Today’s Poem: Poetry

On Marianne Moore’s birthday, a toast to all this fiddle

Illustration from Mary E.C. Boutell’s Picture Natural History, 1869 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Poetry

by Marianne Moore

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. 
     Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there
               is in 
     it after all, a place for the genuine. 
          Hands that can grasp, eyes 
          that can dilate, hair that can rise 
               if it must, these things are important not because a 

high sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are 
     useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the 
     same thing may be said for all of us — that we 
          do not admire what 
          we cannot understand. The bat, 
               holding on upside down or in quest of something to  

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under  
     a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea,
               the base- 
     ball fan, the statistician — case after case  
          could be cited did 
          one wish it; nor is it valid  
               to discriminate against “business documents and  

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction 
     however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not
               poetry,  
     nor till the autocrats among us can be  
          “literalists of 
          the imagination” — above  
               insolence and triviality and can present 

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have  
     it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand, in defiance of their opinion —
     the raw material of poetry in
          all its rawness and
          that which is, on the other hand,
               genuine then you are interested in poetry.
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Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), protegée of Marianne Moore (1887–1972), noted in “Efforts of Affection,” her posthumously published memoir of their long friendship, that among many other things, Moore was a “ruthless” reviser of her own poems. Her early work in particular, such as Today’s Poem from her debut 1921 collection, Poems, underwent the merciless scalpel she wielded in a mid-century crusade against meter and rhyme. 

As Bishop noted, Moore had come down on the side of mistrusting “those very rhymes and stanza forms she had so painstakingly elaborated” years before, and so eviscerated “some of her most beautiful poems.” “Poetry” was the most famous of these, and the most famously torturously revised over the course of half a century. Of the original ars poetica, which you are reading here today, by 1967 only three lines remained: 

I, too, dislike it.
     Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
     it, after all, a place for the genuine.

Marianne Moore, 1935 (Wikimedia Commons)

Well, we all hope, don’t we, that “one discovers in / it, after all, a place for the genuine,” because if we don’t, what are we doing here, at Poems Ancient and Modern? But if “the genuine” is all that we discover a place for in poetry, then again, what are we doing here? What distinguishes poetry from other uses of language is, after all, that it makes a particular kind of place for the “genuine.” It constructs both the place and “the genuine” from the play between syntax, with its forward momentum, and the metered or syllabic patterns, punctuated by rhyme, across which, as in this poem, the complicated sentences skate. And in this play, it makes room in language for the real things of the world outside the bounds of language.

In this poem, cast in sestets of varying line lengths, all Moore’s characteristic idiosyncrasies display themselves. There are the shifting syllabic lines, with counts ranging from nineteen in the opening line to twenty-two to five. There are the line breaks in what feel like awkward places, on articles and prepositions, which mitigate against the flow of oration and render the lecturing, mostly prosy voice disjunct and strange. These breaks also create the unexpected end-rhymes that pair up for an instant before the pattern appears to disrupt itself again, though in fact it’s a regular abbccd — easy not to notice as you float along on the sentences that unwind themselves across those end-words. 

There are the surprising turns of phrase, made more surprising, again, by line breaks: “hair that can rise / if it must,” for example, renderse the weary, familiar figure comically wry. There are the striking images, such as that “immovable critic winkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea,” that erupt with seeming spontaneity out of the flow of what feels like a prose essay — all the things that seem to occupy the place of “the genuine,” that reality which is not language, but for which language, the “raw material,” may construct an world like an “imaginary garden.” Or do I have it backwards, and the particulars are the raw materials, and language itself is “the genuine?” 

At any rate, this poem, in its original form, balances on the page like an Alexander Calder sculpture, the short lines holding the sprawl of the longer lines in check, the tension between language as idea and language as image, in which real things can seem to leap into existence, granting the whole structure, a feat of verbal engineering, its wordy but airy life. 

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