Modern American Poetry

(^428) Bonnie Costello
the top, / reserved as their contours, saying nothing.” The view we would
take will ultimately take us into its flux:
the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.
There are others besides you who have worn that look—
whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no
longer investigate them
for their bones have not lasted.
Landscape, that prospective gaze, in which man dominates over the scene,
must submit to the reciprocal gaze of nature, and ultimately to the
indifferent turning away of death. Yet within this sense of the frame and of
the flux, Moore does create a landscape, one in which nature is compared to
itself, and we to nature. For one does not, in Moore, know the thing in itself,
the “colorless primitive” of Stevens’ “anti-master man.” “A Grave” (CP, 49)
is another “landscape with boat,” but without the balcony view. The animal
perspective is featured. Trees have turkey feet, birds “swim through the air at
top speed, emitting cat-calls,” “the blades of [our] oars / moving together like
the feet of water-spiders.” This is a scene full of movement and transience,
representing us in our mortal, not our imperial state. One cannot “take” a
view, one can only give it, and give up the ghost. Anthropomorphism proves
a figure of death itself:
The wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx—
beautiful under networks of foam,
and fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the seaweed
Moore is famous for her menagerie, but her ideal of poetry puts the
animal “in the middle” of a landscape. In Frost, the American landscape is
converted to a version of the pastoral that reveals its fictional and fleeting
character. In Stevens, landscape is a meditative space in which the shapes
made by the imagination respond to the pressure of reality. Moore’s
landscapes celebrate the principle of the wild within the frame. Her
landscapes, like her poems, emerge from “raw material” both natural and
cultural. Landscape provides Moore the medium for her fullest exploration
of America, both its society and its geography. Far more than Frost or
Stevens, she draws on the patterns and images others have made, and creates
a landscape of these. In particular, her “imaginary gardens with real toads in
them” stand in contrast to the hard and soft pastorals that have sometimes
stood in for an American sense of place. In the first part of this chapter I