New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore

"Marianne Moore was at the birth of modernism, as an editor as well as a poet. She edited the Dial from 1925 to 1929 when it was the leading showcase for modernism, and she was highly rated by her peers including T S Eliot, who published and edited her work, too. I thought I knew Marianne Moore because I studied her work at university and thought, “Good, there are not very many poems so I can study this in a week and be an expert,” but it turns out that the volume I was looking at, Complete Poems (1968) was nothing of the sort. So this really is a new collected poems: a work of love and of scholarship by Heather Cass White, its editor. White shows you to what extent the later Moore rewrote, re-edited, eclipsed her earlier work and changed it from the poetry which earned her so much of her reputation. And it’s a real shocker – excitingly shocking – to find out that I can get the newly minted poems of the 1920s and 30s before the Moore of the 40s 50s and 60s decided to ‘improve them’ by taking out most of the detail and playing up the moral dimension. It’s an incredibly wonderful book. Moore was given to making pronouncements through her poetry: her most celebrated poem is probably the one called simply “Poetry,” and here we get both the long version and the short versions. Yes! “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 in / it after all, a place for the genuine.” And that’s something that can’t be said often enough – she made a place for the genuine and she found the genuine above all in precise observation, in celebration of the singular, of things that cannot be generalised or summed up or reduced. And the catholicity of her imagination, how she takes and honours detailed observation is an inspiration now. In fact, Tara Bergin quotes a line from Marianne Moore as the epigraph for her book. “What is more precise than precision? Illusion.” Her main aim was that the poetry should re-present experience, in the sense of making it present again, as well as simply representing it. She makes vivid the world or aspects of the world which we take for granted. The overlapping scales of a spruce cone in her Pangolin poem. You can never look at a pangolin in the same way, after that. Admittedly, the chances of looking at a pangolin these days have slipped… but she renews things. The act of observation is a very active one and she enables her readers to feel that they too can observe: what matters is the quality of the attention, demonstrated in precise language. Yes, and sometimes you do wonder. There’s a lot of excitement in poetry world when plagiarism is discovered. I’m not always convinced that we’re doing anybody any favours by shrieking out about plagiarism all the time because – was it Eliot who said it? – “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” “Marianne Moore’s aim was to re-present experience, in the sense of making it present again” You are part of a conversation and communion with the dead when you are engaged in literature. You are receiving from people who may not be around anymore, but you still have them with you because you are reading them. And that conversation will continue around the globe and down the ages. It’s one of those things that reduces the isolation and the atomization that you’re doomed to if you don’t read or listen. In fact, you’re far more cordoned off and secluded when you’re reading a novel. A novel demands a huge amount of time to take in, whereas a poem doesn’t. You can get it in the time a train travels between Marble Arch and Liverpool Street. You’re in the company of the poem on the poster opposite you. That’s enough. It may well stay with you for life depending on you and depending on it."