Our poet this week is Marianne Moore. She was born on 15th November, 1887. Her style of writing is described as modernist. Here, poets believe in making poetry new – in vocabulary and style. The words are refined and symbolic. Irony and allusion are widely-used. Some of the celebrated practitioners of this School are Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot.
The Missouri- born Moore graduated with a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College and taught and worked in a library before she embarked on a poetical career. Moore, who belonged to the ‘Greenwich Village’ group, quickly gained the attention of the poets we encountered in the previous paragraph. In turn, she encouraged poets like Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, among others. Moore has won many accolades for her writing, including the Pulitzer Prize. William Carlos Williams referred to her as, “a rafter holding up the superstructure of our uncompleted building.”
When it comes to her writing style, Moore’s sense of liberation and free-spiritedness did not result in overflowing lines. What we see is clear-cut, condensed writing, but one that has a suggestion of plenty. So that when you read her work, you’re pretty sure that under each line and word lie entire worlds. By her own admission, she has an inclination for ‘rhythm and accent.’ Given her love for animals, it’s no surprise that nature features quite prominently in her work too.
A poet who scolds poets. That’s the feeling I got when I read her iconic, Poetry . This is a poem she worked on for close to 50 years. In one of its versions, she presents only the first three lines, with deletions – “I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it/ one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.” Poetry is most known for the line where she says that poetry be presented as, ““imaginary gardens with real toads in them”…” It’s the double quotes that have baffled readers and critics. Moore would borrow lines and quotes from other sources, but these words seem to be no one’s and perhaps are her own. Moore’s love for animals manifests itself in the poem and we see the bat, “elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree…”
Right at the first line, Moore seems to dismiss poetry, remarking that there are more important things than it. But then, in a seemingly contradictory sentence, she says that upon reading it, without being awed by it, being almost dismissive of it, one discovers that there is truth in it. She does caution the reader, “One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry…” She ends with saying, “In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry.”
This poem made sense to me on so many levels. What is a poem after all? Does it have to be so difficult to follow that most readers are turned against the very idea of poetry? Or can it be deceptively simple and complex at the same time? For Marianne Moore, poetry should be raw and real. And that’s something to aspire to.
Srividya is a published poet. Read her work at www.rumwrapt.blogspot.com
