Marianne Moore, Eliot, and Stevens
Until postmodern revisionism altered our perception of modernist poetry, the consensus was that modernism represented an essentially stylistic revolution: an abandonment of the vague, suggestive, and mellifluous verse of the Aesthetes for a direct, ironic, and spare verse style. Eliot, of course, was seen to be the principal architect of this change, with some assistance from Pound and his Imagist movement. Stevens’ marginalization was in considerable part a consequence of his failure to participate in this stylistic shift, because of his persistence in a mode more compatible with the Aesthetes or the Symbolists, who preceded them. Marianne Moore is seldom considered a significant player in this stylistic revolution, but her poetry certainly shares many of the attributes considered definitional for modernism – not least of which is an obscure indirection. A comparison between the initial reception of her poetry by Stevens and Eliot when their own poetic practice was still not irrevocably fixed and a second assessment when their practice was mature (if not fixed) provides a unique opportunity to illuminate the modernist stylistic revolution and their own views of it – from the inside as it were.
Stevens’ and Eliot’s respective responses to Moore’s poetry are tangentially related to the dilemma of the modern in that both poets were troubled by the perception that Moore’s poetry seems not to strive toward the expression of a view of life but instead skips and floats above a world that is vividly imagined but never ordered into a world view or philosophy. Such a poetry is one way to respond to the loss of faith: rather than seeking for a substitute to religion, one simply indulges in the pleasure of living – of observing, and recording in verse, one’s engagement with the world. But the dilemma facing Stevens and Eliot when they reviewed the Faber selection of Moore’s poetry in the thirties was less an issue of religious belief than one of political engagement and social relevance. Eliot felt obliged to consign Moore’s poetry to the status of “minor poetry” on the grounds that it lacks such relevance, while Stevens strove in his review to articulate a theory of poetry that would justify precisely that feature of her poetry, which, as we shall see, represents a radical change from his first response to it.
Marianne Moore was one of the earliest and most persistent admirers of Stevens’ poetry. “Well Moused, Lion,” her review of Harmonium in the Dial (6 January 1924) was very favourable. She took the cryptic title of her review from A Midsummer Night’s Dream – perhaps taking her cue from “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” The remark is spoken by Theseus after the rustic, Starveling, (who is wearing a lion costume) has frightened the young lover, Thisbe, and torn her mantle. Moore cited it as an instance of a liberty successfully taken with language – a feature she admired in the Harmonium poems. She praised Stevens for just those attributes that other less sympathetic readers also found in his poetry – the “riot of gorgeousness” in which she said his “imagination takes refuge.” She also saw in him a bit of a mystical property that not every reader perceives, saying of “Sunday Morning” that it “gives ultimately the effect of the mind disturbed by the intangible; of a mind oppressed by the properties of the world which it is expert in manipulating” (Complete Prose 93). If one excludes the reference to the intangible, these two remarks pretty well adumbrate the next several decades of commentary on Stevens – most of it unsympathetic to just those features that Moore praises. At the time she wrote the review Moore was already familiar with Stevens’ poetry from his contributions to the Dial (where she was assistant editor and later acting chief editor) and to Poetry Magazine, and she was a fan. She repeatedly urged Stevens to submit poems to the Dial.1 Despite her encouragement Stevens submitted nothing during her editorship (1925–29). Of course, he did not publish any poetry during those years.
Surprisingly, Stevens reacted negatively to Moore’s poetry in the period leading up to Harmonium, couching his negative reaction in terms curiously similar to the standard complaints made of his own poetry. For example, he told Alice Corbin Henderson (27 March 1922) that Moore’s first volume, Poetry (1921), meant very little to him. “She concerns herself so much with form, and concerns herself by evading it, that I cannot arouse myself about her worth. There is a curious lack of substance in so many of these things, even after conceding that substance may be a matter of nuances, sounds, colors, etc. instead of eighteenth-century avoirdupoids” (Kermode, ed. 939). Since admirers and detractors of Stevens’ poetry, pick out the “nuances, sounds, colors, etc.” of his poetry as features to be respectively admired or deplored, and detractors uniformly complain of his “lack of substance,” it is striking to see Stevens applying the same strictures negatively to Moore’s poetry. He did change his opinion, but not until he returned to the literary scene in 1935 with the publication of Ideas of Order.
Moore’s Selected Poems were published in 1935, the same year as Ideas of Order, providing Stevens with an opportunity to register his change of opinion. He was then emerging from a dozen years of virtual silence. Clearly something had changed – either in his life, in his aesthetic practice, or perhaps in the great world. We do know that Ronald Lane Latimer’s request for poems to make up a new volume prompted Stevens to search his attic to see what poems he had in hand (10 December 1934, Letters 272), but that can hardly be the whole story. In any case, Latimer’s query seems to have set Stevens to writing poetry again and to new speculation about the nature of poetry. On 12 March 1935 he sent Latimer a new poem, “Sailing after Lunch,” explaining it in terms that reappear in his review of Moore’s Selected Poems: “While it should make its own point, and while I am against explanations, the thing [“Sailing after Lunch”] is an abridgment of at least a temporary theory of poetry. When people speak of the romantic, they do so in what the French commonly call a pejorative sense. But poetry is essentially romantic, only the romantic of poetry must be something constantly new and, therefore, just the opposite of what is spoken of as the romantic. Without this new romantic, one gets nowhere; with it, the most casual things take on transcendence, and the poet rushes brightly, and so on. What one is always doing is keeping the romantic pure: eliminating from it what people speak of as the romantic” (Letters 277). The key term in this account is “transcendence.” The essence of the romantic, for Stevens, was the sense of something beyond mere “things as they are.” The “new romantic” would be a way of capturing that sense of the transcendent that was compatible with the intellectual milieu of the twentieth century. Stevens’ mode, like Wordsworth’s, was to cast “a certain colouring of imagination” over “ordinary things,” but it could not be done in Wordsworth’s style – or that of any of his successors. Armed with this insight, Stevens now saw Moore’s poetry as offering an unWordsworthian mode of looking and seeing.
When T.C. Wilson, editor of the Westminister Magazine, asked Stevens to review Marianne Moore’s Selected Poems just thirteen days later, however, Stevens declined, saying he was “planning to start a piece of work which is likely to keep me busy for some time to come.” That “piece of work” was Ideas of Order. Although he declined to take on the review, Stevens told Wilson that he had some thoughts about Moore’s poetry that he would like to work through. Those thoughts turned out to be substantially the same as those he had conveyed to Latimer: “On the other hand, it seems to me that Miss Moore is endeavouring to create a new romantic; that the way she breaks up older forms is merely an attempt to free herself for the pursuit of the thing in which she is interested; and that the thing in which she is interested in all the strange collocations of her work is that which is essential in poetry, always: the romantic. But a fresh romantic. Anyhow, whether or not that is what she intends (even though unconsciously) it would be interesting too, if on a careful review of her work, the work supported it, to apply her work to that theory” (Letters 279). It would seem that either Stevens’ view of poetry in general, or his opinion of Moore’s poetry, had changed since the letter to Henderson thirteen years earlier. Apparently he had begun to formulate a theory of poetry in the years of his relative silence and was now ready to try to articulate it and to put it into practice in new poems.
The ostensible impediment to doing a review – his preparation of Ideas of Order – soon disappeared, since he gave the text for the volume to a stenographer the very next day (26 March), leaving him free to undertake the review after all. He took a good deal of time over it, not sending it in until 1 July (Letters 281). It seems clear – as B.J. Leggett has argued – that Stevens agreed to do the review because he now saw Moore’s poetry as belonging to the same mode as his own and was keen to express his own views on what he liked to call the “theory of poetry.”2 The fact that Stevens did not have the habit – then or later – of reviewing books of poetry, or any books, tends to corroborate Leggett’s view. For example, he had declined Moore’s suggestion (in March 1925) that he review William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain in the Dial, and when Frederick Morgan asked him in 1953 to do a review article on Santayana for Hudson Magazine, he (absent-mindedly) replied, “I don’t think I have ever reviewed a book in my life and I don’t want to start because there is very little time for the things I want to do” (Letters 771). That Stevens agreed (after initially declining) to review Moore’s Selected Poems bespeaks not only his interest in the type of poetry that Moore wrote but also his conviction that he had something to say about the nature of poetry. It is also possible that, since Eliot had edited Moore’s Selected Poetry and written an introduction for it, Stevens might have thought of the review as an opportunity to articulate his alternative conception of what poetry should be in the twentieth century.
Stevens’ review consists of one leg of a three-way discourse – or rather of three monologues – involving Stevens and Eliot on Moore, and Moore on Stevens. In addition to Stevens’ review of Moore’s Selected Poems, we have Moore’s review of Stevens’ Ideas of Order in Eliot’s Criterion, and Eliot’s introduction to Moore’s Selected Poems. I will consider Eliot’s introduction first, since it precedes Stevens’ review, and Stevens had no doubt read it before he wrote his own review.
Unlike Stevens, Eliot had been favourably impressed by Moore’s poetry from his first contact with it – as was already clear in his 1923 review of Moore’s Poems and the pamphlet Marriage (Dial 75 December 1923). Where Stevens had found “a curious lack of substance” in the volume, Eliot found it to be “aristocratic” and praised the poetry – rather condescendingly – for possessing “a quite new rhythm,” for the “satirical use” of the “curious jargon produced in America by universal university education,” and for its “almost primitive simplicity of phrase” (594). This focus on her language was a recurrent aspect of Eliot’s comments on Moore’s poetry; he repeated it thirty years later in a comment reported by Mary Trevelyan. Eliot told Trevelyan that Moore was “quite outstanding and way above most of the men of her generation. She has invented a new idiom, hitherto unused” (quoted in Imperfect 468).
In the 1923 Dial review, Eliot explained that he had added the pamphlet Marriage as compensation for the two-year delay in submitting his review of Poems. Marriage included an essay on Moore’s poetry by Glenway Wescott which drew a distinction between “proletarian” and “aristocratic”art. Eliot took issue with the distinction, maintaining that “fine art is the refinement, not the antithesis, of popular art” (594).3 However, he agreed with Wescott that Moore’s poetry was “‘aristocratic,’ in that it can please only a very small number of people.” He illustrated at some length those attributes that he praised – a new rhythm, a satirical use of the American idiom, and a simplicity of phrase, softening the condescension of his earlier remark. In particular he singled out one phrase for being reminiscent of Valéry: “a magnificence of phrase like, ‘I recall their magnificence, now not more magnificent / than it is dim, (how like Valéry’s “entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes” or like his “éternellement, / Éternellement le bout mordre” (596–7). It is striking that Eliot should compare her to Valéry, a poet with whom he was to have a long and conflicted relationship. As will be seen in subsequent chapters, Eliot confessed to enjoying Valéry’s poetry very much, but ended by disapproving of it as what he called a “poésie de luxe,” by which he meant poetry about writing poetry – very much like Stevens’ poetry, and not unlike Moore’s.4
At the end of the review Eliot returned to Wescott, citing his characterization of aristocratic art as one that emulates “the condition of ritual,” and took issue with it in a manner that is of interest, coming as it did in the midst of The Waste Land’s success and about the time Eliot was composing “The Hollow Men”: “But of course all art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment. And nothing belongs more properly to the people than ritual – or indeed than aristocracy itself, a popular invention to serve popular needs” (597). It is not clear where Eliot would place Moore’s poetry on the ritual/art continuum, but “The Hollow Men” certainly represented an effort to exploit such a continuum. The view he expressed here, however, did not survive his conversion unaltered. As an Anglican, Eliot insisted on a clear separation of art and religion. Nonetheless, his poetry – and especially the dramatic poetry – continued to exploit the symbolic action that is central to religious ritual.
In his introduction to Selected Poems, twelve years after the Dial review, Eliot was much more cautious in his praise. However, since he was the executive at Faber and Faber responsible for the decision to publish the selection in the first place, he was obliged to be positive about Moore’s poetry. He now appears to be somewhat at a loss as to how to justify her practice in terms satisfactory to himself. His difficulty is the same that many readers have with Stevens’ poetry – the apparently trivial nature of its “subject matter.” Eliot can praise Moore only for her skill with language and her mental agility – both “technical” virtues. He cannot find it in himself to praise her for what she says about life, love, death, and the like. Nor is he apparently willing to redeploy the popular/aristocratic dyad of twelve years earlier. And he no longer invokes Valéry as a parallel.
He declared that his conviction that “Miss Moore’s poems form part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time” has “remained unchanged for the last fourteen years.” While in the earlier review he had drawn attention to her use of American jargon, he now praised her for “maintaining the life of the English language” (xiv) – incidentally abandoning the claim that her poetry was uniquely American. As in the review, he used the occasion of the introduction to make general points about the nature of poetry. In the review he had attributed Moore’s innovative and eccentric use of language to her American milieu. Now he felt the need to defend her poetry against the charge of its “lightness” – the feature, we recall, of which Stevens had complained to Alice Corbin Henderson. But instead of confronting the criticism head on, Eliot retreated to a generalization about the impossibility of assessing value in poetry contemporary with oneself: “We know very little about the value of the work of our contemporaries, almost as little as we know about our own ... The last thing, certainly, that we are likely to know about them is their “greatness” ... For in greatness are involved moral and social relations, relations which can only be perceived from a remoter perspective” (vii).
These remarks reflect Eliot’s Arnoldian conviction that poetry must serve some educative – or at least heuristic – purpose, a prejudice he shares with Stevens, though perhaps not with Moore. Although we are unable to judge greatness, Eliot believes we can still discriminate between the genuine and the bogus: “But the genuineness of poetry is something which we have some warrant for believing that a small number, but only a small number, of contemporary readers can recognise” (vii). His conclusion that Moore’s poetry is not for everyone is perhaps an echo of the proletarian/aristocratic distinction he drew in the Dial review.
Struggling to find something positive to say, Eliot repeats his praise of her language. She is, he said, “one of those few who have done the language some service in my lifetime,” and rather lamely claims that she is sui generis (viii). Oddly he prints the poem “A Talisman” in the introduction as an instance of a poem inspired by Hilda Doolittle, and then pretty well trashes it: “The sentiment is commonplace, and I cannot see what a bird carved of lapis-lazuli should be doing with coral feet.” Gamely trying to be positive, he then commended its Moore-like virtues: “but even here the cadence, the use of rhyme, and a certain authoritativeness of manner distinguish the poem” (ix). Since he told us that “A Talisman” is a poem he had not included in the selection, he seems to have intended its mention as a bit of corrective advice to Moore that she refrain from imitating the Imagists – or at least “H.D.” Moore seems to have taken the hint, so far as this poem is concerned, since she has not included it in her Complete Poems.
Eliot approved Moore’s attention to minute detail, but once again his praise was peculiarly qualified: “The minutiae may even irritate the unwary, or arouse in them only the pleasurable astonishment evoked by the carved ivory ball with eleven other balls inside it, the full-rigged ship in a bottle, the skeleton of the crucifix-fish. The bewilderment consequent upon trying to follow so alert an eye, so quick a process of association, may produce the effect of some ‘metaphysical’ poetry” (x). Eliot’s selection of trivial “artworks” that display ingenious craftsmanship as analogies for Moore’s poetry reflects his discomfort with her style and mode.
And his continuation in the introduction did nothing to dispel the impression that he found her poetry trivial, albeit engaging. Characterizing it as descriptive rather than lyrical or dramatic, he attempted to valorize this minor vein, noting that she does not engage in meditations arising out of description as the Romantics do:
The aim of ‘imagism’ ... was to induce a peculiar concentration upon something visual, and to set in motion an expanding succession of concentric feelings. Some of Miss Moore’s poems ... have a very wide spread of association. It would be difficult to say what is the ‘subject-matter’ of ‘The Jerboa.’ For a mind of such agility, and for a sensibility so reticent, the minor subject, such as a pleasant little sand-coloured skipping animal, may be the best release for the major emotions. Only the pedantic literalist could consider the subject-matter to be trivial; the triviality is in himself. We all have to choose whatever subject-matter allows us the most powerful and most secret release; and that is a personal affair.” (xi).
While the last sentence is perhaps somewhat confessional, the gist of the remark is that the things that prompt “the most powerful and most secret release” for Moore are much less momentous than those that operate for major poets. This remark on “The Jerboa” is very odd since that poem is replete with historical references to Roman and Egyptian objets d’art, to which the little desert rat is contrasted. The “pedantic literalist” is more likely to consider the subject matter to be affected or precious than he is to judge it trivial. One can only conclude that Eliot is more concerned to categorize Moore’s poetry as minor than he is to offer helpful commentary.
Moreover, this poem of seventeen six-line stanzas does not suggest “imagism” to this reader. Indeed, in her 1960 interview with Donald Hall, Moore rejected the notion that her poetry derived from Imagism. She did, however, endorse Eliot’s (somewhat contradictory) view that her poetry was sui generis, although using the less honorific label, “pariah”:
Hall: “What in your reading or your background led you to write the way you do write? Was imagism a help to you?”
Moore: “No. I wondered why anyone would adopt the term.”
Hall: “The descriptiveness of your poems has nothing to do with them, you think?”
Moore: “No; I really don’t. I was rather sorry to be a pariah, or at least that I had no connection with anything. But I did feel gratitude to Others. (Plimpton 72)
Whether it is Imagist-like or not, Eliot acknowledges that Moore’s attention to detail renders her poetry “cold.” “The result” of this feature, he says, “is often something that the majority will call frigid; for to feel things in one’s own way, however intensely, is likely to look like frigidity to those who can only feel in accepted ways” (xi). He adds that this emotional “coldness” or distance “shows itself in a control which makes possible the fusion of the ironic conversational and the high-rhetorical.” Eliot may be speaking of himself, more than of Moore – though her poetry is admittedly dispassionate. The absence of subjective emotional commitment in her poetry is perhaps a feature that Eliot and Stevens both empathize with – and it is arguably the feature that Stevens attempts to theorize as the “new Romantic.” The balance of Eliot’s introduction praised Moore’s technical excellence, especially her use of “light rhyme.”
Stevens’ assessment of Moore’s poetry contrasts strongly with Eliot’s. Where Eliot stresses her dispassion and her admirable and original technique, Stevens praises her passion, her truthfulness, and her intellect:
Instead of being intentionally one of the most original of contemporary or modern poets, she is merely one of the most truthful. People with a passion for the truth are always original. She says:
Truth is no Apollo.
She has thought much about people and about poetry, and the truth, and she has done this with all the energy of an intense mind and imagination and this book is the significant result. It contains the veritable thing. (Opus Posthumous 222)
As we have seen, these remarks coincide with Stevens’ preparation of Ideas of Order for publication, after a dozen years of near silence. It is evident from the list of small corrections that he sent to T.C. Wilson, the editor of Westminister Review, that he took an unusual amount of trouble over the review, even asking Wilson to send the review to Moore and authorizing her to suppress it if she did not think it fair or correct (1 July 1935 Letters 281). All of this supports Leggett’s contention that the review represents Stevens’ first attempt to articulate his own poetic practice (Leggett 91). Fortuitously for my current purposes, he does so in part by comparing Moore’s practice to Eliot’s.
Stevens was at this time enamoured of Valéry’s notion of “pure poetry.” Stevens does not invoke Valéry in his review, as we have seen Eliot did – approvingly – in his 1923 Dial review. But he did invoke Valéry’s notion on the dust jacket of the second (Knopf) edition of Ideas of Order (1936): “The book is essentially a book of pure poetry. I believe that, in any society, the poet should be the exponent of the imagination of that society. Ideas of Order attempts to illustrate the role of the imagination in life, and particularly in life at present. The more realistic life may be, the more it needs the stimulus of the imagination” (Reprinted in Kermode, ed., note 5.1, p. 997).5 Stevens’ point is that poetry offers an alternative to the mundane world in which we live. That role is especially important, “the more realistic life may be.” In this rather awkward way, Stevens was alluding to the troubles that Europe and America were experiencing in the thirties. Stevens felt the pressure from the political left, which was clamouring for a socially responsible literature – an imperative to which he was disinclined to succumb. Moore’s poetry offered a platform from which he could promulgate his views in support of an autonomous poetry. In addition, both he and Eliot were in a stage of transition in their own work. As a consequence of these factors, their divergent assessments of Moore’s poetry reveal as much about their own preoccupations and inclinations as they do about Moore’s poetic practice. Where Eliot was troubled by the lack of social or moral relevance of her poetry, Stevens was particularly concerned to praise and justify exactly that attribute.
Leggett’s conclusion that Stevens was using Moore as a stalking horse for his own poetic theory and practice is surely correct. That motivation contrasts sharply with Eliot’s. Stevens was primarily concerned to praise her poetry without compromising his own loftier standards. Even before beginning the review, Stevens had recorded his response to her poetry “in the back flyleaf and paste-down of his copy” of Selected Poems (Leggett 77). In contrast to Eliot’s introduction, the unpublished, “unguarded” comment – as Leggett characterizes it – stresses the content, rather than the technique of Moore’s poetry: “What are the spiritual forces that have made Miss Moore? One of them is the desire to come close to the truth. About what? I think about literature as a phase of life. Not about literature alone. Nor about life alone. Not about literature and also about life. But about literature as a phase of life. And not, of course, about life as a phase of literature. This gives her book an extraordinary value, vivacity and an extraordinary variety. It is an exquisite book. But it does communicate literature rather than life although it is true that the literature that it communicates is a phase of life” (Leggett 80. My emphasis). The last sentence is echt Stevens in that it takes away with the left hand what the right hand seems to offer. But leaving aside that cautionary gesture, Stevens’ private assessment seems to be in accord with that of the published review, where – even though he stresses technique – he repeats the perception that Moore collapses any supposed distinction between life and art: “Miss Moore’s form is not the quirk of a self-conscious writer. She is not a writer. She is a woman who has profound needs. In any project for poetry (and one wishes that the world of tailors, plasterers, barkeepers could bring itself to accept poets in a matter-of-fact way) the first effort should be devoted to establishing that poets are men and women, not writers” (80).
As already suggested, Stevens doubtless had in mind the left-wing criticism then prominent in American literary circles, that Modernist poetry is merely pleasing, without socially redeeming features. (Eliot’s complaint that Moore’s poetry lacked the articulation of “moral and social relations” that is a requirement of great poetry was similarly grounded, although from the opposite end of the political spectrum.) Stevens wanted to collapse the distinction between life and poetry – or between life and fiction – by making poetry an aspect of life, rather than an alternative to it, as the dust jacket comment implies. His point is that poetry is just as legitimate a human activity as tailoring, plastering, or barkeeping and need not be justified by some higher purpose. But that is not to say that the product of poetic imagination is not, nonetheless, an alternative world to that of tailoring, plastering, and barkeeping.
Stevens then drew attention to the absence of people from Moore’s poetry, a feature Eliot does not mention even though it is a feature that contrasts strongly with his own early poetry: “It [her poetry] has not the tiniest interest in people. There are no people in the book. Thank God. This is a great relief. It is nice to relax with a book that is not about people. On the other hand, there are more animals than there are in Barnum & Bailey’s big show” (81). Stevens’ gratitude for the absence of people was, I believe, another symptom of the looming cloud of socially relevant art that the times seemed to demand. About the time he was writing this review Stevens was also working on “A Statue in Africa,” a poem – as he told Ronald Latimer – in which he was trying “to apply my own sort of poetry to ... what one reads in the papers” (Letters 308). Among the things one was reading in the papers at that date was news of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia.6
Like Eliot, Stevens praised Moore’s metrical and verbal skills, and in the first two pages engaged in a detailed analysis of “The Steeple-Jack” (the first poem in the volume). The “point of the poem” he told us, “is a view of the commonplace.” Her merit is in rendering that view meticulously and honestly: “that is Miss Moore’s method.” “Subject,” he said, “with her is often incidental” (Opus Posthumous 218). After listing the considerable menagerie of creatures – and the less numerous collection of human beings – mentioned in the poem, he concluded: “Out of her whales and the college student and Poole and the danger signs she composes a poem simple, radiant with imagination, contemporaneous, displaying everywhere her sensitive handling [and it] leaves one indubitably convinced that she leans to the romantic” (219).
Pursuant to his project to define a “new romantic,” Stevens then qualified that assessment, citing the following lines from “The Steeple Jack”:
... There are no banyans, frangipani nor
jack-fruit trees; nor an exotic serpent
life.7
He found the mark of the poem’s “new romanticism” in the negativity of these lines: “If she had said in so many words that there were banyans, frangipani, and so on, she would have been romantic in the sense in which the romantic is a relic of the imagination. She hybridizes the thing by a negative. That is one way. Equally she hybridizes it by association” (220. My emphasis).
The exact import of the term “hybridization” here is not self-evident. As it happens, Moore uses the same term in her “Note on the Notes” for Complete Poems. She explains that notes are needed because of her “hybrid method of composition”: “Since ... in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest” (Complete Poems 262. My emphasis). Her meaning is clear: hybrid poetry is poetry that incorporates words, phrases, and perhaps rhetorical ideas from other poems – in short poetry on the allusive model of Eliot’s early verse, with the difference that the reader is not necessarily intended to recognize or “catch” the allusions, as Eliot’s readers surely are.
Later in the review Stevens used the term “intermingling” to characterize Moore’s technique, which he said is “romantic,” but in an honorific, not a pejorative sense – the “new romantic.” He found the same attribute in Eliot’s poetry and praised it: “It is in the sense of living intensity, living singularity that it is the vital element in poetry. The most brilliant instance of the romantic in this sense is Mr. Eliot, who incessantly revives the past and creates the future. It is a process of cross-fertilization, an immense process, all arts considered, of hybridization. Hamlet in modern dress is another instance of hybridization. Any playing of a well-known concerto by an unknown artist is another” (Opus Posthumous 221. My emphasis). From these illustrations it seems that Stevens meant no more by “hybridization” than that shibboleth of undergraduate lectures on modernist poetry – the juxtaposition of disparate elements. He probably meant the same thing by remarking that Eliot’s poetry was “like having a Giotto in what is called a breakfast nook” in his later (1938) Harvard Advocate commentary on Eliot.
As noted above, Eliot thought Moore’s focus on minute detail reflected an imagist influence on her poetry. But that reflects a rather idiosyncratic understanding of Imagism. The classic locus for the definition of Imagism is Pound’s explanation of the genesis of “A Station in the Metro.” It speaks not to minute detail, but to the juxtaposition of two images – faces in the crowd and “petals on a wet, black bough.” “The ‘one image poem,’” Pound wrote, “is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another” (Gaudier-Brzeska 89). Though “Hamlet in modern dress” fits this model, it is not clear to me how Stevens’ last illustration – the “playing of a well-known concerto by an unknown artist” – can be read as juxtaposition. I suppose he might have had in mind the coincidence (hence juxtaposition) of knowledge (of the concerto) and ignorance (of the artist), which renders the experience novel, or – more likely – that the unknown performer is contemporary and the music antique.8
In any case, by “hybrid” Stevens must have meant some sort of mixture, some kind of impurity, some degree of adulteration of one mode, stream, or style by another. It is this impure feature that he considered common to romantic poetry, to Moore’s poetry, and to Eliot’s. In describing the romantic mode, Stevens maintained this principle of miscellany. It is, he said, “always the living and at the same time the imaginative, the youthful, the delicate [that] constitutes the vital element in poetry” (Opus Posthumous 220). Unfortunately, he muddied the waters somewhat by invoking Irving Babbitt, the Harvard French professor and Humanist (and early mentor of Eliot’s), for whom a “thing is romantic when it is strange, unexpected, intense, superlative, extreme, unique” (Opus Posthumous 221). For Babbitt, then, “romantic” is a synonym for “exotic.” I suppose we can say that the exotic implies a juxtaposition of the strange or intense with the familiar and mundane. Certainly Stevens’ example from Moore – “Imaginary gardens with real toads in them” – illustrates the notion of the juxtaposition of incongruous elements (Opus Posthumous 221) in its mixture of the factual or actual and the imaginary or fictional – a feature frequently found in Stevens’ poetry.
A sentence following the passage cited above speaks once again to the shadow that I believe current affairs cast over the review, and which partly prompted Stevens to take it on despite his distaste for reviewing: “Just what it [romantic] means, Miss Moore’s book discloses. It means, now-a-days, an uncommon intelligence. It means in a time like our own of violent feelings, equally violent feelings and the most skilful expression of the genuine” (220. My emphasis). The review, then, was designed to justify his own poetic practice at a time when action rather than contemplation seemed to be called for. He deployed his notion of the “new romantic,” of the hybrid – a mixture of the false (but gorgeous and pleasant) and the true (but plain and unpleasant) – as a response to the criticism of the political left. It permitted him to stay within the palace of art while still acknowledging the turmoil below:9 “The romantic that falsifies is rot and that is true even though the romantic inevitably falsifies: it falsifies but it does not vitiate. It is an association of the true and false. It is not the true. It is not the false. It is both. The school of poetry that believes in sticking to the facts would be stoned if it was not sticking to the facts in a world in which there are no facts: or some such thing” (Opus Posthumous 222. My emphasis). The “throwing up of the hands” represented by the last phrase is typical of Stevens’ feigned insouciance when he feels himself out of his philosophical depth. It becomes less frequent in later years as he gains confidence in his idiosyncratic views.
Stevens regarded Marianne Moore as a kindred spirit, a “new romantic” engaged in articulating a world that never existed on earth or in heaven but which nonetheless somehow includes real toads. And – rather surprisingly – he praised Eliot’s “Preludes” for also possessing the properties of the “new romantic”: “Mr. Eliot’s ‘Prelude’ [sic] with the smell of steaks in passageways, is an instance [of the new romantic], in the sense that the smell of steaks in the Parnassian air is a thing perfectly fulfilling Professor Babbitt’s specifications” (221). “Preludes” was first published in Poems 1909–1925, though it belongs to an earlier period, having been written in 1909, 1910, and 1911. (Stevens presumably read it as set in Paris – though we now know it was partly based on Boston scenes – hence his reference to “the Parnassian air.”) Stevens’ point may be that Eliot’s focus on the sordid venue of tenements in the “Parnassian air” of the city of light fulfills Babbitt’s criteria for the romantic – that it should be “strange, unexpected, intense, superlative, extreme, unique.”
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
Perhaps by “Parnassian air” Stevens did not mean the splendour of Paris, but rather the imagined world of poetry where such mundane unpleasantnesses as the poem catalogues are not expected. However, there would not be much difference, since for Stevens Paris and France remained throughout his life an imagined world. For example, he told Paule Vidal, the daughter of his Paris art dealer in 1953: “I am one of the many people around the world who live from time to time in a Paris that has never existed and that is composed of the things that other people, primarily Parisians themselves, have said about Paris. That particular Paris communicates an interest in life that may be wholly fiction, but, if so, it is precious fiction” (Letters 773).
Although I cannot imagine that Stevens would not have read Eliot’s introduction to Moore’s Selected Poems, I do not detect any traces of that reading in his review – unless it is the stress both men place on “the genuine.” It is more likely that they both took their cue for that term from Moore herself, for one of her most famous lines from the poem “Poetry” draws attention to that feature of her poetry:
one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
In Stevens’ view this concern for the “genuine” puts Moore as much out of step with the age – or at least with the prevailing poetic style of the age, a style largely formulated by Eliot’s poetic practice – as he was himself. Moore’s poetry, then, served Stevens as a vehicle for the articulation of his own understanding of the place and value of poetry, while, as already noted, Eliot’s introduction seeks to find a place for her poetry – so different from his own.
We know that Stevens was expressing his own view of poetry at that moment, for on sending the review to T.C. Wilson, he remarked: “both the poem, Sailing After Lunch, and the note on Selected Poems are expressions of the same thing. The poem preceded the note” (12 July 1935. Letters 282). The title of the poem juxtaposes a pleasurable and unnecessary activity – sailing – with a necessary one – eating lunch, that is, it juxtaposes imagination/poetry with reality. Perhaps it also suggests the indigestion or reflux that might interfere with the pleasure or efficacy of “sailing”:
It is the word pejorative10 that hurts.
My old boat goes round on a crutch
And doesn’t get under way.
It’s the time of the year
And the time of the day.
Perhaps it’s the lunch that we had
Or the lunch that we should have had.
(ll. 1–7 Collected Poems 120)
The speaker complains that he is “A most inappropriate man / In a most unpropitious place.” His “old boat” – symbolizing his poetry – “goes round on a crutch.” If one ignores the awkwardness of the mixed metaphor, the meaning is clear: the boat (poetic tradition) is worn out. Abandoning the marine analogy for a moment, the poem turns to the issue of the “romantic” and its out-of-datedness.
Mon Dieu, hear the poet’s prayer.
The romantic should be here.
The romantic should be there.
It ought to be everywhere.
But the romantic must never remain,
Mon Dieu, and must never again return.
(ll. 11–16 Collected Poems 120)
Returning to the marine analogy, he complains of its “heavy historical sail,” presumably symbolic of the romantic heritage, a heritage that makes it difficult to manoeuvre the boat – that is, to write poetry. It is “a really vertiginous boat” that runs away with the sailor/poet “through the mustiest blue of the lake.” In what appears to be another mixed metaphor, the poem castigates the boat (or perhaps the sail) for being “wholly the vapidest fake ...” (Stevens’ suspension points). He explains the fakery in the following line: “It is least what one ever sees.” In short the romantic boat (or sail) avoids or occludes reality in addition to being only imperfectly controlled. (Perhaps the mustiness of the lake represents the occlusion of reality by the romantic.)
But the poem does not rest there; it now asserts that, although the boat’s sail is heavy and dirty – and even though the lunch/romantic heritage sits heavy on the sailor’s stomach – the wheel is “gorgeous,” and permits boat and sailor to “rush brightly through the summer air”:
It is only the way one feels, to say
Where my spirit is I am,
To say the light wind worries the sail,
To say the water is swift today,
To expunge all people and be a pupil
Of the gorgeous wheel and so to give
That slight transcendence to the dirty sail,
By light, the way one feels, sharp white,
And then rush brightly through the summer air.
(ll. 22–30 Collected Poems 120–1)
The “escape” of the boat from its impediments, however, requires the poet to “expunge all people.” This is an odd detail, and one that hardly fits snugly into the analogy consisting of lone sailor, boat, sail, and lake. Awkward as it is in the poem, the line expresses an essential component of the thought Stevens wants to express: that poetry is an activity to which people – society, history, the poet himself or herself – are peripheral if not positively inimical.
That sentiment is clearer in “Mozart 1935,” published together with “Sailing after Lunch” in “Five Poems” (Alcestis 1 Spring 1935 2–6). The juxtaposition of the eighteenth-century composer and the contemporary scene in 1935 drives home the point:
Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.
If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.
(ll. 1–9 Collected Poems 131–2)
“Cachinnation” is “loud or immoderate laughter,” suggesting the mocking nature of contemporary iconoclastic mockery of things and attitudes previously valued. The sentiment here is very close to that expressed in Yeats’ “Lapis Lazuli,” written in July 1936, approximately a year later than Stevens’ “Five Poems”:
I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.
All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are Gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
(ll. 1–17 Yeats, Collected Poems 338)
But where Yeats insists on the appropriateness of the artist’s detachment from the suffering of ordinary life in the “gaiety” of art, Stevens calls for the artist to articulate that suffering – though as an individual (the pianist addressed as “thou”), not as a member of a group (“you”) such as a political movement:
Be thou the voice,
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain.
Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.
We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
Be seated, thou.
(ll. 16–24 Collected Poems 132)
The fact that Stevens’ artist does not put down his pen, or leave the piano, puts him in the same camp as Yeats’ “gay” actors and sages. In both cases the artist sticks to his task. “Mozart 1935” is not as confident as “Lapis Lazuli,” but both poems express the view that poetry is not obliged to reflect the sufferings of humanity. The concluding lines of “Sailing After Lunch,” invoking “the gorgeous wheel” and the sailor’s ability to “rush brightly through the summer air,” are closer in spirit to “Lapis Lazuli” than is “Mozart 1935.”
The “same thing” that Stevens told T.C. Wilson that both “Sailing after Lunch” and the note on Selected Poems expressed was his concern to maintain the autonomy of poetry in a time of impending crisis. Such a concern is not evident in Eliot’s introduction to Moore’s Selected Poems, even though he was just as troubled by the world’s drift toward war in the 1930s as was Stevens, and had certainly written more about it. But by this date Eliot believed that it was through religion and the community of believers that the social and political ills of the age must be addressed, not through poetry.
The “Choruses” Eliot wrote for the religious pageant ‘The Rock’” (1934) are an exception to his rule, but the other contemporaneous poem, “Burnt Norton” (1936), exemplifies it. The Choruses express Eliot’s concern with the troubled times – particularly the economic depression and the godless state of the world. The response he recommends is a return to the Christian faith, as opposed to the aesthetic detachment that both Yeats and Stevens recommend:
The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change.
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
Forgetful, you neglect your shrine and churches;
(Collected Poems 163, “the Rock” speaking)
In the following passage Eliot alludes to Nazism (“Race”) and Communism (“Dialectic”), and lumps them together with Humanism (“Reason”), capitalism (“Money and Power”), and social Darwinism (“Life”), suggesting an unwillingness to discriminate between these secular solutions to the contemporary global distress. He focuses on economic distress and godlessness, rather than the threat of war:
Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before
That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason,
And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.
The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do
But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards
In an age which advances progressively backwards?
(Collected Poems 178)
This choral comment is followed by the “far off” voice of the unemployed, whose complaints of too few cigarettes and of bitter ale indicate the shallowness of a godless populace.
The role of the artist, in Eliot’s view, is to serve the Lord, synecdochically represented by the building of the temple:
The LORD who created must wish us to create
And employ our creation again in His service
Which is already His service in creating.
For man is joined spirit and body,
And therefore must serve as spirit and body.
Visible and invisible, two worlds meet in Man;
Visible and invisible must meet in His Temple;
You must not deny the body.
Now you shall see the Temple completed:
After much striving, after many obstacles;
For the work of creation is never without travail;
The formed stone, the visible crucifix,
The dressed altar, the lifting light,
(Collected Poems 182)
This passage is as different in sentiment from Stevens’ injunction to the poet in “Mozart 1935” – “Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo, / Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic, / Its envious cachinnation” – as it is different in style. Yet both poets were reacting to the same events and trends in the world around them: the loss of faith, the failure of prosperity, and the insecurity of world peace.11 The “modern dilemma” is the difficulty of selecting an appropriate response to these perturbations – a religious, scientific, political or aesthetic one. Eliot’s choice was clear and consistent – a revival of Christian faith. Stevens was much more ambivalent; as we shall see, he thinks that poetry and art can somehow help – not by offering a cure for the difficulties, but by making them supportable.
It should not be forgotten that at the time Eliot wrote The Rock and the introduction to Moore’s Selected Poems he was still trying to extricate himself from his marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood. Although he had left her irrevocably in 1932 and was assiduously avoiding all contact with her, they were still married. His attempt, in June of 1935, to have her certified as of unsound mind and committed was unsuccessful (Seymour-Jones 541–4). The first of the Quartets, “Burnt Norton,” grew out of Eliot’s personal situation more than the state of the world in 1934 and 1935.
“Burnt Norton” was written after a visit in the autumn of 1934 to an abandoned manor house near Chipping Camden in the company of Emily Hale, with whom Eliot had a romantic attachment that was never fulfilled. Even so, “Burnt Norton” does look to the consolation that can be found in an aesthetic perspective that transcends the mundane world:
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
(“Burnt Norton” V Collected Poems 194)
It is symptomatic of the difference between Stevens’ imagination and Eliot’s – or Yeats’ – that Stevens chose the active and ultimately patternless analogy of sailing to express his view of poetry’s relation to life – while Yeats chose the static Chinese lapis lazuli figurine and Eliot chose a Chinese jar and a patterned dance.12 One exception to Eliot’s preference for fixed pattern that comes to mind is the sailing passage in The Waste Land:
Damyatta: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands.
(V 418–2 Collected Poems 79)
But even here, it is control that is stressed, not the mysterious and uncontrollable force of the thrusting wind. And, of course, it is the emotional life, not the aesthetic, that is being rendered.
However, for the Anglican Eliot, an aesthetic pattern can be no more than a shadow or echo of divine providence, as the opening lines of “Burnt Norton” make quite clear:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
(I Collected Poems 189)
One of the standard contrasts between the classical and romantic imagination is precisely this tendency of classicism to privilege form, finish, completeness, and stability, whereas the romantic is thought to favour growth or dynamism, and hence to privilege the grotesque, the unfinished, and the incomplete. While such a contrast set is familiar, if not clichéd, it is nonetheless an inescapable point of departure for a consideration of the aesthetic postures of Eliot and Stevens. And it is a contrast that they themselves insist upon.
In reviewing T.E. Hulme’s translation of George Sorel’s Reflections of Violence in 1914, Eliot praised Sorel for expressing “that violent and bitter reaction against romanticism which is one of the most interesting phenomena of our time” (“George Sorel” 478). It was a reaction in which Eliot fully participated. Nine years later, disagreeing with Middleton Murry’s remarks on Classicism and Romanticism, Eliot wrote in “The Function of Criticism” that “the difference seems ... rather the difference between the complete and the fragmentary, the adult and the immature, the orderly and the chaotic” (Selected Essays 25). That sentiment of 1923 was reiterated more than two decades later in his memorial essay for Valéry: “The proper end of the romantic is to achieve the classic” (“Leçon de Valéry” 79). And he praises Valéry for having made the transition: “In Valéry a long curve of romanticism rejoins the classic” (80).
Though Stevens’ attraction to romantic features contrasts with Eliot’s hostility, Stevens was acutely aware of the negative connotations the term “romantic” held for most of his contemporaries. Despite his caution, Stevens’ insistence on imagination being the heart and soul of poetry made it impossible for him to evade the romantic aesthetic. Among his expressions of the centrality of imagination, the following from 1949 is the most succinct: “It may be that the imagination is a miracle of logic and that its exquisite divinations are calculations beyond analysis, as the conclusions of the reason are calculations wholly within analysis” (“Imagination as Value” Selected Poetry and Prose 738). And in a later essay he abandoned caution, openly admitting his romantic bias in a neat inversion of Eliot’s praise of Valéry: “The whole effort of the imagination is toward the production of the romantic” (Opus Posthumous 266).
To conclude this tripartite discussion we need to give Marianne Moore a chance to have her say about Ideas of Order. Unlike Stevens, she did not send her review to Stevens for his consideration. But Latimer, the publisher of Ideas of Order, did forward the review to him. Judging from Stevens’ letter of acknowledgment, he was pleased with it: “Thanks for the copy of Miss Moore’s review. She is one of the angels: her style is an angelic style. It is just as unique as Gertrude Stein’s and, to my way of thinking, makes Miss Stein seem shallow” (5 November 1935. Letters 290–1). Not every poet would have been pleased with her opening remark: “Poetry is an unintelligible unmistakable vernacular like the language of the animals ... and Wallace Stevens is a practised hand at this kind of open cypher.” In this rather cryptic sentence Moore manages to encapsulate the common complaint of the obscurity of Stevens’ poetry with praise of its vividness and vivacity. Apparently Stevens liked the remark. The balance of the review is a rather noncommittal collection of snippets from the volume. She praises him for his “dexterousness,” compares him to Brahms, and illustrates her observation with a mischievous anecdote that suggests a degree of evasive self-protection in the poetry: “In the untrite transitions, the as if sentimental unsentimentality, the meditativeness not for appraisal, with hints taken from the birds, as in Brahms, they recall Brahms his dexterousness, but also his self-relish and technique of evasion as in the incident of the lion-huntress who was inquiring for the celebrated Herr Brahms: ‘You will find him yonder, on the other side of the hill, this is his brother’” (308).
She illustrates that evasiveness by reference to “Sailing after Lunch”: “Mr. Stevens alludes to ‘the eccentric’ as ‘the base of design,’ ‘the revealing aberration’; and employs, noticeably in such a poem as ‘Sailing after Lunch,’ the principle of dispersal common to music; that is to say, a building up of the theme piecemeal in such a way that there is no possibility of disappointment at the end” (308–9). In contrast to my effort (above) to generate a paraphrase of the poem’s intent, Moore is content to celebrate the “building up of the theme,” without – in Keats’ phrase – any “irritable reaching after fact and reason” in the poem. The reader will recall that in the famous letter, Keats held up Coleridge as an example of one who could not rest with “the sense of beauty” that “overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration” (Forman 72). If we can take Keats as representative of the Romantic sensibility – as surely we can – then Moore’s aesthetic is purely romantic, as Stevens clearly saw.
Moore concludes the review with a characteristically enigmatic – albeit suggestive – judgment: “Serenity in sophistication is a triumph, like the behaviour of birds. The poet in fact is the migration mechanism of sensibility, and a medicine for the soul. That exact portrayal is intoxicating, that realism need not restrict itself to grossness, that music is “an accord of repetitions” is evident to one who examines Ideas of Order; and the altitude of performance makes the wild boars of philistinism who rush about interfering with experts, negligible” (309). The first sentence of this final paragraph recapitulates the opening sentence of the review with its invocation of birds and Brahms as emblems of the effortless, self-effacing generation of beauty. But Moore complicates the analogy by describing the poet as a “migration mechanism of sensibility,” by which she presumably means someone who takes his or her own sensibility and disperses – or perhaps – dispenses it to others. It is no wonder that Stevens was pleased with the review. All the same, it reinforces the prevailing view that Stevens’ poetry is gorgeous nonsense.