Modern American Poetry

Moore’s America 439

glacier “lies.” And the passage goes on to suggest a distinction between this
elusive reality and the frames we put on it:

dots of cyclamen-red and maroon on its clearly defined pseudo-podia

made of glass that will bend—a much needed invention—

comprising twenty-eight ice-fields from fifty to five hundred feet thick,

of unimagined delicacy.

Thus begins a six-page descriptive poem, piling up different languages,
nomenclature of the sea, flora, human anatomy, technology, geology, every
line of which bears close reading, but which pulls us along in the momentum
of its syntax. Here we have radically different regions of nature compared—
the cyclamen flower evoked at the site of the ocean creature, the octopus,
fuses the flora of Mt. Rainier and the fauna of the underwater world. For
whom and by whom is the “pseudo-podia” “clearly defined”? What is clear
when we impose the category of a “foot” on either an ice field or an octopus?
Mt. Rainier, the poem suggests, cannot be charted; that does not mean it
cannot be experienced. Like an octopus the reality spreads out in all
directions, and the safe distance of metaphoric abstraction yields to mind-
boggling shifts of scale and scene, exuberant lists, densely textured,
proliferating images of power and delicacy, that come as close as any modern
poem to the American sublime, that aesthetic triumph over mapping. The
ambition of the poem, in its accreted quotation, its disarming metaphors and
strained syntax, its radical parataxis, its shifts in scale and perspective, is to
develop our regard for what is beyond our power to circumscribe, to
quantify, and to sell off.
In 1922 Moore visited her brother, stationed near Seattle, and together
they made an expedition to Mt. Rainier, which only two decades before, in
1899, had become a national park. Like so many of her contemporaries, then,
she had rushed to acquire the wilderness experience, on the “game preserve”
of the American Eden. But Moore’s poem is not a spontaneous overflow of
powerful feeling. She does not indulge in naïve realism or frontier
fantasies—old myths of American prioritism, of the wilderness within
unleashed by the wilderness without. She does not come “face to face” with
original nature. The landscape has been heavily intercepted by a collage of
maps and field guides, by human interpretation and representation; it cannot
be known independent of these constructions. Moore’s way, then, to the
American sublime is by heightening rather than suppressing the mediations.
Nature has little to do with the wilderness that is legally chartered and
protected by park rules and regulations, the wilderness simulation that