Marianne Moore’s poem “The Fish” was first published in August 1918 in the London based literary magazine The Egoist, which was published from 1914 through 1919. The periodical is now widely considered to be the most valuable source of English Modernist poetry, having published many of the great imagist and modernist poets and fiction writers of its time, including T. S. Eliot, who served as an assistant editor for the magazine, H.D., and James Joyce. Many classic modernist books were also published by The Egoist, including portions of Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s book of poems Prufrock and other Observations. The edition of The Egoist in which Moore’s poem is published is accompanied by poetry penned by T. S. Eliot, English war poet Richard Aldington (who was also an editor of the magazine), and Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, as well as alongside essays by Ezra Pound and Arthur Symons.
The form of “The Fish” as it appears in The Egoist lacks many of the innovative line breaks and spacing that it boasts in the edition published in our Ramazani anthology. Each stanza of the poem in the magazine is a quatrain as opposed to a cinquain (perhaps edited after the American cinquain was coined by Adelaide Crapsey in 1915). The single-syllable first lines that are seen in the Ramazani text are missing in the magazine, omitting the first line break to create lines of more consistent length. The poem is also standardly aligned to the right in the magazine, lacking the spacing and indentation employed in the now popularized version of the poem.
Moore’s “The Fish” is particularly interesting because of its current inclusion in the literary canon, despite Moore’s other works being awarded less attention, especially when compared to the works of her contemporaries. Perhaps this suggests that Moore’s inclusion in The Egoist has given “The Fish” more of a fighting edge than her other works.Though the poem’s first edition seems to pale in comparison to the one today’s readers are familiar, it seems the popularity it received in The Egoist created enough interest in the poet and poem to improve her/itself and earn a safe place in the literary canon.
I like how you recovered an earlier version of Moore’s “The Fish.” The new form places much more emphasis on the sonic textures and movement of the poem, and it also anticipates her preferred syllabic structures, where it is only the number of syllables in each line that matters. I’m not sure the inclusion of “The Fish” in the Egoist spurred its canonization–that process likely happened later as folks put together anthologies, etc. But I would be curious to learn about poems included in this issue that seem equally strong but are now forgotten. In any case, this was some great archival digging–and thanks for linking over to the Egoist so we could see the poem for ourselves!