The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, edited by Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodridge and Cristanne Miller, Faber & Faber 597pp, £30 in UK
A Selected Letters which runs to six hundred pages raises the question of how many volumes a collected edition might consume, for Marianne Moore at the apex of her fame as a quirky, Modernist poet wrote up to fifty letters a day. A critic, wary of such productivity, might wonder just how much intensity it left her for her art but in truth she was the most deliberately unpoetical of poets. "I too dislike it," she wrote in a lyric called "Poetry", "there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle." Among those things was "the raw material of poetry in all its rawness", which is to say, a lived and messy life.
By reducing the claims made for poetry, she somehow compelled her readers to take all the more seriously the scaled-down claim. She celebrated the sheer abundance of things and persons: her poems can seem crowded out with objects and her mind skips from one to another with astonishing agility, discovering poetic pattern and moral meaning in what to a less filtered sensibility might seem sheer flux. What saves her from chaos is her capacity for an almost prayerful attention to the intrinsic nature of every object, whether it be a table, an animal or another poet. These she renders with a concrete precision which links the Imagists back to the early Celtic nature poets. In her work we learn again the truth of the old dictum that art is trapped energy, dramatic utterance powerfully disciplined. She found in the seeming chaos of the world a challenge to the mind's powers of arrangement. Her poems sometimes sport long, running lines which seem to flirt with the possibility of becoming prose: but, again, there was precedent for her "syllabic counting" in ancient Celtic poetry, even as her non-stanzaic forms seem rooted in a desire to bring the protocols of poetry closer to everyday speech.
For these reasons, there is a necessary, deliberate continuity between her poems and the "raw material" in her letters, which also register the strange juxtapositions of modern life. For here was a woman who loved baseball as well as angular hats, political science as well as low-brow cartoons. As editor of The Dial, one of the great journals of the 1920s, she was a confidante of Eliot and Pound (writing over a hundred letters to each, thirty-two of which are reproduced here). She also corresponded energetically with Wallace Stevens, Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, HD and Elizabeth Bishop.
Beyond all that high-voltage literary gossip, the letters chronicle most movingly the ebb and flow of her family life (one letter from college, mercifully absent, ran to fifty-four pages). It's a pity that the editors have removed her mother's marginal comments and her brother's written responses on the actual letters themselves: the Selected Letters of any author can often seem a one-way street and the reader would like to know more of the recipients and of what they said in response to each memorable bulletin.
The footnotes and head notes, sparingly but tellingly supplied, provide some minimal contexts (though more often to literary than domestic background), but one yearns to know the personalities behind the bare summaries, if only because one suspects that Moore may have drawn even more fully on their lives than may be apparent here. It is tantalising to have to do a lot of guess-work about the mother and brother who did much to stimulate this poet. Considerations of space, which never cramped Moore, may have been decisive for her editors.
Still, one mustn't grumble, for here is God's plenty. After a brilliant analysis of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and other early movies in a letter to a friend in May 1921, we find her lamenting to Ezra Pound that she has not been able to read a single section of Ulysses to the end, because its "mongrel wit" lacked the element of the "exceptional" to balance against the "negligible". A few weeks later, however, she is praising Dubliners as "a manual of the fundamentals of composition" and recognising "The Dead" and (surprisingly) Chamber Music as masterpieces: but still, there is a reservation, as she wonders whether to publish a sample of Joyce's more recent work. Thirty years and two hundred and fifty pages later, she can be read assessing Harry Levin's book on the dead genius. Such was the scope and scale of her letters that they are a personal history of Modernism.
Yeats's A Vision she finds "enthralling" and indispensable to an understanding of his work, yet after his death she cools notably and asks a correspondent what exactly his "enviable apparatus" was for. Again, the demand is for an ethical, as well as aesthetic, arrangement. Yet she was never ungenerous: after a lecture by Yeats in 1932 she magnificently observed: "he has the hands of a hereditary royalist who never picked up a stone or touched his own shoes (but the evening clothes could have been given a few lessons on repose)."
Ever the poet, even when gagging in the presence of the great man, she noted his conversational gift for mingling "lowly" words with aristocratic ones, in lecture as in lyric, thereby avoiding "stiffness". It was a lesson which she herself learned very well. And what she said to Yeats might justly now be said of her: "your being here is a great blessing to America and I hope it's not too paining an experience for you." For Marianne Moore was, in the end, one of the major American modernists who rewrote the rules of literary form and, in the process, lived a full and celebratory life.
Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland recently won the Irish Times Literature Prize for Non-Fiction