In 1924, the editors of The Dial persuaded Marianne Moore to publish “Observations,” a collection of poems, so that later they could surprise her with the Dial Award, created just a few years before and given annually to a contributor for “service to letters.” (There had been one previous collection of Moore’s work, simply titled “Poems,” but it had been published—in England, in 1921, by her fellow-poets H.D. and Bryher, who were smitten with Moore’s work—without her permission. She was not pleased.) The previous recipients of the Dial Award were T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound, and, like them, Moore was increasingly seen as one of the essential reinventors of American poetry. Eliot ranked Moore among the “five contemporary poets—English, Irish, American, French, and German” whose work excited him. Reviewing “Observations” for The Dial, Williams wrote, “This is new! The quality is not new, but the freedom is new, the unbridled leap.”
Despite the acclaim, Moore remained unsatisfied with her own work. She did not produce another volume of new poetry for nearly two decades. In 1935, Eliot and Pound persuaded Moore to let Faber & Faber publish her “Selected Poems,” which Eliot edited; Moore chose to include some of the poems from “Observations,” but not in the same order, and she revised most of the ones that made it in. After her mother’s death, in 1947, Moore deliberately turned her back on much of her earlier work, which she had come to find overly complicated and strange. “She went back and really started to slash and burn,” Heather White, a Moore scholar at the University of Alabama, who is working on a complete edition of Moore’s poems, told me recently. “At the time, her readers protested vigorously. Essays and reviews said, ‘Please, Miss Moore, don’t do this.’ ” In 1967, Moore published her “Complete Poems” with the prefatory admonishment that “omissions are not accidents.” That book begins with “Selected Poems,” rather than “Observations,” the collection that had so thrilled her early fans.
“Observations” has been hard to find ever since. “Becoming Marianne Moore,” from 2002, includes a facsimile of the original text, but that book is mainly for academic use. Penguin published a collection of Moore’s work in 2003, but that edition does not group the poems by volume, and the reader wades through a morass of juvenilia and unpublished work before she arrives at Moore’s mature poetry. As Dan Chiasson noted in The New Yorker in 2013, Moore’s “editions have failed her,” sometimes obscuring the great, innovative poet that she was. This month, though, Farrar, Straus & Giroux is reissuing “Observations” in its original form, giving back to us the Moore that Williams, Pound, and Eliot knew. The Moore of this book is a radical modernist—not a peripheral member of the coterie but an architect of the movement, and one whose influence, despite her uneven publishing history, is increasingly visible in American poetry.
“Observations” begins with short addresses to animals—“To an Intramural Rat,” “To a Chameleon”—and builds to complex, allusive meditations on art and the natural world, such as “A Grave” and “Marriage.” In these poems, Moore uses quotations far more extensively than in her later books, bringing in other voices, different perspectives, and so undermining any comfortable feeling that we’re on solid ground. In her later work, “she really kind of dropped that aspect of her poetry,” Bonnie Costello, a professor of English at Boston University, told me, “that sense of creating a poem as pastiche, irony and satire through juxtaposition, radical shifts, disjunctions, letting the thing sink in its own weight against whatever else is going on.” This is the dominant music of “Observations.”
The poems in the book are arranged largely chronologically, which, as Linda Leavell, Moore’s biographer, pointed out, illuminates the progression of her work leading up to the penultimate poem, “An Octopus.” “I consider ‘An Octopus’ to be her greatest poem,” Leavell said. (John Ashbery, in 1995, called it “as fine as anything written in this century.”) “An Octopus” is Moore’s answer to “The Waste Land” and celebrates the diversity of the natural world as a vital alternative to Eliot’s mythic apocalypse. Between the title and the first line—“An Octopus / of ice”—Moore transforms tentacles into Mount Rainier; she then lifts a description of the “octopus” straight from a National Park Service publication about the glacier. “Moore shows how language helps us to appreciate the wilderness, and also how language limits our experience of the wilderness,” Leavell said.
Moore’s range of source material was one of her major innovations as a poet. She is a magpie, plucking language from myriad arenas: bestiaries, business documents, tourist pamphlets. On the advice of Scofield Thayer, the editor of The Dial, Moore provided notes and an index for her sources in “Observations.” But the notes do not feel merely explanatory; they add an additional layer to the work. Some quoted material in the poems goes uncited, while some is documented excessively. The index, too, is idiosyncratic. Though “wit” appears in several poems, for instance, there is no index entry for “wit.” On the other hand, “supertadpoles,” which is in one poem, has an entry, and poems beginning with the word “to” appear twice (e.g., “To an Intra-Mural Rat” is listed under “T” for “To an Intra-Mural Rat” and “I” for “Intra-Mural Rat, To An”). Moore’s only guiding principle is, as Costello told me, “the wilderness of her mind.”
The first edition of “Observations” also contains the longest, most famous version of Moore’s most famous poem: “Poetry,” the one that begins, “I, too, dislike it.” This is the only version with the line about “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” The second printing of “Observations,” from 1925, winnowed “Poetry” from twenty-nine lines to thirteen, ending on the prim pronouncement that “enigmas are not poetry.” By 1935’s “Selected Poems,” Moore had slashed “Poetry” to just three lines. (She included the original version in the notes to her “Complete Poems,” but there, oddly, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” appears in quotation marks, as though the line had become so iconic that Moore felt like she was quoting herself.)
Moore’s edits and cuts largely serve to fashion her work as more conventional, less difficult. “She had a pretty unerring sense of what was provocative and strange—and just got rid of it,” Heather White told me. One of the “Observations” poems that Moore cut from “Selected” was “Radical,” a self-portrait of the artist as a carrot. Moore puns on radix, or “root,” the etymological base of the word in the title; the carrot, filled “with ambition, imagination, outgrowth,” is “crammed belligerent- / ly inside itself,” overflowing the container of the line and the stanza with the “intensive heat” that forces enjambment. “That which it is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder,” the poem reads. In later years, by contrast, Moore would present herself, in “The Paper Nautilus,” as a kind of mollusk, which builds an intricate but tidy spiral that contains her, like a “fortress.”
In “Roses Only,” Moore writes, “You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather than / an asset,” and then adds, “Your thorns are the best part of you.” The poem reads as both a feminist statement and a defense for her own powerfully prickly syllabics, unusual rhymes, and often strange music.
The reissue of “Observations” is part of a larger Moore renaissance that Jonathan Galassi, the president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, has been spearheading for the past few years. “She hasn’t really had her just deserts,” Galassi said. Galassi edited Linda Leavell’s biography of Moore, which details Moore’s complicated relationship with her mother—they shared a bed for her mother’s entire life—and traces Moore’s transformation from radical modernist to celebrity baseball fan. The collection Heather White is editing will be published next year, and will present each of Moore’s published volumes in their original forms. In 2018, FSG is slated to release Moore’s correspondence with Elizabeth Bishop, for whom she was an essential mentor.
Galassi believes that, just as the restoration of Emily Dickinson’s original punctuation transformed our understanding of that poet, the reissue of Moore’s original work will shift the perception of Moore—from a quirky but somewhat cold formalist to a restlessly imaginative experimenter. The “map of modernism will be redrawn,” he said.
“I think Moore has been dismissed unfairly because people think of her as writing about sort of odd bric-a-brac,” Leavell told me. White, meanwhile, called Moore “the Rei Kawakubo of poetry,” referring to the fashion designer who is considered an essential influence by her peers but is not well known to the general public. The Moore of “Observations” hugely influenced John Ashbery’s work, for instance: in 1967, he wrote, “I am tempted simply to call her our greatest modern poet.” When the poet Robyn Schiff introduces Moore to students, she told me, Moore serves as a kind of barometer: “If you love poetry, you love Marianne Moore.”
In 2014, the poet and critic Stephen Burt, writing for the Boston Review, identified a strain of contemporary poetry deeply influenced by Moore; he dubbed it the “nearly Baroque.” In Burt’s reading, such poets—including Schiff, Ange Mlinko, Angie Estes, and others—believe in an “art that cannot be reduced to its own explanation, that shows off its material textures, its artificiality, its descent from prior art, its location in history. These poets want an art that can always give, or could always show, more,” he writes. Schiff, whose third collection, “A Woman of Property,” was published in March, said, “I wear my Moore pretty loudly.” Reading Moore, she added, was transformative for her. “Syllabics—that seemed like a lifesaver,” she told me, referring to a verse form Moore loved, in which meter is determined by the number of syllables per line, rather than, as is more typical in English poetry, the number of feet. “An inherited but available form,” Schiff called it. “Not overworked. Not dominated by male voice. A secret music.”
