Modern American Poetry

(^430) Bonnie Costello
technology and business, and incorporates images of its creative momentum.
Nature does not stay still, nor should man. Moore’s own poems are structured
syntactically, and through imagistic leaps, to catch that sense of speed. William
Carlos Williams called her poem “Marriage” an “anthology in rapid transit.”
On the other hand, American speed is often combined with a sense of rapacity
and hurry, a desire for quick takes and facile generalizations. Williams’ own
landscape poem “Spring and All” presents some of this same conflict—how do
we see the dynamic life of nature unfurling when we are speeding by in our
car? How can the sense of motion be reconciled with the desire for accuracy?
Moore had a vivid feeling for the continent she had crossed by train, as she puts
it in “People’s Surroundings” (CP, 55), on “straight lines over such great
distances as one finds in Utah and in Texas / where people do not have to be
told / that a good brake is as important as a good motor.” Must we choose
between nature’s dynamism and culture’s momentum? Moore’s poems attempt
to integrate the world’s motions with her own.
Moore’s fascination with nature’s “fluctuating charm” (CP, 180) and its
elusive swiftness sets her against the human impulse to fix it in shallow
simulations. Reality is always quicker than our grasp. She admires the
swiftness of the ostrich in “He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron,’” the quicksilver of
the plumet basilisk, the “kangaroo speed” of the jerboa, which defeat our
desire to turn nature into still life. Her landscapes, similarly, refuse to stay
still within our frames. The appropriate response is not speed of possession,
the plunder of time and space, but speed of transformation, “conscientious
inconsistency” (134), in which the mind, “enchanted” by its object, adopts its
iridescent changes.
That flux affects human affairs as well, and underlies Moore’s sense of
history and modernity. America’s benign myths of origin stand in paradoxical
relation to technological mastery through increasing speed and efficiency.
America is an unfinished landscape, or a series of landscapes on the site we call
America. Our origins do not establish an ultimate dominion, or even set a
process in motion since beginnings are contested. Far more explicitly than in
Frost or Stevens, then, Moore’s temporality reveals the historical dimensions
of landscape, and the impact of landscape on history. In the second part of this
chapter I take up Moore’s representations of American history in relation to
place—her emphasis on history as process rather than image, on nature as
condition and reflection of history rather than a ground of historical meaning
or a proof of dominion. She critiques the tendency to convert historical sites
to “sights,” spaces of merely touristic collection and facile narrative, static
displays rather than scenes of evolutionary struggle and contingency.