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Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson
The Feminist Poetics of Self-Restraint

The myth of Marianne Moore as modest eccentric perseveres both innocently and insidiously in readings that emphasize her observational prowess at the expense of her moral and political integrity, or in analyses that describe her difficult technique as self-protective armor, a "shield that [Moore] constantly hides behind." Moore's poems are marked by stunning concrete descriptions and a shifting, restless, even reticent "I," but to dismiss or praise her work as masked or object-oriented is to ignore the biting satire and subversive coils of language that make her work so radical, as both modernist and feminist. The power of Moore's observations cannot be grasped in isolation from her refusal of the stable lyric "I," for, as May Swenson once asked, who "of us is able to be such an acute instrument for the objectification of sensual perceptions and states of mind as she, without emphasizing self as subject?"

Swenson's question implies that it is exactly the tension created by Moore's remarkably precise observations and her simultaneous undermining of the "I" from which they emanate that defines Moore's most puzzling, and rewarding, poetic. That poetic, with its vital relevance to the currently shifting parameters of American feminist criticism, is the focus of this chapter. Exploring the implications of Moore's strategic selfhood, we shall see how her poetry deconstructs the lyric "I," and even more radically, the "sexed" body through which this "I" is made to seem essential. Like the glacial octopod in "An Octopus," Moore's restless eye is discernible only at moments of intricately palpable existence, the slippery but tenacious tentacles of sensual connection. As we are led through layer after layer of material detail in Moore's poems, we are taken farther astray from any a priori or ontological perspective: "Completing a circle, / you have been deceived into thinking that you have pro- / gressed" (CP, 71). In marking subjectivity by sensual response rather than sexual convention, Moore asks that we loosen sensual experience from the dictates of sexuality, and in doing so, reformulate what it means to have both a sex and a self.

Although Moore's later work suggests that she never fit completely the mythic guise of the modest eccentric, personal records of her early years leave no doubt that Moore's vision of herself was anything but hesitant or selfless. In January 1908, when Moore was a junior at Bryn Mawr, her mother, Mary Warner Moore, cautioned her:

You may not know that you are very strongly self-centered.... Now, there are advantages connected with self-analysis, and self-regard: one is well-mannered, and well-dressed; and is possessed too, of good taste and delicate sensibility,-brings forth from his resources that which will make the individual pleasing to those whom he wishes to please. But there are also disadvantages connected with being self-centered. He may put forth his best and those he attracts may expect his best yet to develop, and be accordingly disappointed when they find that back of that bright promise there is a good deal of colorless material.

What is especially revealing about this excerpt is the way in which Mrs. Moore hints at the self as a kind of design, or tool-an aperture to be sized for different scenes by self-awareness; one's "I" is an entity over which we have at least some conscious control, not something fixed or given. Mrs. Moore's conception of the self was largely shaped by her Presbyterian conviction that selfishness is blindness, a mantra we hear throughout Moore's work. But like her daughter, Mrs. Moore was never meek or selfless. A professional woman and single mother at the turn of the century, Mary Warner Moore had strong opinions and a driving sense of justice to which she dedicated much energy and time. Writing to her son from a suffrage convention, Mrs. Moore provides a portrait of herself quite different from the one to which we are accustomed:

Our cars had great banners on them with the legend on them "Votes For Women." As I lay on my tum-tum-fastened a huge banner of this description from the 2nd story front window of the courthouse-a child looked up and read, "Vote For Women?-No! Me? I'd rather vote for men." Everybody who passed gaped, so we got what we wanted-attention. But I dropped my glasses so I paid dear. I knew at first it would cost and went forth solemnly! But I am not afraid! Bunny Belong!

Hardly a retiring model of Victorian femininity, Mrs. Moore exerted strong influence over both her children, with whom she remained extremely close until her death in 1947. Though somewhat less devout than her mother, Moore also incorporated the basic Presbyterian mandates of self-tempering within her life and work. At the same time, as her mother's letter suggests, Moore struggled with her tendency toward impatience and selfishness. An avid athlete who once declared after a game of lacrosse that she "felt like the trademark inside Sir Knight's iron pants," the young Moore wrote home often with her many judgments and opinions. One such excerpt explains how Moore, upon arriving one fall at Bryn Mawr, found a friend had been stuck with a "vilely" trying roommate, a young woman who would surely drive Moore to "murder the girl and commit suicide after being with her half a day." In another passage, Moore tells her family how after a conversation concerning suffrage with an unsympathetic friend, she "could have beat her with a book." Moore's letters gush with stylistic observations in a flaired and breathless hand, often ending without inquiry into the lives of those to whom she's writing. The young persona that emerges from Moore's early correspondence has more in common with the spirited "Helena Morely" of Bishop's 1957 translation than with the fantastical feminine Moore in graying braids and a tricorne hat. As Cristanne Miller has observed, "Moore's stance seems ... more belligerent than modest."

Moore's correspondence is also marked by moments of deep reflection and tolerance, as many readers have noted. But it is the tension between her self-indulgence and self-reserve that interests me most, because this tension occupies such a central place in her poetry. Insatiably drawn to poetry as a profession, Moore was also her mother's daughter and wary of the inevitable egoism writing entails. As early as 1908, three months after she received her mother's words of warning quoted above and before she had come in contact with any contemporary writers, Moore wrote her family from college with the following announcement:

Writing is all I care for, or for what I care most, and writing is such a puling profession, if it is not a great one, that I occasionally give it up-You ought I think to be didactic like Ibsen poetic like "Sheats," or pathetic like Barrie or witty like Meredith to justify your embarking as self confidently as the concentrated young egoist who is a writer, must-writing is moreover a selfish profession and a wearing (on the investigator himself). (SL, 45-46)

As a junior at Bryn Mawr, Moore was acutely cognizant of her writing as a "profession," of the egoism of that profession, and of the struggle she would face throughout her life as a person who simultaneously believed that "what you are comes out in what you write." Bonnie Costello has artfully written that to impose "the self and its accumulated structures on the world is to narrow the world and trap the self, a self-defeating gesture." But rather than despair at this paradox, Moore reveled in the challenges it posed:

If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can get across it if I try. (CP, 178)

In response to what might seem like an impossible impasse, Moore developed her famous "armor," a key component of her strategic selfhood, in the shape of eclectic quotations, riddled verse, and an elusive, shifting narrative presence-what many have taken to be the poet's self-protective mask. But as Costello insists, the "abnegation of the self ultimately satisfies the self, for it widens the sphere of response, the self being continually discovered through response to the external world." To armor oneself is to enter the world, not shy away from it, as when Moore thanks T. S. Eliot for his introduction to her Selected Poems, claiming that she is "grateful for the armor afforded me by your introduction to my book." It is for this reason that, as Richard Howard has said, Moore's "was the most personal poetry ever written." As on her famous pangolin, whom "simpletons thought a living fable," "who endures / exhausting solitary trips through unfamiliar ground at night," Moore's "Armor seems extra." After all, the pangolin has a "grit-equipped gizzard" and is "the night miniature artist engineer ... of whom we seldom hear." But the "impressive" self of "the armored / ant-eater" is nurtured by his "closing ear-ridge" and "contracting nose and eye apertures"; his "armor" is what lets him meet the "driver-ant" and "not turn back"-it fosters courage, and thus enables curiosity. An integral aspect of the pangolin's identity, his armor is also adjustable-he can contract, be "[s]erpentined," or rolled into a ball that has the "power to defy all effort to unroll it." Indeed, as Moore writes, to "explain grace requires / a curious hand" (CP, 117-18).

Moore's discomfort with the lyric "I" was, of course, a concern of many of her modernist contemporaries as well. Michael Levenson has explained eloquently that the advent of scientific empiricism in the mid-1800s challenged belief in divine order, resulting in a tension between external standards and individualistic self-consciousness that, in turn, engendered early modernism as a movement. Reacting to what seemed a Romantic excess, as well as to the threatened guarantee of transcendental promise, Ezra Pound, Williams Carlos Williams, H.D., Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, and in some senses Moore and Eliot, attempted in a variety of ways to strike a balance between the individualistic thrust to "make it new" and a growing wariness of universal truths. A turn to "objective" experience-Williams's "no ideas but in things," Pound's "the natural object is always the adequate symbol," Eliot's "objective correlative"-spawned a curiously nonautobiographical yet egoistic movement in the arts at the start of this century, one of which Moore was always critical yet deeply a part. Though akin, for example, to Pound and Williams in their quests for exactitude and fresh observation, Moore never condoned Pound's pride or Williams's conviction that "the poet must use anything at hand to assert himself."

At the same time, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have argued, the modernist milieu in which Moore forged her literary career was marked by an anxiety over sex and gender; in the wake of the women's movement, scientific challenges to biological determinism, suffrage, and the wartime imperative for women's public work, gender roles were fundamentally questioned.18 It would be absurd to suggest that Moore was not conscious of the sexism in her professional climate; a cursory glance through the first few pages of Poems (1921), where we encounter "Pedantic Literalist" and "To a Steam Roller," or a look at slightly later poems like "Sojourn in the Whale," "A Grave," and "Marriage" (Observations, 1924), reveals otherwise. But it would be just as erroneous to conclude that Moore considered herself a mere satellite to the largely male group of her modernist peers. Though never granted, or interested in, the status of an Eliot or Pound, Moore was, as several critics have noted, at the fore of the new poetry movement, involved in close friendships with Pound, Williams, and later Eliot and Stevens in which each poet sought the promotion of the other.

Nevertheless, "experience attests," wrote Moore in 1923, "that men have power / and sometimes one is made to feel it" (CP, 67). Given all the ways in which Moore resembles her contemporaries, she remains unequaled in her ability to distinguish, and distance, poetic innovation and observation from self-affirming presence. Always aware of the dueling drives of authorship and reticence, Moore never attempted to soften the disjunction between keen modernist observation and her deep distrust of the lyric "I." Though the poetry of Moore's peers also turns on this inherent paradox (Eliot and Stevens perhaps most of all), no one embraced it with a joy or gusto matching Moore's. Indeed, whereas other modernists sometimes saw this paradox as a problem to be solved, Moore unceremoniously marshaled it as the goal of her poetic.

In keeping with the perception of Moore as modestly mannered, readers tend to agree that as the poet matured, poems like "A Grave" gave way to less assertive, more self-conscious work. Regarding the often judgmental, declarative tenor of Moore's early verse as the expression of youthful egoism, critics often view her later voice as a reaction to the emphatic confidence of her younger years. Margaret Holley gives the best articulation of this argument: in Moore's "mature poems ... the private self is now perceived as one more objective item out there in the public world, while that public world outside the self turns out to be thoroughly permeated with the subjectivities of others' limited points of view, superstitions, and fabulous stories." Holley's reading is based on her premise that the "early poetic voice that responds personally by expressing the views and feelings of the self gives way ... to the poet as an artificer who records, designs and textualizes the materials of the culture in a poetic way" (83). However, examination of some of Moore's first poems reveals that her practice was always inextricable from her acute analysis of selfhood; that Moore's earliest poems, opinionated and raw as they may be, are the products of a subversive architect (indeed, an "artificer") committed to displacing the Romantic lyric "I."

One such piece, "He Made This Screen," initially titled "To a Screen Maker," is ostensibly a poem about the power-presumably an artist's, perhaps God as artist-to create life and the world in which we live it. The final three stanzas appear as follows:

Here, he introduced a sea Uniform like tapestry; Here a fig-tree; there a face; There a dragon circling space- Designating here, a bower; There, a pointed passion flower.

But in one of Moore's earliest drafts of the poem, written in a letter to her family in 1908, it appeared in two parts, its biblical references much less pronounced and its object of description more enigmatic (which, under the eagle eye of Mrs. Moore, may be why it was revised):

1. To an Artificer Not of silver nor of coral, But of weather-beaten laurel. Carve it out. II Make a body long and thin And carve hairs upon the skin Make a snout. III On the order of a tower Faintly wrinkled like a flower On the paws IV Carve out heavy feline toes Make each claw an eagle's nose. Carve out great jaws. 2. To a Screen-Maker Not of silver nor of coral, But of weather-beaten laurel Carve it out. II Carve out here and there a face Flying a symbol out in space Of grim doubt. III Represent a branching tree Uniform like tapestry And no sky. IV And devise a rustic bower And a pointed passion flower Hanging high.

The first part of the poem, "To an Artificer," suggests an agent, an inventor who carves a literal life that parallels the making of the poem itself. Part 2, "To a Screen-Maker," also addresses an inventor, one who works with the same common material-"weather-beaten laurel"-as opposed to the more difficult to procure "silver" or "coral." But the screen-maker's product is one of surroundings, of context, perhaps that in which the artificer's claw-toed body might live. Whereas the artificer's ordered efforts forge a single material creature, contained and local, the screen-maker's impart intellection, a "symbol" of "grim doubt" emanating from a dappled haze of bodiless heads. Furthermore, it is the ambiguity afforded by this abstract doubt that precipitates a radical shift in the agent's work. Unlike the artificer, who seems to enjoy a direct and unmediated relationship to its artifact, the screen-maker, surrounded by the intellectualizations of its own making, now merely "[r]epresent[s]" a "branching tree," "a rustic bower," and a "pointed passion flower" in its efforts. In devising its skyless surroundings, the screen-maker produces a screen between its own agency and its craft; what started as an ordered procedure of cause and 18 Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson effect turns into a highly mediated artistic endeavor, much like the scenario enacted between the artist and his subject in John Ashbery's poem "The Painter." Indeed, it is precisely the screen-maker's power to construct this world of thought (the screen-maker's own intellect, projected) that accounts for the loss of innocence this part of the poem invites. Thus, the world becomes a screen, a "symbol" of itself, crafted by the screen-maker and, in turn, screening the screen-maker's relation to it. The Romantic relation of the speaker to her subject, in which the artist emerges as conduit to the real, is refigured in this version of the poem, the real and the artist becoming interlaced threads of a "weather-beaten" screen, letting in light while blocking it out.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson by KIRSTIN HOTELLING ZONA
Copyright © 2002 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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