Modern American Poetry

427

A PLACE FOR THEGENUINE

Marianne Moore is most familiar to readers as the poet of armored animals,
creatures who defy our efforts to entail them. Moore is also a distinctive poet
of places—and they are similarly elusive. Writing in the midst of the
Progressive era’s rugged individualism, she offers a posture of humility
toward the wilderness. Moore’s sense of the frame and the flux emerges in “A
Grave” (CP, 49), which describes a seascape in Maine. Like Stevens, she
knows her eccentricity and suspects a perspective that claims the center:

Man looking into the sea,

taking the view from those who have as much right to it as

you have to it yourself,

it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,

but you cannot stand in the middle of this

Landscape has an explicit political and moral implication for Moore, as well
as the aesthetic and ontological implication it has for Stevens. Ultimately, no
human has a “right” to the “view.” Moore shows how unyielding nature is
and how little it resembles us, except as a counterimage of our imperial
stance. “The firs stand in a procession, each with an emerald turkey-foot at

BONNIE COSTELLO

Moore’s America

FromShifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry. © 2003 by the President
and Fellows of Harvard College.