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Observations
Marianne Moore's Observations stands with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's early Cantos, William Carlos Williams's Spring and All, and Wallace Steven's Harmonium as a landmark of modern poetry. But to the chagrin of many admirers, Moore eliminated up to a third of its works from her subsequent collections while radically revising some of the poems she retained. This groundbreaking book, first published in 1924, has been unavailable to the general reader for nearly a century.
Impeccably precise yet playfully elusive, emotionally complex but stripped of all sentiment, the poems in Observations show us one of America's greatest poets at the height of her powers. Edited and with a new introduction by Linda Leavell, the author of the award-winning biography Holding on Upside Down- The Life and Works of Marianne Moore, this reissue of Observations at last allows readers to experience the untamed force of Moore's most dazzling innovations. Her heroic open-mindedness and prescient views on difference and individuality make her work uniquely suited to our times.
Impeccably precise yet playfully elusive, emotionally complex but stripped of all sentiment, the poems in Observations show us one of America's greatest poets at the height of her powers. Edited and with a new introduction by Linda Leavell, the author of the award-winning biography Holding on Upside Down- The Life and Works of Marianne Moore, this reissue of Observations at last allows readers to experience the untamed force of Moore's most dazzling innovations. Her heroic open-mindedness and prescient views on difference and individuality make her work uniquely suited to our times.
120 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1924
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419 people want to read
About the author
Marianne Moore
194 books173 followersMarianne Craig Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was an American Modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit.
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May 13, 2017
I have never known how to read Marianne Moore, either in the most elementary sense (as in, what book should I even be reading?) or the more advanced sense (as in, what on earth do these poems mean?). Encountering Moore's poems in anthologies, I found them totally befuddling; vaguely aware that her whole oeuvre was somehow compromised by dubious editorial decisions, mostly her own, I did not know how to go beyond the anthologies nor did I ever seriously try. This 2016 reissue of Moore's first authorized book, Observations (1924), has happily solved the problem of what to read.
Moore may have rewritten some of its contents beyond recognition and deleted some of its poems from her canon, deciding they were too difficult, when she became prominent and popular in the middle of the century.[1] Its importance as a modernist slim volume (its present editor, Linda Leavell, associates it in her introduction with "Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), Pound's early Cantos, Williams's Spring and All (1923), and Stevens's Harmonium (1923)"), however, means that Observations deserves to be read in its own right by every student of modernism.
So what do Marianne Moore's poems mean? I am still not perfectly sure. She reminds me of her contemporary, Hart Crane, in that I can read their poems over and over and remain mystified. The reasons for each poet's opacity, though, are very different, and the particular quality of Moore's difficulty gives me one way into her work. Crane is a mystic and a visionary; too high for reason, even for grammar, he seems to seek and to attain sheer glossolalia ("Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping / The impasse high with choir"), senselessness as the certification of his spiritual authenticity. Moore, by contrast, may be too reasonable. Her poems possess blinding clarity.
In a 1965 essay on Moore called "The Experience of the Eye," Hugh Kenner argues that Moore advances beyond both pre-modern allegorical poetics, for which each phenomena indicates a spiritual fact, and Romantic poetics (to which Crane is heir), for which phenomena are a pretext or an index to the poet's subjective response. Moore, Kenner says, is attempting not allegory or subjectivity but scientific objectivity: hence her profusion of unsystematic but visually vivid metaphor; hence her use of syllabic rather than accentual verse to disrupt poetry's tendency toward emotive rhetoric. Her poems are meant for the eye, not the ear, Kenner concludes, they and belong to the era of the typewriter in their impersonal grid of shaped syllables:
Her sentences remind me ("remind one, as it were," I should say) of Henry James, alluded to at least three times in these most allusive poems. I think of Michael Hofmann's tantalizing aside, in an essay on Stevens, that "Henry James [is] the Master and onlie begetter, I am increasingly coming to think, of all the great modernist poets, of Pound and Eliot and Moore and Stevens."[2] In a poem about New York City, Moore—who appears to have been a pro-capitalist Roosevelt-hating Republican, not unlike her contemporary Willa Cather or, indeed, Stevens—nonetheless praises the city, not for its commerce, which she lushly evokes, but for its "'accessibility to experience,'" a supremely Jamesian phrase she takes from none other than James himself.
Quotation marks abound in her poetry, as she borrows language from everywhere, not only from canonical authors but also from advertisements, periodical essays, and encyclopedia entries. These are not Eliotic allusions, shards of tradition the reader is meant to reassemble in the hopes of restoring Christendom to its lost wholeness, but provocations to reflection. If James counseled the writer to be a one on whom nothing would be lost, Moore's borrowings are the somethings that will not be lost on her.
A Presbyterian, devout, with a minister brother and a pious mother, "Miss Moore"—as they used to say—praises hard work: the kind of slow, patient, tough labor required to really see what is front of you and think through what you see. (The kind of labor required to read James's prose, also.) With a satirical spirit, she writes poems in dispraise of the the "steam roller" ("You crush all the particles down / into close conformity") who destroys subtlety, and the "pedantic literalist" ("What stood / Erect in you has withered") and aristocratic ladies ("But why dissect destiny with instruments / more highly specialized than the components of destiny itself?") who abuse it. Not averse to energy or splendor, she praises Bernard Shaw, Molière, chameleons; not averse to intelligent leisure, she commends house cats and dock rats. My favorite of these poems, summing up their aesthetic values, is "Diligence is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight":
Other poems similarly counter stereotype or else, if they deploy it, praise what has been scorned. The poem "England" satirizes national difference; it seems to lament, in time-honored fashion, the cultural crudity of America (she famously describes our English as "plain American which cats and dogs can read!") before concluding of "the fruit and flower" of civilization that it "has never been confined to one locality." In a poem to Disraeli, she opposes Eliotic/Poundian anti-Semitism—not, to our post-essentialist ears, very sensitively, but with an important transvaluation of values, as she lauds the Victorian prime minister as a "brilliant Jew," a "subtle thing," possessed of "sound sense," implicitly deprecating the Christian idealism and anti-intellectualism at the root of modernist Judeophobia. Finally, a poem called "The Labors of Hercules" describes the struggle to keep the mind open, supple, and observant, to resist the blandishments of propaganda and the flattery of false lyricism. She concludes—the phrase is a quotation, but the sentiment hers—that in the face of collective delusion,
I admire Moore's intransigent intelligence, but I like the customary graces of poetry quite a bit more than she does. These poems somehow fail to linger in my mind, except for their sententiae. But what sententiae!
_____________
[1] Writers, in general, should leave their early work well enough alone. We are all embarrassed by our juvenilia—I'm embarrassed by what I wrote last week—but once something has circulated widely enough, you should respect that it stands clear of you. I am not saying "first thought, best thought"; you should always revise! But the ardor of initial composition, in which I include the first pre-publication revision process, might possess a value in excess of distant circumspection. I think the 1855 "Song of Myself" has more odd energy than the 1881. I suspect the folio text of Hamlet to be Shakespeare's own redaction, as it tightens the plot and eliminates redundancy (a wild speculation, I grant; in my defense, it is not even close to being among the world's most crackpot Shakespeare theories); but who would want to lose the unsweet prince's soliloquy from the second quarto upon seeing Fortinbras's army ("What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed?") just because it disrupts an otherwise clean "character arc," to speak in the language of TV criticism?
[2] Any desperate student chancing upon this review: take that for your thesis! Be sure to credit Hofmann with the idea—preferably in MLA—and throw in Auden while you're at it.
Moore may have rewritten some of its contents beyond recognition and deleted some of its poems from her canon, deciding they were too difficult, when she became prominent and popular in the middle of the century.[1] Its importance as a modernist slim volume (its present editor, Linda Leavell, associates it in her introduction with "Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), Pound's early Cantos, Williams's Spring and All (1923), and Stevens's Harmonium (1923)"), however, means that Observations deserves to be read in its own right by every student of modernism.
So what do Marianne Moore's poems mean? I am still not perfectly sure. She reminds me of her contemporary, Hart Crane, in that I can read their poems over and over and remain mystified. The reasons for each poet's opacity, though, are very different, and the particular quality of Moore's difficulty gives me one way into her work. Crane is a mystic and a visionary; too high for reason, even for grammar, he seems to seek and to attain sheer glossolalia ("Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping / The impasse high with choir"), senselessness as the certification of his spiritual authenticity. Moore, by contrast, may be too reasonable. Her poems possess blinding clarity.
In a 1965 essay on Moore called "The Experience of the Eye," Hugh Kenner argues that Moore advances beyond both pre-modern allegorical poetics, for which each phenomena indicates a spiritual fact, and Romantic poetics (to which Crane is heir), for which phenomena are a pretext or an index to the poet's subjective response. Moore, Kenner says, is attempting not allegory or subjectivity but scientific objectivity: hence her profusion of unsystematic but visually vivid metaphor; hence her use of syllabic rather than accentual verse to disrupt poetry's tendency toward emotive rhetoric. Her poems are meant for the eye, not the ear, Kenner concludes, they and belong to the era of the typewriter in their impersonal grid of shaped syllables:
AllNote that within the arbitrarily syllabic poetic structure is a sinuous sentence; as Kenner observes, Moore separates poetic form from syntax.
external
marks of abuse are present on
this
defiant edifice—
all the physical features of
ac-
cident—lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns
and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm side is
dead.
Her sentences remind me ("remind one, as it were," I should say) of Henry James, alluded to at least three times in these most allusive poems. I think of Michael Hofmann's tantalizing aside, in an essay on Stevens, that "Henry James [is] the Master and onlie begetter, I am increasingly coming to think, of all the great modernist poets, of Pound and Eliot and Moore and Stevens."[2] In a poem about New York City, Moore—who appears to have been a pro-capitalist Roosevelt-hating Republican, not unlike her contemporary Willa Cather or, indeed, Stevens—nonetheless praises the city, not for its commerce, which she lushly evokes, but for its "'accessibility to experience,'" a supremely Jamesian phrase she takes from none other than James himself.
Quotation marks abound in her poetry, as she borrows language from everywhere, not only from canonical authors but also from advertisements, periodical essays, and encyclopedia entries. These are not Eliotic allusions, shards of tradition the reader is meant to reassemble in the hopes of restoring Christendom to its lost wholeness, but provocations to reflection. If James counseled the writer to be a one on whom nothing would be lost, Moore's borrowings are the somethings that will not be lost on her.
A Presbyterian, devout, with a minister brother and a pious mother, "Miss Moore"—as they used to say—praises hard work: the kind of slow, patient, tough labor required to really see what is front of you and think through what you see. (The kind of labor required to read James's prose, also.) With a satirical spirit, she writes poems in dispraise of the the "steam roller" ("You crush all the particles down / into close conformity") who destroys subtlety, and the "pedantic literalist" ("What stood / Erect in you has withered") and aristocratic ladies ("But why dissect destiny with instruments / more highly specialized than the components of destiny itself?") who abuse it. Not averse to energy or splendor, she praises Bernard Shaw, Molière, chameleons; not averse to intelligent leisure, she commends house cats and dock rats. My favorite of these poems, summing up their aesthetic values, is "Diligence is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight":
With an elephant to ride upon—“with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,"Elephants in their dense sedulousness beats the fanciful flying carpet, and beauty is best set off on the neutral ground of hard work (imagine the bells on her toes glittering and jangling against the elephant's thick, dull hide); the thesis is not only stated but enacted in the poem's dense texture of rhyme and syntax, blending poetic sound and prosaic sense. There are political implications here as well: the unglamorous elephant is a counter-Orientalist image in the otherwise kitschy Orientalist picture.
she shall outdistance calamity anywhere she goes.
Speed is not in her mind inseparable from carpets. Locomotion arose
in the shape of an elephant; she clambered up and chose
to travel laboriously. So far as magic carpets are concerned, she knows
that although the semblance of speed may attach to scarecrows
of aesthetic procedure, the substance of it is embodied in such of those
tough-grained animals as have outstripped man’s whim to suppose
them ephemera, and I have earned that fruit of their ability to endure blows
which dubs them prosaic necessities—not curios.
Other poems similarly counter stereotype or else, if they deploy it, praise what has been scorned. The poem "England" satirizes national difference; it seems to lament, in time-honored fashion, the cultural crudity of America (she famously describes our English as "plain American which cats and dogs can read!") before concluding of "the fruit and flower" of civilization that it "has never been confined to one locality." In a poem to Disraeli, she opposes Eliotic/Poundian anti-Semitism—not, to our post-essentialist ears, very sensitively, but with an important transvaluation of values, as she lauds the Victorian prime minister as a "brilliant Jew," a "subtle thing," possessed of "sound sense," implicitly deprecating the Christian idealism and anti-intellectualism at the root of modernist Judeophobia. Finally, a poem called "The Labors of Hercules" describes the struggle to keep the mind open, supple, and observant, to resist the blandishments of propaganda and the flattery of false lyricism. She concludes—the phrase is a quotation, but the sentiment hers—that in the face of collective delusion,
…one keeps on knowingI get lost in the longer poems that close the volume. The most famous is an ironic collage of quotation called "Marriage," in which the never-married Moore surveys with grim comedy the "institution, / perhaps one should say enterprise" she evaded. A satirical canvas of male entitlement and arrogance, of female vanity and complicity, the poem decays into a trading of imprecations between man and woman that is like a genteel version of the scene in the Spike Lee joint where the characters disgorge their bigotry (see here and here, but be prepared!):
"that the Negro is not brutal,
that the Jew is not greedy,
that the Oriental is not immoral,
That the German is not a Hun."
She says, "'Men are monopolistsWhat I have written above is as much as I understand of Moore for now, I think. Any critic who writes on Moore is supposed to go on and on about her animals, but these elude me; I must not be enough of a nature lover, though I also suspect, pace Kenner, that they are a good deal more allegorical, however empirically observed—emblems for the virtues the poet wishes to promote.
of stars, garters, buttons
and other shining baubles'—
unfit to be the guardians
of another person's happiness."
He says, "These mummies
must be handled carefully—
'the crumbs from a lion's meal,
a couple of shins and the bit of an ear';
turn to the letter M
and you will find
that 'a wife is a coffin,'
that severe object
with the pleasing geometry
stipulating space and not people,
refusing to be buried
and uniquely disappointing,
revengefully wrought in the attitude
of an adoring child
to a distinguished parent."
I admire Moore's intransigent intelligence, but I like the customary graces of poetry quite a bit more than she does. These poems somehow fail to linger in my mind, except for their sententiae. But what sententiae!
Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or that detracts from one’s enjoyment.Gratitude is the proper recompense for a writer who has wisdom as well as (or even, if it comes to it, in place of) passion to share. I end with her most famous phrase, from "Poetry," where she she defines the successful instances of her art as creating "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." Critics may argue if the toads are toads or if the toad is the poet, but the imagination that cultivated these poems is a rare one.
It must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the approved triumph easily be honored—
that which is great because something else is small.
It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,
it must be “lit with piercing glances into the life of things”;
it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.
("When I Buy Pictures")
The passion for setting people right is an afflictive disease;
Distaste which takes no credit to itself is best.
("Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers and the Like")
_____________
[1] Writers, in general, should leave their early work well enough alone. We are all embarrassed by our juvenilia—I'm embarrassed by what I wrote last week—but once something has circulated widely enough, you should respect that it stands clear of you. I am not saying "first thought, best thought"; you should always revise! But the ardor of initial composition, in which I include the first pre-publication revision process, might possess a value in excess of distant circumspection. I think the 1855 "Song of Myself" has more odd energy than the 1881. I suspect the folio text of Hamlet to be Shakespeare's own redaction, as it tightens the plot and eliminates redundancy (a wild speculation, I grant; in my defense, it is not even close to being among the world's most crackpot Shakespeare theories); but who would want to lose the unsweet prince's soliloquy from the second quarto upon seeing Fortinbras's army ("What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed?") just because it disrupts an otherwise clean "character arc," to speak in the language of TV criticism?
[2] Any desperate student chancing upon this review: take that for your thesis! Be sure to credit Hofmann with the idea—preferably in MLA—and throw in Auden while you're at it.
March 13, 2022
• Favorite line: “They make a nice appearance, don’t they? Happy, seeing nothing?”
• Favorite poems: When I Buy Pictures, A Grave, An Octopus, Silence
• Observations, when it’s at its best, is sexy pretty science. These are tough, but calming poems that take non-poetic subjects—like quotes from academia or amoeba cells—and pull music from them
revisiting Moore’s complete collection in the summer
• Favorite poems: When I Buy Pictures, A Grave, An Octopus, Silence
• Observations, when it’s at its best, is sexy pretty science. These are tough, but calming poems that take non-poetic subjects—like quotes from academia or amoeba cells—and pull music from them
revisiting Moore’s complete collection in the summer
August 16, 2022
Moore directs a focused intelligence at particulars, noting their complexity. She also writes of poetry as just such concentrated thought. Top tip: Octopus.
September 28, 2019
Giving this only two stars makes me feel absolutely brutal but the truth is I didn't understand a lot of these poems and the paragraph spacing really threw me off. There's some interesting stuff in here but overall it just wasn't for me.
December 21, 2020
So odd, but who could argue with poems containing the following:
"the little assumptions of the scared ego confusing the issue"
or
"blind to the right word, deaf to satire"
or
"Because one expresses oneself and entitles it wisdom, one is/
not a fool. What an idea!"
"the little assumptions of the scared ego confusing the issue"
or
"blind to the right word, deaf to satire"
or
"Because one expresses oneself and entitles it wisdom, one is/
not a fool. What an idea!"
December 8, 2021
I turn to this book whenever I want to go on a rollercoaster of imagination and wit. So delightful and singular.
April 6, 2023
about once a year a poet totally revolutionizes my conception of poetry writing; this year, it's dear marianne, & thank you
June 8, 2024
faves: an octopus, marriage
July 8, 2016
Amazingly inventive and intelligent with a genius command of the language.
July 6, 2025
Me dijeron que tenía que leer a Marianne Moore porque ella decía que sus poemas eran para ser vistos, no leídos en voz alta. Me gustó cómo exotiza lo natural, desnaturaliza la naturaleza a través del lenguaje. Quizás por eso son poemas para mirar: en la exotización de la naturaleza, en la revisión de la biología y la creación de nuevos ecosistemas hay una forma de mostrar la perversión en el lenguaje también y no creo que se quede solo en el sentido. Las formas, la letra, la disposición de los versos en la página también se ven subvertidos en la poesía de Marianne Moore.
July 8, 2019
I’d hoped to find that, although Moore hadn’t appealed to me long ago when I first began exploring poetry, this book at least would win me over. It didn’t. There are a handful of charming pieces here, but mostly the title is far too accurate—these are mostly not really poems as much as small essays in lines which sometimes rhyme. Perhaps spectacular for the right reader, but not for me.
December 1, 2018
It is so good to read this collection as it was (more or less) intended to be read, and to savor again the delectable oddities herein: Moore never fails to surprise, especially upon second, or fiftieth re-reading, and these poems abide as ever-new monuments to the imagination.
Read
July 4, 2022Although this is a fairly short collection, I read through it extremely slowly. A Modernist poet who is often grouped together with the likes of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Moore's language is beautifully precise and deliberate, and at times frustratingly opaque. The title is perfect.
December 12, 2018
Couldn't get into this. Verses like beautiful shards of stained glass but I couldn't grasp the whole image.
December 26, 2018
It might not get much better than "An Octopus." I don't even know what I mean by "it" but I still know that this is true.
July 25, 2020
marianne moore lived like, across the street from where i live on campus and i really admire her.................. she's like the only person who can write like she does and have it be GOOD
November 3, 2020
Interesting and very deep. Highly recommended!
May 6, 2023
A whole bunch of pickling periwinkles. Perhaps the tightest grasp on the English language I’ve seen.
September 3, 2024
i like contradiction too much to love her approach to precision but this was a kind wonderful mouthwash
October 20, 2024
I too, dislike it:
there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
August 29, 2025
Moore demands to be read. Few are better.
September 9, 2025
misleadingly like lace..distaste which takes no credit to itself is best
April 17, 2022
"man looking into the sea/ taking the view from those WHO HAVE AS MUCH RIGHT TO IT AS YOU HAVE TO YOURSELF" !!!!!!!!!
the back blurb of this book says "emotionally complex but stripped of all sentiment.” her tone and words just really deeply resonate. i love.
the back blurb of this book says "emotionally complex but stripped of all sentiment.” her tone and words just really deeply resonate. i love.
November 24, 2017
Absolutely essential if you are an admirer of Moore. This is the first book of poems released on her own approval to the public. Came out within the same time frame as Stevens', Eliot's and Pound's first truly modernist work. It is just as focused on blowing the last remnants of overripe romanticism with its flabby language and sentiments to smithereens.
What really differentiates it from the other modernists mentioned is there is not a trace of elitism or anxiety at the disappearing of the aristocratic voice, which I take to be the subterranean stream which pretty much feeds all romanticism, which is very evident in those first American male modernist poets.
This early volume is also Moore at her most demanding. Some of the poems are arranged for visual effect. I'd never seen that side of her before. This is definitely a work of youth, exuberance, and irreverence. Both difficult and lively.
I love Stevens, he's mischevious. So is Moore. But her poetry, at least her earlier work, contains both laser sharp precision and articulates the personality behind the work without suffocating it in self reference. Here she is on how she sees the poetic craft
".....you don't devise a rhythm, the rhythm is the person, and the sentence but a radiograph of
personality."
Without a doubt the funniest and, I would suggest, cleverest of that first generation that tried to break decisively with the past. She loved being alive. That's obvious. Arguably the most democratic, actually that first generation wasn't democratic at all, other than Williams, of the first moderns.
The last time these poems were all available in their original form, Moore was notorious for reworking early poems later in life, as well as pretty much ignoring much of her early work when she later assembled her Collected Poems in 1951, was in 1925. So, if your familiarity with her work is based on that collection, you're pretty much missing some of her early, truly innovative work. Why the original Observations disappeared is beyond me, it's fantastic.
The entire collection is also included in the recent FSG's Marianne Moore - New Collected Poems.
What really differentiates it from the other modernists mentioned is there is not a trace of elitism or anxiety at the disappearing of the aristocratic voice, which I take to be the subterranean stream which pretty much feeds all romanticism, which is very evident in those first American male modernist poets.
This early volume is also Moore at her most demanding. Some of the poems are arranged for visual effect. I'd never seen that side of her before. This is definitely a work of youth, exuberance, and irreverence. Both difficult and lively.
I love Stevens, he's mischevious. So is Moore. But her poetry, at least her earlier work, contains both laser sharp precision and articulates the personality behind the work without suffocating it in self reference. Here she is on how she sees the poetic craft
".....you don't devise a rhythm, the rhythm is the person, and the sentence but a radiograph of
personality."
Without a doubt the funniest and, I would suggest, cleverest of that first generation that tried to break decisively with the past. She loved being alive. That's obvious. Arguably the most democratic, actually that first generation wasn't democratic at all, other than Williams, of the first moderns.
The last time these poems were all available in their original form, Moore was notorious for reworking early poems later in life, as well as pretty much ignoring much of her early work when she later assembled her Collected Poems in 1951, was in 1925. So, if your familiarity with her work is based on that collection, you're pretty much missing some of her early, truly innovative work. Why the original Observations disappeared is beyond me, it's fantastic.
The entire collection is also included in the recent FSG's Marianne Moore - New Collected Poems.
October 13, 2020
The Fish
wade
through black jade
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices–
in and out, illuminating
the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,
pink
rice-grains, ink-bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.
All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice–
all the physical features of
accident–lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm-side is
dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.
Read
March 11, 2023i like some of the titles, she must have been the first i've seen to do these really long awesome titles. i like the minimal punctuation and what she is doing with space/lines. short lines, varying forms and rhymes. i like the poems about poetry & self-referencing. clever. early post-modernism. earlier early whalen. breaking up words across lines. feminist. talks about nature like a new yorker lol.
November 7, 2021
Brilliant and elegant. Moore uses a precise, grandiose, aristocratic style. I agree with the foreword that this collection places her among the high Modernists on par with Elliot’s The Wasteland and Pound’s The Cantos.
September 26, 2018
Choose your gems wisely.
Read
February 17, 2018I don’t rate or review poetry. I will say that I am not smart enough for Moore. I think “An Octopus” was my favourite.
April 30, 2017
Terrific. This was published in 1924 and seems like it'd be pushing the envelope even if it were released today.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews