A Crystal for the Metaphysical (1966)
Review of Marianne Moore’s Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics
Marianne Moore’s Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics performs a rare act: these poems and brief essays supply another part in the definition of a structure, accurate and personal.1 [. . .] In this new work, her fourteenth book (to be published November 4), the objects appear to face each other; forms that had seemed crystals, twin crystals, take on a further growth. The polarity is clearer and greater than one had guessed. She sets up an opposition. [. . .]
Many of her poems are “metaphysical newmown hay”; and Marianne Moore has offered the charge against herself with gallantry, answering it with the crystal structure, the delicate, courageous wit of poems.2 [. . .]
In clarity the poems claim their form.
[. . .]
This poem [“The mind, intractable thing”], in its praise and harsh confessing grace, sets extreme qualities alongside those that Miss Moore has long given us: probity, scrupulousness, limits set and honored by the self, a sense of exotic dailiness, a pattern to which the poet has been committed in personal bravery, a vital diffidence. For here the mind and the poet, and witchcraft, wordcraft, rouse us by so powerful a suggestion that every cry is answered. We know this in familiarity on the stage, when Tennessee Williams and Albee, in cannibal attack, offer us the vision of love between people, of marriage, by showing us the hour massacred.3 Or Houdini, as strong magician of escape, who said he had to master two things: fear and every muscle of his body.4 These poems have mastery of things comparable, ultimate danger. What is mastered here, and what the poems of Marianne Moore suggested might be mastered, are “disparagers, death, dejection,” and chaos, against which she has struggled for compactness.5
[. . .]
The line-by-line handling of Miss Moore’s poems is now our history: her medieval device of rhyme-breaking; the syllabic standard, the form in which she gathers her freedom. But with these poems and meaning that face each other we can see something more: a style of the spirit for which there are precedents, and none closer than the one celebrated in the first poem of this book, the poem called “Granite and Steel,” and again in “In Lieu of the Lyre.”6 [. . .]
In early autumn 1966 a visit to Marianne Moore was rather like an answer to the poem by Elizabeth Bishop “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore”: “From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, / please come flying.”7 She lives now near the Henry James part of Greenwich Village; not that there is any James stretch now, but the overtopping and smothering of the city that he foresaw have its several gaps, housefronts, a long broad sky.
“Miss Moore’s not likely to answer the bell,” said the man downstairs. But she did. Here, newly returned to Manhattan after living in Brooklyn almost forty years, she was frail and strong in a pale blue dress. We sat under the square clockface, facing the yellow velvet, tufted sofa. Kind, ironic, of acute and direct speech, she gave me gracefulness. We spoke of the new book, whose galleys I had been reading. What might she do next? Maybe write her memoirs, Miss Moore said.8 Her files were all in the next rooms, boxes to the ceiling in one, she said; the sorting-out of moving was still going on. However, she really lived here now, although her church was still in Brooklyn, and people there were talking to her about coming back and asking her why she hadn’t told them that she was thinking of leaving.
We spoke of several poets for whose writing she has affection. For whom she cares. Robert Francis.9 Elizabeth Bishop, now in the Northwest.10 Many good poets now, don’t you think so?
Of politics, of the war in Vietnam, and of the reception given for her recently by Ambassador Goldberg, at which I heard her say, after the terms of praise with which she had been introduced, “Overestimated! Always overestimated!”11 She said she did not really like her marvelous poem “In Distrust of Merits” because it is “didactic”: “I care about speaking up. I never wanted to evade anything.”12
We spoke of TV and the interviews, close and personal, that come into one’s room; the interview with Jean Renoir, of which she has written in this new book. [. . .]13
We spoke of the interview with Roy Campanella, in which Mike Wallace asked him in his suffering, “Do you believe that God was punishing you?” And Campanella answering, “No, I believe that actions follow as a direct result of laws of physics.” With dignity.14
Of baseball: I was not curious about her interest, but the scoreboard knowledge for which she is celebrated. I praised it as the only orbital game.
Of art, imagination, and long achievement. Of the phrase to which she comes back again and again, the most difficult central phrase. It is in the hymn that says, “Rejoice evermore.”15 (Echoes of “Nevertheless” start up, of the crow who will not learn to say “Nevermore.”) “Evermore!” she said.16 “Think of it! And if it is a mother with a son blown to unrecognizable bits in Vietnam . . .”
Around us the signs of the place, rare and many, filling one’s senses. Haunting, curious moment; beginning when one was a child, reading Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry and finding Marianne Moore with “a scarab of the sea”—the seagull greeting “men long dead.”17 This moving, frail, strong woman and the cluster about her, all speaking so clear: the small bone figure of the Arctic musk-ox, the Mexican toad, the yellow rose painted by E. E. Cummings, the sea, the ballpark, in her room the dark beaver in snowy winter giving off a dark light, the photograph of T. S. Eliot as a young boy, the green wax candle.18 The book she gives me, the thin fine English print, its feel in my hand after she writes in it. Now she lights the great wax candle; the flame springs up, warm flower-yellow, deepens; down the tower-shaped candle the shadow drops.
[. . .]
The poet who believes in the materials of the world—written material—in such a way that his desire to include drives him to use them selectively, but in their own voice, is at once faced with questions.19 How to claim, to make the material one’s own, and still leave it to walk among its origins?
The traditional assertion—that all materials belong to the artist—is true in a sense. This is actually an assertion that the artist does not want to own the world but to use the world. It includes the entire range of life in horror and love.
And of the delights and irritations of Marianne Moore’s poems? In what relation to the world does this woman stand? Is it as wry, odd zookeeper? Is it as poet interested chiefly in the edges of things, bringing them together to offer them to us juxtaposed as joints of crystal are, the edge-lit world of meeting planes, severely maintained axes of alignment?
One thinks of Eliot and the ways in which he acknowledges the world of sources; Marianne Moore, Louis Untermeyer notes, “unlike Eliot . . . scrupulously puts her quotations between inverted commas.”20 Paradoxically, no poet owes more to more sources than Miss Moore, and yet no author is more original.
This use of the world, incorporating the achieved angles of existence into the work, opens all the questions of taking and making. In writing about these poems, in which one hopes to be able to remove the scaffolding, one deals with the fusion of materials. With luck, in writing about Willard Gibbs, Charles Ives, the Ajanta paintings, one can—after a very short time, in a generation—take away the scaffold of information.21 But one’s own sources—it is these that Miss Moore scrupulously and honorably retains; and this family of sources must be examined, for she goes prospecting for flavors among the description of things visible, for the pleasures of the assorting eye among the spirit’s counting of syllables in a strange and telling awareness of time, not by beat but by actual procession of sounds going by. Henry James and Beatrix Potter, the actual owners of an actual cat—the range of her sources is very wide.22
In his essay on Marianne Moore in the new William Carlos Williams Reader, edited by M. L. Rosenthal, Williams speaks of the “definite place where the matters of the day may meet if they choose or not, but if they assemble it must be there.”23 It is for him a place of “white penetration” where the thrust goes through all colors.24 There, where the sources become something new, the poem exists.
Writing of novelty, which must be inspired, Wallace Stevens observed, “There is one most welcome and authentic note; it is the insistence on a reality that forces itself upon our consciousness and refuses to be managed and mastered. It is here that the affinity of art and religion is most evident today. Both have to mediate for us a reality not ourselves. This is what the poet does. The supreme virtue here is humility, for the humble are they who move about the world with the love of the real in their hearts.”25
That art of the supreme virtue is declared in the ways in which the world is given in the poet’s voice. It can be seen in Marianne Moore.
(Saturday Review, 1966)
1. This edition is an abridged version of Muriel Rukeyser’s review of Marianne Moore, Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics (New York: Viking, 1966). Moore’s volume features brief essays that gloss the poems with autobiographical narratives, thus creating the “twin crystal” structure Rukeyser describes. The full review heavily cites the poems and essays from Tell Me, Tell Me, as well as earlier essays by Moore. This edition’s omissions are marked by bracketed ellipses, and, for readability, this edition supplies only limited annotations about that cut material.
2. Moore, “Tell me, tell me,” in Tell Me, 43.
3. Contemporary literary and Broadway playwrights Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee.
4. In the 1940s, Rukeyser had begun to develop a play about Hungarian American escape artist Harry Houdini (né Erik Weisz). Houdini: A Musical (Ashbury, MA: Paris Press, 2002) premiered in 1973.
5. Moore, “The mind, intractable thing,” in Tell Me, 10.
6. Moore, “Granite and Steel” and “In Lieu of the Lyre,” in Tell Me, 3–4, 7–8.
7. Elizabeth Bishop, “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore,” in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), 82.
8. Around the time of Rukeyser’s review, Moore had begun a memoir, incomplete and still unpublished. See Charles Molesworth, Marianne Moore: A Literary Life (New York: Atheneum, 1990), 449–450.
9. Robert Francis, author of “The Pitcher” (1953), a popular poem about baseball. Moore was an enthusiast and addresses the sport in the poem “Baseball and Writing,” in Tell Me, 28–29.
10. In 1966, Bishop, Moore’s mentee, briefly left her adopted home of Brazil to teach in Seattle.
11. In 1962, Arthur Goldberg, US ambassador to the United Nations, hosted a large party celebrating Moore’s seventy-fifth birthday. See Molesworth, Marianne Moore, 434.
12. Quotes are from Rukeyser’s interview with Moore. Moore’s poem “In Distrust of Merits” (1944), in New Collected Poems, ed. Heather Cass (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017), 171–173, expresses doubts about whether the Second World War was just.
13. French director, screenwriter, and actor Jean Renoir is cited by Moore in her essay “Profit Is a Dead Weight,” in Tell Me, 24.
14. Roy Campanella, a Black catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, was paralyzed in a 1958 car accident. The following year, he was profiled on The Mike Wallace Interview, a television series.
15. Albert Benjamin Simpson, “O Let Us Rejoice in the Lord Evermore” (date unknown): “It is better to sing than be sighing, / It is better to live than be dying; / So let us rejoice evermore.” The hymn obliquely cycles back to Moore’s questioning of the moral effectiveness of the Second World War in her poem “In Distrust of Merits.” See note 12 above.
16. In the full review, Rukeyser discusses Moore’s story “My Crow, Pluto—A Fantasy” and its corresponding poem “To Victor Hugo of My Crow Plato,” in Tell Me, 32–34, 35–37. Both of Moore’s texts allude to Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” (1845) and its classic refrain “Nevermore.”
17. Marianne Moore, “A Talisman,” in Modern American Poetry: A Critical Anthology, 3rd ed., ed. Louis Untermeyer (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), 445. Untermeyer first included this 1912 poem and three other early pieces by Moore in his anthology’s third edition after having omitted her work from its previous editions. Rukeyser was twelve years old when this edition was published.
18. Most famous for his poetry, E. E. Cummings was also a painter.
19. Here, Rukeyser refers to the sourcing of found language and the use of citation in Moore’s poetry. The published review quotes in full Marianne Moore, “A Note on the Notes,” in What Are Years (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 46.
20. Louis Untermeyer, headnote for Marianne Moore, in Modern American Poetry: Mid-century Edition, 7th ed., ed. Untermeyer (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), 368. Rukeyser’s ellipsis. Rukeyser quotes material added by Untermeyer to the original 1925 headnote for this later edition. See note 17 above.
21. Rukeyser refers to her own poems “Gibbs,” “Ives,” and “Ajanta,” in CP, 182–185, 195–198, 207–211.
22. Rukeyser is noting Moore’s references to Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester (1902) and Henry James in “Tell me, tell me,” in Tell Me, 44.
23. William Carlos Williams, “Marianne Moore,” in The William Carlos Williams Reader, ed. M. L. Rosenthal (New York: New Directions, 1966), 387.
24. Williams, “Marianne Moore,” 385.
25. Wallace Stevens, “About One of Marianne Moore’s Poems,” in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1951), 99. Rukeyser misquotes and interpolates much new material into this passage from Stevens, thus altering his meaning.