Some critics consider Marianne Moore
the best living American poet.
She says her writing springs from

"An Instinctive
Wish to Share

what has done me good to look at or to know

By Mary Seth

Six months or so ago, on my way to
the Pennsylvania Railroad suburban sta-
tion, I stopped at a bookstore on Walnut
Street and bought a copy of Collected
Poems by Marianne Moore.

Boarding the Media Local, I eagerly
opened the small, pink-jacketed volume
which was to become my favorite train
companion for several weeks. I didn't
read fast nor much at a time, sometimes
taking only one poem to a trip. One
night it would be "The Steeple-Jack,"
another "The Fish," another "Rigorists,"
which is about Sheldon Jackson and his
reindeer.

I liked to linger over the way Mari-
anne Moore described "The Hero":

... tired but hopeful—
hope not being hope
until all ground for hope has
vanshed; and lenient, looking
upon a fellow creature's error with the
feelings of a mother-a
woman or a cat. . . .

And there were two war poems that
I read and reread—"In Distrust of
Merits":

... There is hate's crown beneath
which all is
death; there's love's without
which none
is king: . . .
and "Keeping Their World Large":

... whose spirits and whose bodies
all too literally were our shield, are still
our shield.

They fought the enemy, we fight
fat living and self-pity. . . .

The more I read, the more enamoured
I became with the precise, flawlessly
constructed verses that were fine for
reading out loud, too. All kinds of do-
mestic animals were here—and exotic—
whales, peacocks, hippopotami, and the
plumet basilisk. But however filled with
the animal, vegetable, and mineral, her
poems were chiefly concerned with the
motions of the human mind.

Came an editorial meeting. I suddenly
realized it was my turn to speak.

"Poetry begins in delight and ends in
wisdom," I said.

"How's that?"

"Marianne Moore," I said.

"I know who she is," said one who
shall remain anonymous. "She is the
Brooklyn lady who visits the zoo and
gets photographed with swans and
monkeys and elephants."

"What else does she do?" somebody
else said.

That snapped it. "She's just the great-
est living poet," I began. Such was the
intensity of my voice that the room be-
came quiet.

I read what T. S. Eliot had to say
on the subject: "Miss Moore's poems
form part of the small body of durable
poetry written in our time."

"I think there is deep religious in-
sight in her poetry, and an unusual kind
of old-fashioned wisdom," I said.

I talked for quite a while, ending up
with a practical point: "Of course, you
know Marianne Moore has won all the
prizes, including the Pulitzer, but did
you know she's a Presbyterian?"

The sense of the meeting: I was to find
out even more about Miss Moore.

Soon I began to spend my spare time
at the library, where it became apparent
that while the work of Marianne Moore
was for the most part contained in the
Collected Poems (Macmillan; 1951) and
in her recent translation of the Fables of
La Fontaine (Viking; 1954), what
amounted to many times their content
had been written about her.

Born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in 1887,
the daughter of John Milton Moore, an
engineer, and Mary Warner Moore,
Marianne Craig Moore lived in the home
of her grandfather, the Reverend John
R. Warner, pastor of the First Presby-
terian Church in Kirkwood, until she was
nine.

14

PRESBYTERIAN LIFE

Marianne has one brother, John Warner (Buddy) Moore, a year her senior, who recently retired after forty years as a chaplain in the U.S. Navy. Chaplain Moore remembers a sunny Sunday morning when he and Marianne were ages six and five. Their grandfather in the pulpit was disturbed by the fact that the entire left side of the church was paying no attention to the sermon. Instead they were being entertained by the two children turning somersaults over each pew in succession in the adjoining lecture room, while their Irish nursemaid, afraid to enter a Protestant place of worship, stood at the door imploring the two acrobats to "come out of there."

The family moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where the two young Moores attended elementary and high school. Buddy went to Yale and Marianne to Bryn Mawr where she majored in economics and history but spent most of her time in the biology laboratory. She received her B.A. degree in 1909. Returning home, she studied for a year at the Carlisle Commercial School and was then asked to take charge of the commercial department of the United States Industrial Indian School in Carlisle. One of her pupils was famous athlete Jim Thorpe.

When her brother became minister of the Ogden Memorial Presbyterian Church at Chatham, New Jersey, Marianne and her mother first moved to Chatham, later to New York, where she became an assistant in the New York Public Library. Since 1929 she has lived in an apartment in Brooklyn, alone since the death of her mother in 1947.

Bryn Mawr publications and Poetry magazine, edited by Harriet Monroe in Chicago, were the first to print Marianne's poetry.

In 1921, a collection of her poetry—*Poems*—was printed without her knowledge, as a gift of a friend, by the Egoist Press in London. In 1925, these poems and others appeared as *Observations* in the U.S. and received the Dial Award as an outstanding contribution to American literature. The same year Miss Moore became an editor of the *Dial*, considered by many to be the best literary magazine in America until its termination in the depression year, 1929.

*Selected Poems* appeared in 1935; *The Pangolin and Other Verse* in 1936; *What Are Years* in 1941. Nevertheless—awarded the Contemporary Poetry's Patrons' Prize and the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award of $500—was published in 1944.

In 1945 she was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1946 a grant of $1,000 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters "in recognition of the wit and wisdom she has . . . imprisoned in poems of the rarest distinction." The following year she was elected to the

National Institute of Arts and Letters, whose membership is limited to 250 American artists, writers, and composers whose works are considered most likely to achieve permanence in American culture.

In 1951, the seventh volume of the verse of Marianne Moore appeared—*Collected Poems*, the pink-jacketed book that had been delighting me on the Media Local for so long. It contained most of the poems that had been published in the first six books, and was showered with awards: the $1000 Bollingen Prize in Poetry, given annually by Yale University Library; the National Book Award for Poetry; and the Pulitzer Prize of $500.

Six years before the publication of *Collected Poems*, in 1945, Miss Moore began the translation of the 241 *Fables of La Fontaine*. Determined to capture not only the literal meaning but to render the *Fables* into English verse comparable to the French, Miss Moore undertook a gargantuan job. Although French children know the *Fables* by heart, they are written extremely subtly. And Miss Moore had only a reading knowledge of French. It took nine years to complete the work—after four successive revisions. Some of the *Fables* were revised ten times.

After reading *Collected Poems*, from cover to cover, I wrote to Marianne Moore, asking if I might visit her. The reply was immediate and gracious. "I shall be glad to talk with you," wrote Marianne Moore in a fine delicate hand on a postcard. "My stop on the 8th Avenue Independent subway is Lafayette station, Brooklyn and the stop before is Hoyt-Schemerhorn. . . . I am between Lafayette Avenue and DeKalb Avenue in a six-story, yellowish apartment house, fifth floor front. There is an elevator."

On a sunny, crisp Tuesday, I followed her directions carefully. Coming up out of the subway in Brooklyn, I crossed a square and a little park that gave onto Cumberland Street, which was lined with tall, old houses, some having wrought iron fences around the plots of grass. The sidewalk, made of large slabs of stone, was edged with trees.

A block and a half along the old-fashioned street, the yellow-brick apartment house settled comfortably. Yellow-veined marble lined the lobby walls.

In response to the bell pushed beside Marianne Moore's name, the door opened, disclosing a hall and the self-service elevator. Five flights up another door opened, disclosing Marianne Moore herself, solicitous about my long trip (only four hours) and did I have any trouble finding her. "I wanted to discourage you from coming," she said, "because I wasn't sure you would feel it worth your while."

She led me down a long hall lined with books and pictures and livened with brilliant flecks of pink, turquoise, and yellow light, the source of which was explained when we reached the living room. Standing on each of two bookshelves that flanked her large, old Governor Winthrop desk were branched, gilt candelabra with crystal pendants that caught the rays of the morning sun and spread rainbows through the apartment.

Miss Moore offered me a comfortable blue stuffed chair, sitting opposite me in the exact middle of a sheraton sofa. She is small and delicately made; wears her

Buddy and Marianne at the time of their acrobatic performance. He was to become a Navy chaplain, she a great poet.

hair in a braid around her head. Now it is mostly gray but with clear indication in a little remaining color (and certainly in her temperament) that it had once been red.

She was dressed in a soft, bright-blue blouse with a black tie at the neck and a darker skirt and jacket, the color of her eyes somewhere between the two blues—her remarkable eyes that seem perfectly round and manage to look darker than blue usually looks.

Across the room was a bronze head of Marianne modeled by Gaston Lachaise in the early 1920's.

Miss Moore talked easily. Her simplest remark has great elegance because of an unusual selection and arrangement of words. Her writing, she said, springs from "an instinctive wish to share what has done me good to look at or to know. It is an expression of gratitude." She writes of people, experiences, books that

APRIL 16, 1955

15

"AN INSTINCTIVE
WISH TO SHARE"

have been a "reviving experience" for
her that have "done me good."

She spoke with distaste of decadence
in art or literature that "undermines mo-
rale. One should be affirmative, and
whether the word is outmoded or not
—wholesome—we can't live on disease,
even if a plant can," she said. "Our life
should speak of health.

"I like the way President Eisenhower expresses his ambition for the people. I am optimistic, I don't think the world is helpless and hopeless. You cannot live without hazards. You can't go around being afraid you will be struck by a car or obliterated by a bomb. Nuclear physics is bound to help us. Anyhow, we can't undo what has been done. You cannot seal off exact knowledge because you are afraid it will do harm. It is control that is crucial. Planes have killed people, but they have also saved lives. I'm superstitiously against restricting knowledge."

When asked if there was some sym-
bolic significance to her animals, she said,
“No”; she hadn’t thought about it that
way. She just likes animals. She likes
them because “they are what they seem
to be. There is something authentic
about them, they have attractions and
are not morally enigmatic.” Among her
prized possessions are several prints of
Durer’s rhinoceros which she loves and
is amused by because of its anatomical
inaccuracies. While she had no live ani-
mals—I had expected a cat—there were
arranged across the desk and bookcases
a Dresden leopard, a ceramic elephant,
and two large glass turtles.

While we were observing a drawing
of a hen, the door bell rang; it was the
mail man with an arm full of letters and
books. "I get hundreds of letters from
people I don't know," Miss Moore said.
"Here is one from a protégé, in prison. I
don't know whether he will ever write
good verse or not, but he improves."

W
ITH the mail laid aside for perusal
later, Miss Moore rémисsed about
how her mother had her and her brother
commit the catechism to memory—much
of which she still remembers. Another
comforting memory from her childhood
is family prayers. She believes strongly
in families doing things together, going
to church together. The Bible has always
been important to her. She especially
prizes the eleventh chapter of Hebrews
about faith.

On Sunday evenings she attends the
Bible class at Lafayette Avenue Presby-
terian Church, taught by her pastor, Dr.
Alvin E. Magary. She says she gets
much from it, spiritually and intellectu-

ally. "It cheers me up."

While as a child her world was a
Presbyterian world and she still prefers
that church to any other—Marianne de-
plores the lines drawn between the Prot-
estant, the Roman Catholic, and the
Jew. She believes that "the day of de-
nominations is over."

I asked about a poem:

"Spenser's Ireland

has not altered;—

a place as kind as it is green,

the greenest place I've never seen.

No, she said, she had never been to
Ireland but it was a true story in the
third verse:

It was Irish;

a match not a marriage was made

when my great great grandmother'd

said with native genius for

disunion, 'although your suitor be

perfection, one objection

is enough; he is not

Irish.'...

Actually the girl had a much more suit-
able suitor, and the Irish marriage was
not such a success.

The poem ends:

... The Irish say your trouble is

their trouble and your

joy their joy? I wish

I could believe it;

I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.

"My mother said if I want to call myself
Irish, I may because my great grand-
mother was," she explained.

"Well, if you are going to write me
up, perhaps you should see how I live."
We went out to the kitchen through the
living room and dining room, two rooms
of the same size, each with two large
windows overlooking the housetops of
Brooklyn. The walls were cream colored;
the rugs, gray; the furniture, antique.
A row of old plates on the plate rail
circled the dining room. Bookcases at
every possible location were not able to
hold all the books which were piled
about everywhere.

The kitchen was compact and looked
efficient, especially the tools, which in-
cluded a saw, hammer, screw driver,
pliers, and many others—neatly affixed
to the end of the kitchen cupboard—
on which stood an array of vitamins and
dehydrated vegetables in bottles. The
tools had been used to build the book-
shelves in the bedroom where she kept
her favorite books—among them many
volumes of poetry, several books by T. S.
Eliot, and a tiny set of the *Fables of
La Fontaine* bound in light, brown calf.

We looked at everything; the rectan-
gular old walnut clock above the desk
with the Rousseau-like painting below
the face, the marlin pike of walrus tusk
from Greeley's expedition given her
brother by a naval officer, and finally
her water colors—clean, fresh, almost

botanical flowers and seascapes done
last summer in Kittery, Maine, when she
was a guest of Malvina Hoffman.

When noon approached, we decided
to go out for lunch. Miss Moore got out
the famous three-cornered black velvet
hat (see cover) and, with barely a glance
in the old-fashioned floor length mirror
between the living room windows, put
it on her head, and then her coat, a soft,
unfitted one of fine black fleece.

We walked arm in arm the three
blocks or so to "Miss Julie's" as she
pointed out to me the churches in the
neighborhood, her own among them;
talked of her neighbors; and waved to
the local photographer seen through the
window of his shop. "Miss Julie's" was
a small, neighborhood restaurant, two
brick steps below street level, on the
corner, with windows all around, and
painted soft green. Miss Julie was a
solid, smiling, Danish woman, a friend
of Miss Moore's, who came over to the
table to talk with us.

When we had been served, I asked
Miss Moore about her poem "Rigorists"
which alludes to the story of Sheldon
Jackson's importing reindeer to Alaska
to prevent the extinction of the Eskimo.

She had become interested in Dr.
Jackson as a young girl in Carlisle
through her minister's wife, Mrs. George
Norcross, who was Sheldon Jackson's
sister Louise. The memory led her
eventually to read the Congressional
records of Jackson's attempts to persuade
the government to import reindeer from
Lapland. She mentioned his careful doc-
umentation of all the uses of the rein-
deer—the bones for tools and utensils,
the hide for clothing, the flesh for food;
a beast of burden, too.

On the way back to the apartment,
Miss Moore spoke of her interest in art
—especially Paul Klee, for whom she
seems to feel a special affinity—and
Giotto, Mantegna, Giorgione, Rouault.
"Do you like Rouault?" she asked.

Then she began talking about a book
of prose she was assembling (*Predilec-
tions*; *Viking Press*; April; $3.00). It is
a collection of editorial comments from
the *Dial*, a piece about Pavlova, lectures
given in a course on contemporary po-
etry at Bryn Mawr. She writes and re-
writes, she said; believing that good
work is arrived at slowly.

In spite of her warmth and easy
friendliness, it was impossible ever to be
unaware of Marianne Moore as a rare
and original genius, the author of "part
of the small body of durable poetry
written in our time."

The last I saw of her that day was a
gay little smile and a wave of her hand
through the square glass in the self-
service elevator.

(Selections from Marianne Moore's poems are
reprinted with permission of The Macmillan Com-
pany.)

16

PRESBYTERIAN LIFE