On “Poetry”

Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” reads like an essay and addresses the otherness of the genre, as well as the inability to clearly define what its role is as art, culture, and social criticism. The opening lines distinguish this poem as a sort of confession – and a personal one at that – at the pains of engaging poetry. This move seems antithetical to the modernist movement, which is why the form and language of the poem are crucial to understanding what the poem is doing. In the first line she belittles poetry as unimportant but goes to say that in “Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it, after all, a place for the genuine.” All the while, the object, the prize of poet’s in her era, becomes a mere “it.”

In the first two stanzas that read like an introduction to a critical essay, both in their appearance on the page and the academic language they employ, the speaker makes a case against poetry that requires interpretation to be understood. This is stated in straightforward language pointing to the utility of words in a poem, which are meant to be “useful,” as opposed to “so derivative as to become unintelligible.” She leads from here into a slew of images, which she alluded to as important by holding up the senses as genuine expressions in the first stanza. The reader is bombarded with images that are at once vague and poignant, perhaps because of their proximity in space as opposed to any apparent relationship they have. We get images of elephants, and “a wild horse taking a roll” just above the “immovable critic twitching in his skin like a horse that feels /  a flea.” Then personas appear, yet these types undoubtedly have images attached to them for each reader.

The three middle stanzas of the poem appear more poetic on the page. They alternate between right and left justified. They look shorter and the language used is less coherent as a whole. They are all object and image, and speakers is lifting up and exposing the idea of what poetry looks, feels, tastes, and sounds like. She, and we want to assume that Moore herself is speaking, coming out as a modernist and exploring the pains therein – a comment on the new forms itself, which diminish authors and their opinions. Lehman describes in the short biography on Moore that she was known for using quotations in a revolutionary way. In these marks we read of “‘business documents and school-books'” things, “phenomena,” the speaker, presumably Moore, believes of equal import. The speaker makes the bold and controversial statement that poetry will emerge when poets become “‘literalists of the imagination’ – above / insolence and triviality // for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’.”

Lehman describes in the short biography on Moore that she was known for using quotations in a revolutionary way. In these marks we read of “‘business documents and school-books'” things, “phenomena,” the speaker believes of equal import to poetry. The speaker makes the bold and controversial statement that poetry will emerge when poets become “‘literalists of the imagination’ – above / insolence and triviality // for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’.”

This turn into the last stanza with the last phrase in quotations marks this essay-like poem’s concluding paragraph, which touches on the tension of poetry, which demands both “raw material” – langue, image, form – with what is “genuine.” These lines, as a concluding paragraph ought to, echo the poem’s thesis, that poetry is a slippery genre that can be hard to touch, yet an absolutely necessary expression of true things.

Question for Reflection

In this brief close reading, I am left wanting to understand more about how “Poetry” is commenting on modernism and where Moore’s lands in its various schools.