Preface

Greatly beloved yet little understood, highly esteemed yet barely known outside of English departments, Marianne Moore is a poet of paradoxes. She was generous to a fault in answering queries and granting interviews, yet she revealed her deepest feelings to no one. Although she left to posterity an archive that chronicles virtually every week of her life, the archive reveals little about her private thoughts, emotions, fears, and aspirations. She had lifelong, deeply devoted friendships-including those with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, and other well-known writers-but she never married and apparently never fell in love. "No poet has been so chaste," wrote the critic R. P. Blackmur in 1935. Her literary maiden-aunt persona won many fans in the 1950s and '60s. But for too long since then the perceived chasteness in her art and life has all but dehumanized her in the public imagination.

From the time her poems first received notice, critics were divided on the question of feeling in her work. Mark Van Doren, Louis Untermeyer, and other leading critics of the 1920s called her poetry haughty, needlessly obscure, and devoid of emotion. But all the poet-critics whom we now consider important-T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), William Carlos Williams, and later Wallace Stevens-praised her in superlatives. From 1915, when her poems first attracted their attention, until 1925, when she won the prestigious Dial Award and assumed editorship of The Dial, they thought her the finest poet writing in America. They admired especially the subtlety of feeling in her work and her startling diction. "With Miss Moore a word is a word most," wrote Williams, "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."

The one point upon which both her detractors and admirers agreed is that her readership would never be large. Van Doren placed her among the "insufferable high brows" while Eliot said her poetry was "too good . to be appreciated anywhere." No one, least of all the poet herself, could have predicted that three decades later, at the age of sixty-two, she would launch a career as a celebrity and public poet. Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Ladies' Home Journal published her poems; McCall's paid her a thousand dollars for an interview. Macmillan and then Viking issued new books of her poems as fast as she could produce them. Her readings on college campuses drew crowds to rival those of Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas. On her eightieth birthday in 1967, she appeared on Today and a few months later on The Tonight Show. She threw out the first pitch to open the 1968 season in Yankee Stadium and was recognized everywhere for her tricorne hat and cape. She was widely hailed as America's most distinguished living poet.

While her new books of the late 1950s and '60s received glowing reviews from poets as diverse as James Dickey and John Ashbery, public life took a toll on her poetry. Instead of spending months on a single poem, as she often did earlier in her career, she wrote quickly and prolifically. She wrote primarily for a listening audience or for a specific publication or event. Ever more fluid and technically proficient, her late poems lose the verve of her earlier work; they charm rather than disarm the reader. The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, published to much fanfare on her eightieth birthday, omitted nearly half the poems she published before 1951 and included virtually all those she published afterward. This far-from-complete collection distorted her oeuvre and framed her reputation for decades to come.

Meanwhile during the 1960s and '70s young people were discovering the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and other consciousness-raising taboo breakers. To readers captivated by such voices, the witty ironies of Marianne Moore came to seem irrelevant and her elderly quirkiness embarrassing. Identity politics in the 1970s called upon women to express raw anger and honest sexuality. Rather than celebrating Moore's success as a woman poet, the new generation of feminists accused her of repressing her sexuality in order to achieve that success.

For more than a decade after her death in 1972, Moore's poetry languished in obscurity. Serious readers never doubted her prominence among America's major modernists, but she became more than ever a poet's poet, unread by all but the elite. As identity politics loosened its grip in the late 1980s and '90s, academics began turning their attention to women poets who did not necessarily fit the post-World War II feminist paradigm. Graduate students were advised to take another look at Marianne Moore. Those who investigated the Moore archives in Philadelphia and who sought out her early poems in rare-book rooms discovered a poet quite different from the media darling who still lingered in the public imagination. Dissertations and monographs about Moore's feminism and her contribution to modernism proliferated.

As more professors began teaching her poetry, anthologies expanded their selections of her work and substituted her early, difficult poems for the later, more accessible ones. In contrast to the anti-Semitism that was taking its toll on the reputations of Pound and Eliot, Moore's politics began to seem remarkably prescient. Her poetry pled for multicultural tolerance and endorsed biodiversity many decades before these issues grabbed our national attention. Her posthumously published Complete Prose and Selected Letters along with new editions of her poems have provided today's readers a more complete view of her achievements than did her Complete Poems. Yet the woman behind those achievements remains as elusive as ever.

"Moore's poems are famously unforthcoming," wrote Brad Leithauser in a 2004 book review, "you can study them for years and derive little sense of her family, friendships, jobs, and littler sense still of the nature of any balked hopes and private losses."

It is not Moore's dearth of feeling but rather its depths, she claimed, that make her poems unaccommodating. "Feeling at its deepest-as we all have reason to know-tends to be inarticulate. If it does manage to be articulate, it is likely to seem overcondensed, so that the author is resisted as being enigmatic or disobliging or arrogant." Yet expressing her feelings in enigmatic, overcondensed poetry became for Marianne Moore a means of survival. From the time she was twenty-three until her mother's death when Marianne was almost sixty, the two women lived together and were rarely apart for even one night. Mary Warner Moore did all of the housekeeping and mostly supported her daughter's literary ambitions. She was the first reader of everything that Marianne wrote, and she served as a trusted assistant during the four years that Marianne edited The Dial. The two were genuinely devoted to each other and enjoyed each other's company-while the mother exacted from her adult daughter the emotional subservience of a young child. Marianne had no place to hide-except in her poems.

Her many poems about obscure, and often armored, animals are both studies in the art of survival and acts of survival themselves. As impersonal and unforthcoming as they might seem, these poems reveal much, I have found, about the poet's interior life. Marianne always defended her mother to outsiders. She told an interviewer in the 1950s that her mother was "the least possessive of beings," yet said in a later interview, without mentioning her mother, that she felt herself to be "a case of arrested emotional development." Her poetry includes many images of confinement, such as "the sea in a chasm, struggling to be / free and unable to be." And it rails against greed, tyranny, egotism, and all forms of possessiveness. Her heroes are nocturnal, unassuming, solitary creatures. They survive by fortitude and nonviolent resistance.

As constraining as Mary's love was, Marianne found in that love the artistic space she needed. As she wrote about the eggs of an obsessive mother in "The Paper Nautilus," she was "hindered to succeed." Not only did she insist to her friends that living with her mother provided the ideal environment in which to work, she proved it. With literally no "room of her own," she wrote poetry that stands at the forefront of American modernism.

Living within the narrow confines of her mother's love, Marianne Moore came to identify with the oppressed and marginalized. She valued individual freedom and autonomy above all else and knew from experience the difficulty of achieving them. "Politically I cannot contemplate anything but freedom for all races and persons," she wrote. Sweeping generalizations of any kind were for her a form of tyranny, and she repeatedly warned against typecasting or lazy first impressions. Those who make the effort to be precise and to recognize nuances of individuality she praised as heroes. The cry for freedom in her domestic life becomes in her poetry a political imperative.

I knew Marianne Moore's name before I knew that of almost any other poet. The eighty-year-old celebrity read at the University of Texas...