“Poetry” by Marianne Moore is a meditation on the subject of poetry. Moore was a modernist poet, and was well known for using her own techniques in writing her poems: “Her stanza is composed of regular lines counted by syllables, instead of by stress, which are connected in an elaborate verse pattern, and in which rhymes often occur at unaccented syllables and even in the middle of a word. The effects she achieves are complex and subtle” (“Marianne Moore” 2031). In “Poetry,” Moore articulate that we may not understand poetry, as we do not understand many things in the world; but it is good if it is written in a genuine way to evoke a raw feeling. She expresses this in the way she wrote the poem, and in the subject matter of the poem itself.
“Poetry” is a poem about poetry. The poem’s form is five stanzas, each containing seven or eight lines. The stanzas are not separate entities in any way; each stanza flows into the next. There is enjambment in almost every line, and there are pauses, or caesuras within the lines as well. Moore is the speaker of the poem and in the first half of the poem she begins by setting the reader up to think that she is stating a case against poetry by saying “I, too, dislike it” (line 1). The “it” is poetry, and she seems to be siding with the reader who is thinking in their own head, “I can’t believe we have to read another poem!” She concedes that there are things that are more important than reading poetry; she terms it “fiddle” (line 2) which is likening it to an instrument for playing music and for entertainment. The reader can imagine the poet with a poem on paper right in front of her, eyeing the poem “with a perfect contempt for it” (line 3) and then once she begins reading it, her sentiment changes as she says that through the contempt, “one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine” (lines 4-5). She describes some of the genuine feelings that a poem evokes: “Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must” (lines 6-8). Dilating pupils and rising hair are bodily functions that happen naturally and are certainly not caused by the literariness of the poem. She speaks to this fact when she says (note the way the lines are broken up):
these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful (lines 8-10).
What are “these things” that Moore speaks of? Is she speaking of the human reaction to poetry or the poetry itself? It seems that “these things” are the poetry itself because she then says that they are “useful” because of the feelings they invoke, not because scholars can write interpretations filled with intellectual language about them. That is why Moore separates the word “useful” from the previous line in order to highlight its importance. She uses imagery to give examples of other things which are not easily understood by most people, and includes herself with the audience again by saying “we do not admire what we cannot understand” (lines 14-15): “the bat holding on upside down or in quest of something to eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the baseball fan, the statistician-” (lines 15-22). There is simile used in likening a critic who is twitching because a poet has written a bad poem, with a horse twitching because a flea is bothering him. We do not understand many things in the world, poetry being one of them. Moore goes on to give examples of some other things that people may not understand, such as “’business documents and school-books’” (lines 23-24). She advocates not discriminating against those types of things either and concludes the fourteen-line sentence with the statement “all these phenomena are important” (line 24). All of the aforementioned things are important to some living beings.
In the beginning of the second portion of the poem, Marianne Moore goes back to speaking about poetry specifically. Her phrase “One must make a distinction however” (line 24-25) is a call to action to the reader. She refers to the aforementioned incomprehensible things, and says that when “half poets” (line 26) drag these things into prominence (or write poems about them), “the result is not poetry” (line 27). So what is poetry and who is a true poet? “Literalists of imagination” (lines 29-30) is her answer. Moore draws a connection between the phrase “literalists of imagination” and “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” (line 32). In an essay by Tara Stubbs, she gives us some information about Moore’s use of that line calling it “a metaphor Moore used for poems in general, describing them as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” in a draft of her poem “Poetry,” first published in 1919” (Stubbs 72-73). This metaphor is also a literary nod to the Romantics who believed that nature gave inspiration to poets. For Moore, it is also necessary that poets create this imaginary real place without “insolence and triviality” (line 31) so that it will be genuine. In the last sentence of the poem, Moore recalls the aforementioned (line 5) genuineness of a poem. This is a repetition of an idea that is supposed to stress its importance. Finally, Moore uses an image of a person holding two things in their hands. In one is the “raw material of poetry in all its rawness” (lines 35-36). In the other is poetry “which is on the other hand genuine” (lines 37-38). Both add up to an interest, or a love of poetry.
“Poetry” somewhat reads more as an introduction of poetry than a poem that draws an imaginary garden with a real toad in it. She does show the reader how it is necessary to have poetry be sincere and yet evoke a raw feeling to be true.
Works Cited
“Marianne Moore.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter 7th ed. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton, 2008. 2031-31. Print.
Smith, Philip. 100 Best-Loved Poems. New York: Dover,1995. Print.
Stubbs, Tara. “’Writing Was Resilience. Resilience Was an Adventure’ Marianne Moore, Bernard Shaw, and the Art of Writing.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies. 29 (2009): 66-78. Project MUSE. Web. 15 Sept. 2010.
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