It’s a strange courage
you give me ancient star:
Shine alone in the sunrise
toward which you lend no part!
MARIANNE MOORE
1887–1972
“Poetry”
“Marriage”
Marianne Moore was born in St. Louis in 1887. She graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1909, working as a teacher for a while and as an assistant librarian in the New York Public Library, where she spent much of her time culling the stacks for odd sayings and surprising remarks, many of which found their way into her poetry. She was particularly delighted by the infinite variety of the animal world (which is no longer so infinite, alas). She spent most of her life in New York, later in Brooklyn, and produced many fine books. Collected Poems won her the Pulitzer Price and she received many other awards as well, dying in Brooklyn in 1972.
“Poetry” is a very famous poem, which probably annoyed Miss Moore. I have read it scores of times and led discussions of in my poetry course, and I don’t understand it completely. But I feel I do, and especially its wonderfully enigmatic lines, to wit:
not 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.
“Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” What an astonishing description of what constitutes real poetry! Does it make any sense to you? If not, think again; and if not even then, then think once more. It is needed, after all. Or you may just decide to chuck the poem into the wastebasket. But I hope you won’t.
“Marriage” is equally challenging. I’ll quote just the first few lines.
This institution,
perhaps one should say enterprise
out of respect for which
one says one need not change one’s mind about a thing one has believed in,
requiring public promises
of one’s intention
to fulfil a private obligation:
I wonder what Adam and Eve
think of it by this time …
And so it goes, referring in this long poem to dozens of ancient and modern sayings, remarks, lines of poetry, images, and so forth. It is Marianne Moore at her best and worst, the upshot of all being that she doesn’t like marriage, which she declined to enter into. Do you blame her? Well, once more think again, and avoid the wastebasket.
T. S. ELIOT
1888–1965
Selected Poems
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888, the descendant of an English family that had left East Coker, in Somerset, and moved to New England in the seventeenth century. He was educated at Harvard and Oxford universities, with an intermediary stint at the Sorbonne in Paris. He established himself in London in 1914 and became a British subject in 1927.
Eliot’s first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, appeared in the gloomy war year of 1917; the edition of five hundred copies, at a shilling a copy, took three years to sell out. But Eliot was beginning to make a name for himself as a critic, and when his poem The Wasteland appeared in 1922 he was suddenly famous. Dedicated to his fellow poet and poetical revolutionary Ezra Pound, Eliot’s Wasteland was shocking and innovative, but it also perfectly captured the mood of disillusionment of the early postwar period.
Eliot was confirmed in the Church of England in 1927 and thereafter wrote several works on religious themes, among them the poem “Ash Wednesday” (1930), his fine verse play Murder in the Cathedral (1935), and his more popular theatrical success The Cocktail Party (1949). The year before, in 1948, he had been awarded the Order of Merit by King George VI and had received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
For twenty years—from 1935 to 1955—T. S. Eliot was the most important literary figure in the English-speaking world. He wrote relatively little, but each small publication of new poetry or prose was an event of major importance. He was studied in every graduate department of English literature, and professors told their students that Eliot’s fame would endure until the end of time.
Now, three generations later, some of that enthusiasm has abated. There has been a flurry of interest because of an amazingly popular musical comedy made out of his charming book Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and Eliot’s prose and verse are still widely read. But not many today would declare that he is one of the greatest English poets of all time.
If the estimate of him was too high when he was alive, it may be too low now. Eliot was a very good poet and an excellent writer of pellucid prose, and he remains exciting and challenging to read.
One of the problems with Eliot is that he was a bit pompous. Born in St. Louis, he moved eastward, first to Cambridge and Harvard, then to London. But he did not just live in London; he became a British subject and adopted a British accent. He became more English than the English and wrote about his adopted country as if it really were his own.
His poetry, nevertheless, is not “merely” English. It is dependent on the classical tradition of English literature but, like that tradition, it has universal aspects that raise it above the ordinary parochial level. After all, every “national” literature must be parochial to some extent, else it would not be national. And among national literatures, which one is greater than English literature? I do not think there is any. So to be English, as we say of Eliot, is no bad thing to be.
But it is the universal aspects in Eliot’s poetry that are most worthy of note and admiration. The dark side of things, as we see it in The Wasteland, is a side of things that not just English men and women have observed. The myth of a wasteland that comes down to us from the Middle Ages was the subject of learned discussion when Eliot was writing the poem; World War I had just ended, and many felt that it had turned a blooming civilization into a desert and that the world would never seem, or be, so rich and full of promise again. This was a universal, not just an English, insight; and the images of the poem are universal, too, comprising as they do remembered scenes from the history and literature of the whole world, not just England. What the poem says—that we can turn the world into a wasteland, and that we may even want to do that—was worth saying in 1922, and it is worth remembering today. We can still do it, we can do it more absolutely and completely than ever, and maybe we even want to do it, still.
Four Quartets is an even finer poem than The Wasteland, as well as being more English. No poem better expresses the way many persons felt at the end of the 1930s when, tired of the lying and the hatred, they were willing to fall into another great war—a more terrible war by far—rather than face their own selves. The war came and swept away many of the old things, not the least of them the old England, as Eliot had perceived it.