So, having all read the poem, tell me what is verse in Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry”? And what is poetic about it? She must have asked herself the same question, because when she reprinted the poem in her Complete poems, she revised it thus:
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.[i]
The revisions emphasize concision.
But at what cost? What is lost? Well, for one, two of the most famous phrases in Moore’s corpus, if not the corpus of 20th-century poetry: “beyond all this fiddle” and “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”.
The only structural element I can find in the original poem, the one published in 1920, is in the stanza: there are six lines in each stanza; the first line of each stanza has 19 syllables; the second, 22; the third, 11; the fourth, 5; the fifth, 8; and the sixth, 13. It’s hard to tell that from the revision above. So I reprint the longer poem below, from Moore’s “Notes” at the back of the book. But she had revised this version also, and in my calculations I am using the lineation of this version, because lineation is not clear from the 1920 printing. So I have indicated her changes in the text itself. Thus, in reading it once, you can read both versions. You’re welcome.
The strikethrough I have employed because it helps show changes in punctuation. Things added, mostly punctuation, are in red. To approximate Moore’s use of indentation, I have used asterisks, colored white, since this blogging software ignores leading spaces — with 20 white asterisks necessary when I have to break a line. You can see them if you squint. Now read on:
Poetry
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;. wWhen they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
**the same thing may be said for all of us—, that we
***do not admire what
***we cannot understand.: Tthe 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 twitching 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 poets 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 the 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, you are interested in poetry.[ii]
Again, the revisions emphasize concision. They also destroy the syllabic counts that characterize the original stanza. A lot of the early poems in Complete poems seem to adopt a similar stanzaic principle, but I have been unable to verify that — i.e., I haven’t counted the syllables.
In the last stanza, as revised, Moore puts the words “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” in quotes. In “A Note on the Notes,” her head-note, Moore justifies her notes and quotation marks thus:
some readers suggest that quotation marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry, or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. But 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.[iii]
Thus she confesses to being willing to steal from the best, but to feeling somewhat guilty about it.
In her notes to “Poetry”, Moore says that she borrows “business documents and school-books” from Tolstoy’s diary, and adapts “literalists of the imagination” from Yeats’s Ideas of Good and Evil. But she gives no source for “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”. I would like to imagine that she is quoting her first text, i.e. herself, acknowledging that the phrase has gotten away from her, and that she is wishing it a fond farewell.
But hold on, I hear you say: What about Moore and Pound?
Your turn.
____________________
[i] Complete poems (New York : Macmillan ; Penguin, 1994), p. 36.
[ii] First published in Others for 1919 : an anthology of the New Verse / edited by Alfred Kreymborg. – (s.l. : Nicholas L. Brown, 1920), this text was revised twice by Moore for her Complete poems (New York : Macmillan, 1982). The first and shorter version appears on p. 36 of Complete poems / Marianne Moore (New York : Macmillan ; Penguin, 1994) (Penguin twentieth-century classics). The longer version Moore consigns to the “Notes,” (pp. 266-7), revised as shown. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the 1920 text, which comes from poem-a-day, an e-mail from poets.org, launched by the Academy of American Poets in 2006. There was at least one typo in that text. You should all still subscribe.
[iii] Complete poems, p. 262.
If you highlight the poem with your mouse you can see the white asterisks. Ironic that WordPress doesn’t preserve leading spaces. I remember Leslie Norris saying one day in class that he had bought WordPerfect (3, I think) and felt that word processing software would revolutionize the look of poetry because it would allow poets to handle their own typesetting. When I worked at WP, though, I learned that spacing is problematic for proportional fonts. Just as the letters aren’t of a fixed width–W taking more space than h–neither are the spaces, which take on the proportions of the surrounding letters. Tabbing works better, but I haven’t found a good way to make WordPress give me a separate tab for each line.
I like the line breaks of the poem-a-day version better than the later versions. I wish I knew if that was the original lineation or a function of narrow line length in the American Academy of Poets’ e-mail client.
There’s more energy here
than here
because the line-break subverts the plain sense being developed that
and suggests instead that they are important in themselves, in their self-existence. The line break introduces a tension into the poem.
June 16, 2017 another reply to in verse 77
I should say something about Moore’s notes. Other than Eliot’s notes for The Wasteland (which you told me he added to make the poem book-length) I’m not aware of a lot of poets making notes. Arthur Henry King does, and Cynthia Hallen follows his example, as a courtesy to readers, I suppose. But the notes risk taking the reader out of the poem.
When I listened to Dracula last fall I kept my ears open for the description of Dracula crawling headfirst down the castle walls. I remembered you telling me that Valerie Eliot said T.S. didn’t gloss an allusion to that scene because he thought it was so well known no one needed a gloss. People who don’t know particular passages might not understand without a gloss, and people who do might find it annoying.
A good gloss can open a poem up. I was looking for a gloss on “You Lazarushian leather, Gunga Din.” One site glosses it as a pun, Lazarus+Russian, another glosses it as leprous, with a play on the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, which stands the parable on its head because Lazarus would have been unable to relieve Dives’ thirst in the way the speaker of the poem imagines Gunga Din relieving his thirst in hell. (By the way I came across a book of puns in jr. high, Gunga Your Din-Din is Ready.)