Poetry

WHAT ARE YEARS --Marianne Moore--Macmillan ($1.50). The most accomplished poetess in the English-speaking world today is Marianne Moore, a greying, mobile-faced, almost reckless spinster, born in St. Louis, Mo. in 1887. She graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1909. She was an assistant in the New York Public Library from 1921-25. In 1924 her book of poems Observations received the $2,000 Dial award; and for five uninterruptedly happy years thereafter she served on the learnedly esthetic Dial's editorial staff. Since the Dial's demise in 1929, Miss Moore has picked up a microscopic living from her writings, for the last twelve years has lived a sequestered life in her mother's Brooklyn flat. Though she looks somewhat like an unreconstructed Hibernian, she is as American as a buffalo gun.

Of poetry Poetess Moore once wrote: "I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle." Her own poems are practically fiddle-free.

They are written in a kind of perfected prose--a prose stripped of all discursive verbiage and whittled down into functional verse shapes. Thus, of a hen mocking bird engaged in feeding her brood, Poetess Moore writes:

Toward the high-keyed intermittent squeak of broken carriage-springs, made by

the three similar, meek-coated bird's-eye-

freckled forms she comes; and when from the beak of one, the still living beetle has dropped

out, she picks it up and puts

it in again.*

Marianne Moore's poetry is a small museum full of such devotedly matter-of-fact observations. In What Are Years are reindeer, ostriches, paperweights, pangolins, college students, paper nautiluses, quartz-crystal clocks, butterflies, Negroes, France, speech, patch-box inscriptions, triskelions and juniper boughs--a partial list. These things Moore treats not as subject matter but as object matter; and she sees in their essential structure object lessons about the Creation in which man finds himself.

These lessons she passes on to her readers in the form of still-life parables, whose gist is that what is good in the world is good because it is useful to life.

Patience, with its superlatives, firmness and loyalty and faith, is as useful to man as tightly fitting scales are to an artichoke. By conveying such pragmatic truths, Marianne Moore's work, to a degree unique in contemporary poetry, inspires a fresh moral appreciation of the world. In poetess Moore American utilitarianism has found its bird of paradise.

* These lines are not "free verse," but a rhymed, syllabically measured verse stanza.

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