Marianne Moore Books

Having interests in both science and poetry, I was excited to find a book about both, which was not merely a collection of "scientific poetry" but which actually had something worthwhile to say. The book presents a wonderful insight into the lives of three poets in particular, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore, and is enlightening as to the ways in which they responded and reacted to the increasingly science and technology oriented society they lived in. Since this trend towards a reliance on science and technology has only escalated since the 1920s and 30s it is interesting to compare their position to our own. Certainly, I have gained a new appreciation for the poetry, and a new understanding of the period. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the ways poetry is written to reflect our position as humans within a social context.

Because he didn't get permission to quote from Marianne Moore's family correspondence, and because she led an outwardly uneventful life, Charles Molesworth falls into the trap of more or less paraphrasing from Moore's letters to tell her story, leaving some of the big questions about this unlikely Modernist nearly untouched. He doesn't seem to see anything unusual in Moore's relationship with her mother, who she lived with for the first 60 years of her life and whose letters and sayings became such a rich source for her poems. He doesn't examine why Moore chose to be a lifelong spinster, or attracted so much interest among Greenwich Village's hard-living bohemians. Even her religious convictions are taken for granted, without much consideration of how her faith shaped her distinctive views of life and art.

I wish Molesworth had looked for more creative, less literary sources on Moore: maybe parishioners from her church, or her nieces, or people who worked with her adored older brother, Warner. A more inspired reading of the poems might have helped round out the picture, too: you kind of wonder what all those aloof and armored animals that walk through her poems say about her life. This book's a little too content to take Moore and her family at their own valuation, where I hoped to see beyond the careful surface and learn more about the sources of her poetry. Helpful for sketching the outlines of Moore's life, but it left me looking for another book to add depth and texture.

This book is quite informative -- the author has clearly done solid and serious research for many years to write such a book. However, the book is incredibly boring -- it has no through-line, no plot, just chronological plodding through year after year without any sense of how to tell a story, much less write one. The style is extremely uneven and at times just pure aggravation. He actually uses words like "ignorable," a word that is not in my Webster's Unabridged but that obviously means easily ignored, but after the fiftieth such term it does become difficult to ignore such awkward neologisms.

Still, if you are interested in Moore, this book is the best place to start. He is right about everything where her critics are just a pack of psychotic feminist goofballs for the most part -- one book uses the term "anti-bourgeois" 123 times in 120 pages. Moore was for the Vietnam War, voted for Nixon and went to church twice a week. She spent her entire life in devotion to Christ. You won't find that out from reading her critics, who instead draft her into the feminist war on men. While Moore did think women should have the right to vote, she was also against any kind of self-righteousness and was very conservative, and long before Nixon had supported Taft and Hoover. She is also anti-feminist in many ways: Molesworth quotes her:

"If there is any advantage in dress, it is on the side of woman; ... women are no longer debarred from professions that are open to men, and if one cares to be femininely lazy, traditions of the past still afford shelter" (162).

Molesworth gets his facts straight and is right about the major themes of Moore's life, and this part of his book is pure pleasure. This is a great biography in terms of research and details, but very poor in terms of plot line, and readability. I've read about ten books on Moore, and this is far and away the best one. You get a good picture of her, while in most of the criticism you get willfully and woefully inaccurate depictions of her in which the authors simply don't care at all to present the truth. Molesworth really does care to present the truth as he sees it, and he has struggled hard to get to it. Thank heavens there is one useful book to get at this difficult, charming, incredibly ingenious poet. Set aside 60 hours to read it, it's about as difficult to read as anything I've read since Hegel, but he hews close to the facts, and has a very strong mind for understanding Moore's philosophy, religion, and temperament. He just has so many facts, and they don't seem to be well-organized, and sometimes you have to reread a paragraph three times to figure out what he was trying to say, as he can move from talking about her brother, to a poem, to a check she got, to her interest in the Presbyterian religion all in one sentence. Check out this sentence, literally chosen at random (there are some that I could find that are much worse):

"The poem [The Plumet Basilisk], by treating his enemies as Iscariot-like, implicitly compares Hoover to Christ; this may well be the result of Mrs. Moore's influence, though Moore's own political views in this period are strongly conservative" (259).

The author is extremely familiar with all the vast currents of modernism and intimately familiar with the work of Williams, Eliot, Stevens, H.D., and not only with their poetics, but with where their money came from, and who they were sleeping with. This is a really useful book that I took one star away from for its awkward prose, but I am so grateful that it exists that I gave it 4 stars and would advise anybody interested in Moore to skip the lit-crit and just go straight to this book. The lit-crit is not only terribly written but is just entirely wrong-headed and for the most unable to deal with this paradoxically avant-garde conservative Christian.

I THOUGHT THAT THE BOOK WAS GOOD IN THE SCENCE THAT IT WENT THROUGH AND EXPLAINED HER LIFE EVERY STEP OF THE WAY. THE BOOK TOLD THE HARD THINGS THAT SHE OVER CAME IN HER LIFE. I WOULD RECOMEND THIS BOOK TO YOU IF YOU WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT ONE OF THIS COUNTRY GREATEST POETS....ERIC COUGHLIN 9-27-99

I bought this Dover Thrift knowing that I would at least like a few of the poems, and even one great poem would be worth a measly dollar. These are poems that speak of the greatness of America, or the treachery of slavery, or other such things that bring tears to your eyes if you don't fall asleep before its over. Now don't get me wrong, every poem in this book marks a great step for women in poetry, and all of the poems are good. For those who like surrealism and dreamlike imagery though (like me), this book is more worth buying for the poems such as: "Daddy" (S. Plath's jerking rendering of the thoughts of a half-Jew, half-German woman), "Bluebeard's Closet" (R. Cooke's portrayal of the horrors of the room filled with dead wives), and a few other such of the like. The title, "Great Poems by American Women" should read "Great First Poems by American Women". The great poems of more recent poets were awfully ignored in the making of this mediorce (but hey, not a bad trade for the price) anthology.

Grace Schulman is a poet who pretends to write a critical study of Moore's work; her appeal to critical sources is amateur. The book is most useful where Schulman relies on her own readings, which nonetheless utilize such stodgy methods as counting syllables and stresses almost exclusively. Schulman has been meticulous and has uncovered a few things that could be helpful to readers, but her own logic is watery. This book serves as a good example of mainstream poetics trying to claim that Moore was a poet of the so-called "conversational" vein rather than an innovator who played--successfully--with the big boys.