade. There must be edges.^46
Moore’s elaborate syllabic patterns foreground the visual aspect of her
work. The stanza, as opposed to the line, is her operative unit, and her
characteristic poems are an arrangement of stanzas, each a formal replica of
the previous one. “The Past Is the Present” concludes: “Ecstasy affords / the
occasion and expediency determines the form.”^47 Moore’s expedient forms
rely on the cadences of prose as well as the music of colloquial speech. They
shun traditional effects, seem hammered out on a typewriter. The formal
arrangement of her work gives the impression not so much of a thing saidas
of a thing made.Implicitly the poems stand as a corrective to the formless and
shoddy in life and art.
Moore is particularly American in her belief in “accessibility to
experience” (“New York”) and her faith in locale, her aesthetic of the
independent observer looking intently at the brute forces of nature.
Observationsalso looks acutely and knowledgeably at “this grassless, linksless,
languageless country in which letters are written / not in Spanish, not in
Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand, / but in plain American which cats and
dogs can read!” (“England”).^48
Like Williams and Moore, E.E. Cummings was a poet of contact and
immediacy, the present moment. A lesser poet than either—in an ultimate
sense he altered no language but his own—he was nonetheless allied with
them in. a commitment to the new and experimental. In a way he combined
the romantic bohemian sensibility of Millay with the restless formal
experimentation of Williams. On the surface his style was aggressively and
typographically innovative. Cummings was extreme in the way he fractured