Four years and counting!

I was planning to run Dylan Thomas’s “Notes on the Art of Poetry” as a fourth anniversary poem, but, although I agreed with everything it had to say, it didn’t really move me. Moore’s “Poetry”, on the other hand, did, so here it is.

So, what is it about the poem that I so liked? I’m not sure - maybe I just appreciate the exquisite poetry hiding under the matter-of-fact facade (to say nothing of the rigid form (see the commentary on Poem #1043 for a description of Moore’s syllable counted verse) hidden under an illusion of free verse), or because I like the penetrating originality of phrases like ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’.

Oddly enough, I agree with Moore a lot less than I do with Thomas - in particular, “these things are important…because they are useful” made me twitch. Of course, that raises the question of how seriously to take the poem (I mean, how seriously should one take a poem titled ‘poetry’ and beginning “I too dislike it”?). I’m not really sure what Moore is trying to say, in the end - indeed, at times she appears to be treading a fine line between poetry and something perilously close to antipoetry.

The case for an assumed voice is all the more compelling in that it looks like Moore is distinguishing not just between the genuine and the artificial (or more closely, between genuine poetry and poetry that is what I like to call capital-L Literature), but between the rough and the finished. If in “Poetry’s” distaste for the ‘high-sounding interpretation’ it eschews artifice, it also seems to want craft to fall by the wayside - between the “raw material of poetry” and the “genuine”, there seems very little room for the careful and precise shaping of words that - ironically - today’s poem is an excellent example of.

Contrast (our) Thomas’s commentary on Poem #1043:

  Archibald MacLeish famously wrote:
     "A poem should not mean
      But be."
  I can think of no poet who so consistently fulfils MacLeish's dictum as
  Marianne Moore.

Randall Jarrell talks of “her lack – her wonderful lack – of arbitrary intensity or violence, of sweep and overwhelmingness and size, of cant, of sociological significance”. Her poems simply exist; they “cannot be suborned to any end but their own” [1]. They are elegant and precise; carefully constructed and meticulously detailed; and always, always, wonderfully rewarding.

and the paradox falls into clearer focus - today’s poem seems to be all about Meaning, but when you step back and take a look at it, it just Is. And, as Thomas noted, few people do that better than Moore.

— Martin

p.s. The poems-from-the-movies theme will be back tomorrow - think of this as the intermission.

Links

There’s an extensive set of comments on the poem and its extensive revision history here:

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/moore/poetry.htm

  Two things I liked were the argument that Moore was distinguishing between
  'poetry' and 'Poetry' (compare my earlier derogatory usage of Literature),
  and the following note:
    Another manifestation of the interrogation of authority in "Poetry"
    developed across Moore's revisions of it over the years. The poem was
    well known and well liked, in all its subversive playfulness. But its
    argument created problems for its poet. For if it was "genuine" on first
    publication, once it became well known, by its own lights it lost some
    of its genuineness. For later publications, Moore revised the poem
    substantially and managed in so doing to disperse some of the
    familiarity. Finally Moore cut the poem to three lines, and printed one
    of the longer versions in the endnotes. The short version reads:

      Poetry
      I, too, dislike it.
          Reading, it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers

in it, after all, a place for the genuine.

- And for the discovery of today’s poem, I’m indebted to the excellent

collection of metapoems at http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/index.html