(1995). The pattern of the poem's reversions in revision is an insistent figure of the text's return to itself, and the poem's "final" form, as we have seen, is a radical enactment of this movement.Willis and Driver also help us to trace the poem's historical play in polemic. Original poets, on the other hand, may disturb and perplex us; but their direct rendering of "hands that can grasp," etc., makes those materials intelligible in a way that excessively derivative writers, whose work filters out the "genuine," do not.Up to a point Moore admits the use of older poets as an aid in writing the ideal poetry that is "original and lucid. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be "literalists of the imagination"—above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," shall we have it.
. If prior revisions were made to please a coterie committed to free verse or to a poetic dogma, or to please an editor such as T. S. Eliot, this one was probably made by Moore for herself alone, though not without a larger audience in mind.Indeed, the final revision with its dramatic about face—cutting what was virtually an institution by 1967 and then almost nostalgically, or in a parody of nostalgia, restoring it—puts the earlier revisions of "Poetry" in perspective, particularly that version made for T. S. Eliot's edition of her Selected Poems in 1935. The speaker is, after all, a poet, and her means of making this statement is a poem. unintelligible, The word "derivative" linked with "unintelligible" implies a definition of the ideal poetry as original and lucid. There are things that are important beyond all this fiddle"? The three-stanza version is much more intent upon making its point than the thirteen-line version in free verse. . New York: The Dial Press, 1924 (O) and 1925. Her attempt in arguing with these authorities is to claim authority for the unauthoritative, a complex move with the principal intent of maneuvering Moore into a position of authority. Our toads are conspicuous and vulgar, challenging the perimeters of formal beauty. The objective is architecture, not demolition; grudges flower less well than gratitudes.
But she always reveals what's up her sleeve, brings her images round to reveal the conjurer. I mean this: that the images of alarm in "Poetry" (Ward 196; Costello 16)—"Hands that can grasp, eyes / that can dilate, hair that can rise / if it must"—realize themselves in Schulman's "Three lines?" . That we should stick to sensory detail when writing, to "finite objects"? His interest is in the poem's relation to the problematic of the "definitive" text as well as that of poetic inception. In the same vein, Jean Garrigue called "Poetry" one of the nine poems in which Moore is both "poet and critic, writing incidentally about literature in general or poetry in particular" (204).
to discriminate against "business documents andMoore has evaded all questions. Instead Moore gives us more information about what is not appropriate: When they become so derivative as to become Generalization itself must take the role of indefinite pronoun. After this five-stanza version was published in Selected Poems in 1935, the three-stanza version appeared twice more, even in a new anthology for which we may assume Moore gave permission herself since she speaks of it so fondly in 1960 in her essay, "Brooklyn from Clinton Hill" (Moore 1961). You have javascript disabled.
American Women Poets. It is motivated by an essential ambivalence about poetry's capacity to assert and form an elusive, multifaceted world. In doing so, it opens up a whole new space for the reader to make his or her own interpretations and use of imagination to connect with Moore’s sentiment and beautiful words.great job!
Is an unoriginal versifier such as Helen Steiner Rice really less intelligible and less admired than a genuine poet like Moore herself, who is allusive, complex, and problematic? "Before moving on to the five-stanza poem, a few comments on the revisions are necessary. Moore seems to have gradually substituted inductive for deductive argument, a trend evident even in "Poetry's" last revision, which turned it into a three-line aphorism upon its own evolution.Not only do Moore's exclusions result in a kind of modernist ideogram, her inclusions too are modern.
Poetry 114 (May 1969): 126.Schulman, Grace. In Charles Tomlinson. But the toad is not an emblem of defeat. . Poetry 37 (February 1931): 26.[Ed. Later Moore sees this wish as self-indulgent, claiming that the 1967 version contains all that the earlier version spells out. (A Marianne Moore Reader 185)Despite her liking for this anthology, the three-stanza version of "Poetry" was probably little more than Moore's vociferous transition to yet another revision of the five-stanza version of the poem.When she sent a typed manuscript of her poems for Selected Poems (1935) to T. S. Eliot at his request as an editor for Faber and Faber publishers, it must have included the revised, five-stanza version that borrowed from both the three-stanza version of "Poetry" and the original form in five, six-line stanzas. Yet it does serve the crucial role of indicating how thoroughly certain active forces in Moore's poems resonate in conjunction with qualities that some situations can mark as gendered. nor till the poets among us can be "literalists of the imagination"—above insolence and triviality and can present.