On Drafting toward Observations

Many critics have commented on the importance of Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass, including one who calls it the “single most original book of poetry ever written in the history of the world.”*[1]* T. S. Eliot’s 1922 publication of “The Waste Land” has received similar accolades in relation to modern poetry. Marianne Moore’s 1924 Observations should be recognized similarly as a monumental moment in the history of modern poetry. In Observations, Moore takes Whitman’s poetic innovation a step further by divorcing syntactic closure and sometimes even word boundaries from the poetic line. Moore combines the apparently arbitrary lineation of prose with the highly stylized formal (syllabic) meter and the precisely patterned rhyme of poetry. Like Eliot, but with greater irony and humor, she attaches the commentary of notes and an index to her volume of poems, spoofing traditions of source-hunting and hierarchical seriousness with her entries. The effect is profoundly democratic and challenging, demanding that we make sense for ourselves of her sometimes puzzling and often witty juxtapositions of description, trenchant commentary, and reflection—mostly in syllabic verse although in the early 1920s she turns to equally remarkable free verse for her longest poems. Observations is unique, a landmark of adventurous poetic innovation, cultural commentary, eco-environmental wisdom, understated feminism, and quirky playfulness.

The question of why Moore has received less attention than other poets, for this volume and her entire oeuvre, has been answered in earlier decades but perhaps deserves brief attention again in this centennial year—when we may understand with new clarity the precarity of women’s status in the professional world, and generally. While there have been many gains in women’s rights and openness to women’s achievement over the past century, gender still looms as the primary impediment to Moore’s deserved full acknowledgment as being among the most significant innovators of modern verse. I mean this in two ways. First, for all the decades of her own life, most (although definitely not all!) critics and readers were less willing to see radical innovation as stemming from a woman than a man, particularly if that woman followed behavioral characteristics generally regarded as conventional or feminine—and despite Moore’s winning every major poetry prize available in the United States: the Pulitzer, Bollingen, National Book Award, Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and in France the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres—among others. Moore did depart from stereotypes of femininity—as Elizabeth Gregory has most recently argued—but those departures were quieter than, for example, Gertrude Stein’s.*[2]*

Second, both male but especially female and feminist readers and critics since the 1970s have sought out earlier poets and stylistic innovators from those whose departures from convention were openly marked in their personal lives: sexually, sartorially, and in their social politics. Not (openly) lesbian, bohemian, or politically radical—despite her feminism and ongoing support for what we now call diversity and equity, and she would have called Civil Rights, Moore lived with her mother until 1947, demanded some degree of decorum, and was relatively soft-spoken. She has seemed, and perhaps to some still seems, an unlikely candidate to be an extraordinary innovator of poetic form or a profound spokesperson for major issues of her century. And yet that is precisely what Observations proves her to be, from its brief syllabic verses to its long free-verse poems; from the manifestos of “Poetry, “Roses Only,” and “The Labors of Hercules” to the profound musings of “England,” “Black Earth,” and “In This Age of Hard Trying Nonchalance is Good And.” We learn from this volume and see in her life, as Moore writes in “Radical”—a poem spoken in the voice of a carrot—“that which it is impossible to force, it is impossible / to hinder.”*[3]* And as “Radical” and other Observations poems indicate, Moore herself was thinking about hierarchies of power and gender as she completed the poems collected in this volume.

There is no record of Moore’s drafts of the poems she completed before 1922. For some poems, there are early typed or earlier published and then revised editions—beautifully documented in Robin G. Schulze’s Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems 1907-1924. Starting in 1922, however, Moore kept a poetry draft notebook, containing what are apparently her earliest drafts for the poems “Marriage,” “An Octopus,” “Silence,” and “Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns.”*[4]* In 2016, the Marianne Moore Digital Archive (MMDAhttps://moorearchive.org/) published this notebook in facing page manuscript and edited, annotated transcription.*[5]* This notebook allows us both to think in new ways about Moore’s process of composition and to reflect on the concerns Moore repeated as she worked toward the final poems of this collection.

This notebook puts to rest the idea, initiated by Moore herself, that she composed by conceiving of a particular syllabic stanza and then organizing other material toward a poem following that pattern. While this may be true of the moment when she begins to move her crafted phrases into syllabic form, Moore’s initial composition consists of repeated and reorganized words, phrases, and groups of lines.*[6]* In this notebook, these phrases with some frequency include an “I” position and pronoun that appears to reflect Moore herself, the kind of personal pronoun she largely edited out of her early verse.*[7]* Such personal pronouns show a feistiness and emotional engagement easier to overlook in finished poems where the “I” is downplayed or disappears. This 1922-1930 notebook also suggests a different organization of its initial material than has been supposed, as Moore moves toward the crafted phrases used in published poems. In 1984, Patricia C. Willis argued that in this notebook Moore was drafting a single poem, which she later separated into distinct compositions, trying out two titles for this one poem: “Marriage” and “An Octopus.”*[8]* It seems to me that this notebook instead indicates that Moore from the start conceived of different poems, which she worked on simultaneously, including from one line to the next on the same page. Willis is correct that Moore tries out several phrases, and ideas, without being sure where they will finally be used, if at all. These indeed indicate the connections, for her, among different poems’ concerns. Her repeated centering of distinct titles and leap from one subject to another, however, suggest that her initial drafting is rarely toward a single work for long. As ideas or phrases occur to her, for various poems, she jots them down. The first proper page of this notebook (perhaps written late in her drafting) includes:

Marriage lupin small blue flowers growing

Mt Rainier close together so that patches of them

looks like sheets of blue water in the distance

Tropics & unicorns I too am not fickle

I too am happy only at home

Peter see mole’s BR Nov 8 fr to enslave

one meets it, whiskers out

Hermes Bk of Noble Dogs his robust personality

Peter voluntary curfew half past 2

My past life has not been a parody on the real

(MMDA, 07.04.04: 2)

Later on this page, she writes “neatness of finish, neatness of finish,” a phrase near the conclusion of the published “An Octopus” and not recurring in the notebook, although on page 74 she twice writes “niceness of finish.”

As this page indicates, this notebook also includes a few phrases or lines pointing toward “People’s Surroundings” (published 1922) and “Peter,” first published in Observations—although its four references to a “tomcat” or “Tom cat” “& his enemy” (12, 18, 23, 29) occur in the midst of other lines suggesting “Marriage”—for example, “difficulty enforcing his authority” (17, 18, 19) and that “man” “who is incap[able] of not ever wishing ever to go anwhere” and “is incap of living anywhere but at home” (12). Moore’s repetition of “tomcat” is one of those instances where it is not clear whether she is playing with an idea not yet placed as part of a different poem (“Peter”) or briefly imagining Adam as a tomcat (for “Marriage”). Moore also mentions “Bluebeard” (from “People’s Surroundings”) in relation to the line “I too am happy only at home” (11).

Other of Moore’s frequently repeated phrases include some variation on “not their silence but their silences” (11, 17)—shifting when Moore begins drafting specifically toward “Silence” (mid-page) to “not in silence but restraint” (92, 94, 97, 98, 99).*[9]* “Silence” comes closer to its published form than any other poem drafted in this notebook. Referring to Adam, Moore repeats variations on “I have seen him when he was so handsome he gave me a start” (19, 22, twice on 27, 39)—always among other lines pointing toward “Marriage.” “An octopus of ice” first appears on page 6 and is then repeated three times several pages later (28, 66, 73). There are five references to a “goats looking glass” and another five to “Calypso the goats flower.” Generally, around page 66 Moore turns from primary drafting of “Marriage” (first published 1923) toward primary drafting of “An Octopus” (published December 1924, shortly before its revised publication in Observations) and “Silence” (published October 1924).

While drafting toward “Marriage,” Moore writes eight times a line she uses in the published poem: “men have power & sometimes one is made to feel it” (5, 14, 20, 22, 23, 25, twice on 27). She repeats other claims never appearing in the poem, for example, that marriage “is universally associated w the fear of loss” (8, 15, 19, 23, twice on 26 and 29, 50) and that “sentimental emancipation is a great aid to logic” (2, 7, 8, 20, 23, twice on 24, 28), once accompanied by the question “what are women emancipated fr & what are they being emancipated to?” (20). Later, Moore proposes that “the mind of man” (associated with “arrogance”) “must be discarded . . . & forgetfulness be power. . . this eagle w tigers in his eyes & feet” (55). This passage occurs on a page beginning with “Marriage” centered, as a title, and then “the mud of matrimony”— trying out and cancelling a possible first line. If Moore did conceive of “Marriage” and “An Octopus” simultaneously, she seems soon to have made gender hierarchy exclusive to drafts of “Marriage”—although I find it difficult to place some references to “Adam” in one direction of drafting or the other. She repeats eleven times a variation on “eagle with tigers in its eyes and feet”—mostly in relation to descriptions of Adam; nothing in either poem makes use of this conception. She repeats five times some reference to the “spiked hand” that proves its affection “to the bone,” perhaps a related portrayal.

The draft of a never published poem, apparently written in 1924, also picks up some of Moore’s concerns with hierarchy and power, through a portrayal of animals.*[10]* Unusually, this is an uninterrupted draft of one poem.

Vienna

A Cat on Viennese striped silk

a sleeping cat

fanned by a rat

an arctic fox on silk

Venetian fuschia sultan red.

‍ ‍light blue and lilac silk.

silver

with 8 young rats in scarlet coats

to offer it, its milk—

Venetian fuschia sultan red

light blue & lilac silk

Petunias here, petunias there,

It has the only chair

and only pleased Not wishing never to go anywhere

at home And happy only at home

a tyrant

‍ ‍It visits in its sleep‍ ‍surveying in its sleep

‍ ‍the asiatic beast

Seets Panama, Niagra falls & Panama

‍ ‍& places in the east

It sits up taller than at first

of conoisseurs of taste

it is the smallest & the worst

painting

[Vertical left margin: the raving a decent madman of good taste It

is the that eats when it is in the mood as much as any more

than some it is the choicest & the worst]

[Vertical right margin: the silver cushioned chair]

this small horned viper on a banner

of blue & yellow silk

as soft and snowy as that down

adorns the blowballs frizzled crown—*[11]*

care made w care

the cushion,^ settled there*[12]*

by monkeys art hands—

Vienna bands of

of silk on rabbit hair—

It has the only chair.

the morose mascot

ideal companion for an indoor life

___________________________

th on cushion-cockle shells a pair

‍ ‍of a pair of painted vipers on white silk

The innoucous child of fearless parents,

the tame cat—

the only domestic animal wh has not

lost its wild quality

_________________________ (MMDA, 07.04.04: 107-108)

Moore uses the phrases “the only domestic animal wh[ich] has not lost its wild quality” and “the innocuous child of fearless parents” in drafts toward “Silence” although not in the finished poem. “Peter” describes a cat with reference to its sleeping, to a chair, to an “eel” and “snake” (in “Vienna,” the reference is to “vipers”) and to his “disposition /invariably to affront” (BecomingMM 93, 94). This Viennese cat, however, is a “tyrant” and a “connoisseur” (perhaps the “worst”—a word Moore repeats): un-cat-like, it sits straight in “the only chair” and is fanned or fed by nine rats.

In family nomenclature, Moore went by the nickname “Rat” from about 1914 for the rest of her life. Consequently, in some ways this poem suggests a portrait of Moore and her mother, Mary Warner Moore— with whom she was living in very cramped quarters. As Linda Leavell concludes in her biography Holding on Upside Down, this relationship both enabled Moore’s writing career and was oppressive and troubling.*[13]* Her mother was, in some ways, tyrannical, and she did not like all of the poetry Moore was publishing. She may perhaps have been the “smallest and the worst” among “connoisseurs of taste” or “the choicest and the worst” among “madm[en] of good taste”—as “Vienna” puts it. Yet, the poem states, this “morose mascot” is the “ideal companion for an indoor life”—certainly true of an indoor cat, but perhaps also acknowledging that her life with Mary did enable her writing. Mary may also be “The innocuous child of fearless parents, / the tame cat” in that Moore and her brother referred to Mary as their child and themselves as her uncles.

This poem proposes a different kind of power relationship than a marriage, but perhaps one in which Moore similarly felt herself to be, or potentially to be, disadvantaged: as a woman in a marriage and as a “rat”/Rat in relationship to a tyrannical cat. Not much can be made of this poem since Moore abandoned it and its players are not distinctly developed. The cat is a “child” offered “milk” but also a tyrant fed by subject “rats.” The phrase used earlier in relation to Bluebeard, “I too am happy only at home,” now belongs to the cat (“it”).*[14]* Neither cat nor rats are gendered and the scene is ekphrastic—describing a “banner” or “painting,” or “cushion.” Nonetheless, the poem repeatedly suggests relationships of power: the cat is a tyrant, a “viper,” a raving madman, greedy (eating “more than some”—presumably more than others in its own household), monopolizing “the only chair,” and alternately “morose,” “innocuous,” “tame,” and “wild.” Leavell’s portrayal of Moore’s eating disorder in relation to her mother’s controlling behavior, especially in relation to food scarcity, encourages this interpretation of the drafted poem (Leavell 163-65).

As published, Observations is a remarkable volume. This 1920s poetry drafting notebook offers a fuller and still barely explored perspective on Moore’s development and personal engagement with the topics and portrayals in the poems concluding that collection. Moreover, during the period between 1922, when she began keeping notebook 07.04.04, and the late 1924 publication of Observations, Moore was at least occasionally writing in six other reading, conversation, or miscellaneous-material notebooks. One of these, a reading notebook from 1923 (07.01.04), is also already published on the MMDA. As one of its editors, Claire Nashar, has written, this notebook’s extensive index may provide a model for that of Observations. *[15]* Together the published poetry-drafting and reading notebooks; the not-yet-published five additional notebooks with material from 1922-1924; and the several reading, conversation, miscellaneous, and lecture notebooks she kept before 1922, offer new ways to consider the foreground and the accomplishment of Observations. It is my hope that this brief essay will encourage others to explore these and other notebooks for what they offer in relation to Moore’s 1924 and later poems. And while such exploration may not alter evaluation of Observations per se, it cannot help but increase our understanding of Moore and the thinking that led to that extraordinary collection.