What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, —
dumbly calling, deafly listening—that
in misfortune, even death,
encourage others
and in its defeat, stirs
the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.
So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.

Even Roses Only, the poem considered her “most feminist,” has been poked at by some “feminine view” critics. It’s a dense poem, with more than one possible interpretation.

Roses Only

You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather
than
an asset – that in view of the fact that spirit creates form
we are justified in supposing
that you must have brains. For you, a symbol of the
unit, stiff and sharp,
conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority and
liking for everything
self-dependent, anything an

ambitious civilization might produce: for you, unaided, to
attempt through sheer
reserve, to confuse presumptions resulting from
observation, is idle. You cannot make us
think you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you are
brilliant, it
is not because your petals are the without-which-nothing
of pre-eminence. Would you not, minus
thorns, be a what-is-this, a mere
perculiarity? They are not proof against a worm, the
elements, or mildew;
but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance
without co-ordination? Guarding the
infinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to
the remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be re-
membered too violently,
your thorns are the best part of you.

But the density of the poem is nothing compared to the density of the criticism. This is where my eyes begin to feel the strain:

“French feminists have in fact theorized what Moore had been doing about half a century before; the subverting of the forms, structures and meanings as used by the existing representational powers. As a result, her meanings are rarely conclusive and her notoriously difficult poetry is best read as an inconclusive encounter with the predominant literary tradition and larger system of representation which modifies and disrupts these orders.”

— Elien Arckens, Marianne Moore: American Modernist read from a French Feminist Perspective

And Arckens is actually one of the more readable and insightful scholars.

I won’t drag you into the really incomprehensible stuff, but here’s a very brief sample of the semi-incomprehensible:

“Sandra Gilbert who points out Moore’s “parodically spinsterish asexuality”, Susanne Juhasz who similarly asserts that seeking critical recognition the poet “had to play by the boys rules” and “opted for nonsexuality”, or Jeanne Heuving who argues against treating Moore as neuter and sexless, and who claims at the same time that she “did not make gender an important part of her public identity as a writer … engender[ing] difference primarily through the subtleness of the poetic medium itself”. 

— adroitly summed up by Paulina Ambroży-Lis, in “Your Thorns Are the Best Part of You”: The Female Poet and the Question of Non-Conformity in the Poetry of Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein

Sheepishly, I am reminded of Mark Twain’s opening statement for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”

The very thing I am attempting to do, while at the same time, decrying the attempts of others. Criticism is a tricky business.

Marianne Moore will remain a literary figure of mystery and controversy no matter what I say. I can only hope that my words make you want to go to the source — the poems themselves — and decide what they mean to you.

Thank you for reading this week’s Word Cloud.