Perhaps the most recognized images of Marianne Moore (1887–1972) are as poetry’s elder statesman in a tricorn hat, appearing with Joe Louis on the cover of Esquire magazine or lobbing out the first ball at a Yankees series opener. Such unlikely photo-ops capture the later celebrity enjoyed by the poet, but little of her renowned decorum and restraint (though idiosyncrasy had long been a hallmark of her poems). Currently on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “As They Were: 1900–1929” are two portraits of Moore done by artists of the poet’s acquaintance from New York art circles in the early 1920s. The likenesses, an ostrich-necked bust of Miss Moore by French-American sculptor Gaston Lachaise and a pencil sketch by William Zorach of a braid-bedecked Marianne decorously posed, give us the poet in her youth. That Moore represents only one of several poets and writers pictured in the Met’s exhibition—Charles Demuth’s tribute to William Carlos Williams, The Figure Five in Gold, and Jo Davidson’s famous bronze of Gertrude Stein in a sumolike squat are also included—suggests a kinship between writers and artists of the period that is at the heart of Linda Leavell’s new study, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts.

According to Professor Leavell, Moore modeled for Lachaise and for Zorach and his wife, Marguerite, in early 1925, the year after Observations, the first U.S. edition of her poems, appeared. The book received The Dial award, and in a matter of months its author was given first acting, then full editorship of The Dial, a job Moore held until the magazine closed doors in 1929. Under Scofield Thayer and James Sibly Watson, The Dial had long featured contemporary artwork in its pages, and though Moore’s initial responsibilities did not include art, in time, with Thayer’s declining health, Moore assumed a role in the selection of pictures. While Moore preferred representation to abstraction, she displayed a resistance to nudes, a reserve that extended to literature in the case of James Joyce, whose excerpt from “Anna Livia Plurabelle” she rejected when Joyce refused to excise the bawdy bits. Among the artists whose works in The Dial provided “intensives on the text” were Lachaise, the Zorachs, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and Arthur Dove (as well as the Europeans de Chirico, Picasso, Cocteau, Seurat, and Brancusi). As Professor Leavell points out in the useful biographical passages of her book, The Dial years were by no means Moore’s introduction to the New York art scene, but rather the culmination of a familiarity with the artists and works of American modernism that began with what Moore called her “sojourn in the whale,” the trip she made to Manhattan from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, ten years earlier.

Born in a suburb of St. Louis, that most fertile of breeding grounds for modernist poets, Moore didn’t know her father, whose nervous breakdown wound him back in his parental home, never to see his family again. Throughout her life, Moore kept house with her mother, an arrangement that lasted until the elder Moore’s death in 1947. In 1894, Moore moved from Missouri with her mother and older brother, John, to Carlisle; Bryn Mawr College in 1905; back to Carlisle for a year of business courses; a summer abroad; then a stint of teaching at a United States Indian School. In college she wrote poetry of some note and was classmates with Hilda Doolittle. Moore’s first publication came in 1915 in The Egoist, edited by Richard Aldington, who was by then married to H.D.

It was in that year that Moore traveled to New York at the invitation of Arthur Kreymborg, editor of Others, the magazine that championed Moore’s groundbreaking poems along with those of Stevens and Williams. Outfitted in a new striped coat, a gift from her mother, and carrying a map of the city, she began her trip with a visit to Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, 291, later writing to her brother with characteristically guarded amazement that:

Mr. Stieglitz was exceedingly unemotional, and friendly and finally after telling me how he was hated, said I might come back and look at some of the things standing with their faces to the wall in the back room. I enjoyed them. He has a magnificent little thing of the sea in dark blue and some paintings of mountains by a man named Hartley, also some Picabias and Picassos and so on. He told me to come back and he would show me some other things.

With Kreymborg, she visited the sculptor and poet Adolph Wolf. Then there were the galleries: shows of Van Gogh and the Zorachs. And introductions: Moore met Alanson Hartpence of the Daniel Gallery who showed her works by Man Ray and Prendergrast. But it was with the “straight photography” of Stieglitz and Edward Steichen that she became smitten, declaring them “the most beautiful things Rat ever saw.” (The Moores at the time had taken to calling each other by names borrowed from The Wind in the Willows; thus “Rat,” the scribbler of verses. Other familial monikers, “Fish,” “Basilisk,” and “Pangolin,” later appeared as poem titles.) Through her Others connections, Moore began a long-standing, loose affiliation with the artists of the Stieglitz circle, which, with Walter Arensberg’s coterie of Dadaists, was at the heart of the post-Armory Show New York art world. It is Leavell’s contention that Moore’s particular brand of poem takes its cues less from, say, the French Symbolists or from Pound (as Pound himself suggested), than from the challenges posed by painters and sculptors of the day. Modernism, as conceived by Leavell and the critics she cites, comprises an interdisciplinary movement cutting broadly across the whole of the arts.

Leavell, while noting the apparent imprecision of such indiciplinary comparison, quotes Wendy Steiner’s The Colors of Rhetoric (Chicago, 1982) as a work that helped to “clarify [her] thinking”: “The interartistic comparison inevitably reveals the aesthetic norms of the period during which the question is asked.” This is clarity? Yet to employ the language of one art form to describe another is, for the most part, to speak in tropes. One can refer to the architecture of a stanza, but faulty prosody and clumsy line-breaks have never caused a building to collapse. The claims for a Cubist aesthetic in literature may suggest a disruption of traditional syntax, but any direct corollary between syntax and the interplay of colors and forms on a canvas is, beyond the metaphorical, tenuous at best. This is not to say that such comparisons are without utility, only that they can take us just so far. Leavell, in considering Moore’s rhymed syllabic stanzas, suggests certain technical similarities to Cubism and collage, while carefully observing the line which ultimately divides them from poetry. Such correspondences, however, sit more comfortably within the purview of the poet than the critic.

Leavell at her most convincing is quite good indeed, which is to say that certain corollaries are more useful than others. The term collage—Leavell prefers the more general assemblage—works well to describe a certain aspect of the way Moore makes poems, i.e., her collecting of quotations appropriated from far-flung, eclectic sources.

“Picking periwinkles from the cracks”
or killing prey with the concentric crushing
rigor of the python,
it hovers forward “spider fashion
on its arms” misleadingly like lace;
its “ghostly pallor changing
to the green metallic tinge of an
anemone-starred pool.”
The fir-trees, in “the magnitude of their root
systems,”
rise aloof from these maneuvers “creepy to
behold,”
austere specimens of our American royal
families,
“each like the shadow of the one beside it.”

This passage from “An Octopus,” likening the ice-fingers of the glacier atop Mount Rainier to an cephalopod’s tentacles, quotes six times in ten lines from sources as diverse as Ruskin and the Illustrated London News. As Moore stated with regard to the assemblages of Joseph Cornell, the artist’s “sense of design” and “consistent rigor of selection, constitutes, it seems to me, a phase of poetry.” Snippets of newspaper, seemingly ubiquitous in visual collage, provided Moore with endless material, and to similar effect. Whereas the found materials of collage—despite their contribution to the overall composition--remain essentially newsprint or wood, the found phrases in Moore’s poetry never completely lose their ties to sources outside the poem. Moore’s use of quotation, as Leavell notes, is not that of Eliot or Pound, who by and large employ fragments from works well-known to the general reader. Moore’s fragments from the media and obscure scientific studies, each meticulously cited in her copious notes to the poems, perform a satire on allusion—rather than enlarge the scope of her poems with outside resonances, the lifted passages serve mostly to underscore Moore’s quirky reading habits. Occasionally, the quotations are invented, or, in the case of certain dramatic monologues Moore wrote while at Bryn Mawr, attributed to fictional characters. “Selecting is a humbler art than making,” Leavell tells us, an apposite method for this most modest of poets.

But what are we to make of what Leavell describes as the Cubist “spatial” qualities of Moore’s syntax as it relates to the poem’s presentation on the page?

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 …

These stanzas exemplify the willed tension in Moore between the movement of her sentences and the strictures of the nonce stanzas into which she pours them. By traditional standards of form, some of Moore’s choices make for a jarring read: whole lines held by the semantically weak an or the; enjambment after a hyphen; the title as first line hovering in block caps. That these beautifully wrought, fairly conventional sentences fidget in their ill-fitting clothes, however, is one of the greatest pleasures of the poem. Yet do a mismatched syntax and stanza form go toward the creation of a “spatial” element in poetry—an attention to the poem’s surface confluent with the Cubists’ attention to the surface of a canvas? Of Moore’s attention to the pattern that a poem cuts on the page there can be little doubt, but by her own admission the poem’s visual shape is of secondary importance; that Moore later revised a number of her stanzaic poems into free verse for better flow bears this out.

Another prominent “ism” weighed with Moore’s poetry is the Precisionism of Georgia O’Keeffe and Charles Sheeler. Leavell quickly admits that the term itself, one central to a large portion of her book, is a dubious one; a critical tool wielded after the fact, “Precisionism” describes a group of artists who never identified themselves with each other. Moore, for her part, does use the word precisionists in the poem “Bowls,” but with reference, Leavell admits, to writers not painters. While Moore may have known certain of these artists personally, tracing any direct allegiance with them or to the aesthetic “challenges” they address in their art work ends only in frustration.

Leavell then eschews “precisionism” in favor of “functionalism,” which she claims “more accurately describes the aesthetic Moore shared with visual artists such as Sheeler, Demuth, O’Keeffe, and Strand . . . for all were interested in the aesthetic relationship between form and function in both nature and technology,” later adding that the technology bit was of less interest to the poet. Moore was clearly fascinated by the way things work, in technical manuals and science journals, and in the built-in, anatomical devices animals use for defense; as Elizabeth Bishop put it:

Marianne was intensely interested in the techniques of things—how camellias are grown; how the quartz prisms work in crystal clocks; how the pangolin can close up its ear, nose and eye apertures and walk on the outside edges of its hands “and save the claws/ for digging”; how to drive a car; how the best pitchers throw a baseball; how to make a figurehead for her nephew’s sailboat.

The juxtaposition of Moore’s poems with Paul Strand’s photographs of gears or O’Keeffe’s skyscrapers, however, only serves to muddy Moore’s peculiar vision, a vision often incorporating no little amount of fancy. As Moore’s delightful “Ford Correspondence”—an exchange of letters between the poet and the car company which later ran in The New Yorker—suggests, her response to actual machines, in this case a new model of automobile for which Moore was to devise the name, was less functionalist than whimsical. Having requested sketches of the car and using the already-existing Thunderbird as her model, Moore delivered a spate of names the likes of which Madison Avenue has never seen: there was The Ford Fabergé, The Intelligent Whale, The Resilient Bullet; then came Mongoose Civique, Aeroterre, Pastelogram; and, lastly, Turcotingo and Utopian Turtletop. The company responded with a Christmas greeting addressed to “our favorite Turtletopper,” but never went for any of her inventions, choosing instead a name utterly devoid of “gusto,” that prized Moorean quality—in the end, the car was blandly christened Edsel.

Finally, Leavell’s likening of Moore’s artistic concerns to those of visual artists, such as the Cubists and Precisionists, works best as an extension of biography, where the timeline of contemporary visual art is superimposed over that of Moore’s early career—the book focuses on the years up to 1929. It is of interest to discover what Moore made of the art of her friends and contemporaries. One can note, as Leavell does, the suggestions in Moore’s essays and her “Comment” pieces in The Dial of not only an appreciation of the visual arts but actual fellow feeling. As a placement of Moore’s poetry within a relevant and thoroughly researched historical context, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts provides a lively codicil to Charles Molesworth’s definitive Marianne Moore: A Literary Life (Atheneum, 1990). The keys to the panoply of riches that her poetry has to offer, however, are better discovered in Donald Hall’s Marianne Moore: The Cage and the Animal (Pegasus, 1970), as well as the sterling collection of critical essays from Prentice-Hall (1969) edited by Charles Tomlinson, studies which are—in A. R. Gordon’s phrase quoted by Moore in “When I Buy Pictures”—“lit with piercing glances into the life of things.”