Miss Moore has said in conversation that she has been influenced by Poe’s prose, and although it should not be pushed too far, an interesting study could be made of several points of comparison. Miss Moore and Poe are our two most original writers and one feels that Miss Moore would cheerfully subscribe to Poe’s remark on Originality: “The extent to which this has been neglected in versification is one of the most unaccountable things in the world,” and his painful edict that “In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation,” and also that it is greatly assisted by “an extension of the application of the principles of rhyme and alliteration.”
In fact, although it might have surprised him, one might almost say that in some respects Miss Moore is Poe’s Ideal Poet, the one he was unable to be himself.
Poe in his prose and Miss Moore in her verse strike a tone of complete truth-telling that is compelling and rare, — Miss Moore’s being so strong as to lend veracity to her slightest comment, inducing such confidence that for years I even believed her when she said,
Dürer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house.
I can imagine her writing Poe’s “Chessplayer” in verse, and I can imagine Poe writing parts of “The Hero,” with its melancholy, repeated o’s, and
Where the ground is sour; where there are
weeds of beanstalk height,
snakes’ hypodermic teeth, or
the wind brings the “scarebabe voice”
from the neglected yew set with
the semi-precious cat’s eyes of the owl.
They both take delight in their wide reading and in sharing it, and both are capable of making something unexpected and amusing out of the footnote, that usually unsmiling paragraph.
And both are virtuosi, Miss Moore, of course, to a much higher degree. I do not want to go into problems of versification and shall simply say that the more one reads Miss Moore the more one is inclined to give up such problems and merely exclaim, “How does she do it!” She is able to develop some completely “natural” idea with so many graces and effects of hesitation and changes of mood and pace that one is reminded of what little one knows of the peculiarities of Oriental music. This constant high level of technical skill must cost her incredible effort, although one is rarely aware of it; but what may be an effort for her would for most poets be an impossibility.
Sometimes I have thought that her individual verse forms, or “mannerisms” as they might be called, may have developed as much from a sense of modesty as from the demands of artistic expression; that actually she may be somewhat embarrassed by her own precocity and sensibilities and that her varied verse forms and rhyme schemes and syllabic logarithms are all a form of apology, are saying, “It really isn’t as easy for me as I’m afraid you may think it is.” The precocious child is often embarrassed by his own understanding and is capable of going to great lengths to act his part as a child properly; one feels that Miss Moore sometimes has to make things difficult for herself as a sort of noblesse oblige, or self-imposed taxation to keep everything “fair” in the world of poetry.
Miss Moore and Zoography
This same willingness to do things in such a way as not to show off, not to be superior, is shown in Miss Moore’s amazingly uncondescending feeling for animals. A great deal has been said in the last twenty years about how authors should not condescend to their working class or peasant characters, and the difficulties standing in the way of honesty in such a relationship have been explained and explained. Surely it is also very hard to write about animals without “pastoralizing” them, as William Empson might say, or drawing false analogies.
Come, shall we go and kill us venison?
And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools,
Being native burghers of this desert city,
Should, in their own confines, with forked heads
Have their round haunches gor’d.
As You Like It
It was perhaps consoling and popular to think that the animals were just like the citizenry, but how untrue, and one feels Miss Moore would feel, how selfish. There are morals a’plenty in animal life, but they have to be studied out by devotedly and minutely observing the animal, not by regarding the deer as a man imprisoned in a “leathern coat.”
Her unromantic, life-like, somehow democratic, presentations of animals come close to their treatment in Chinese art, and I believe she feels that the Chinese have understood animals better than any other people.
Such are Miss Moore’s gifts of portraying animal physiology and psychology that her unicorn is as real as their dragons:
this animal of that one horn
throwing itself upon which head foremost from a cliff
it walks away unharmed,
proficient in this feat, which like Herodotus,
I have not seen except in pictures.
With all its inseparable combinations of the formally fabulous with the factual, and the artificial with the perfectly natural, her animal poetry seduces one to dream of some realm of reciprocity, a true lingua unicornis.
1948
Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks
Like Miss Brooks’ first book of verse, this explores the life of the Northern urban Negro. The material is the same, the scene has not changed; but here Miss Brooks has turned from her earlier poetic realism to a strain of lyric emotion. She has turned, too, to elaboration and experimentation in language which, although not always successful, shows her desire not only to break out of set patterns but to make the tone of her work as variegated as possible. The story of Annie Allen becomes a kind of kaleidoscopic dream; and the wildly colored images and symbols shake into a design both stirring and moving, as the lyrics of which it is composed draw to their end. The poet’s feeling for form is basic and remarkable. If her sonnets are dramatically projected, they are also classically firm. This underlying firmness, this sense of form, holds the book together despite its moments of extravagance.
1950
XAIPE: 71 Poems by E. E. Cummings
The famous man of little-letters, e. e. cummings, presents here his first book of poems since 1 × 1 appeared in 1944. It is appropriate that the book should appear in the spring, since spring is Mr. Cummings’ favorite season, speaking to him of flowers, rain, new moons, love and joy. Most of the seventy-one poems take up these themes, but there is the usual scattering of involuted and sometimes rather unpleasant epigrams, and this time a few sympathetic and touching portraits as well. Often Mr. Cummings’ approach to poetry reminds one of a smart-alec Greenwich Village child saying to his friends: “Look! I’ve just made up a new game. Let’s all write poems. There! I’ve won!” And in front of the wood-and-coal man’s basement shop, on the wall of the Chinese laundry, along the curbs of the dingy but flourishing park, appear poems and ideograph-poems in hyacinth-colored chalks. The obscene and epigrammatic ones have most of this happy hoodlum quality; in the others he is still playing his game and winning it, but it has been refined into a game resembling a one-man Japanese poetry competition, using the same symbols over and over again, formally, but delicately, freshly and firmly, as no one else can.