as Pound, but while Pound and tonsome extent Eliot were attempting tonset their own work within a context of anliterary tradition that included Vergil,nOvid, Propertius, and Dante, Elizabethanndrama and Provencal song,nMoore draws from any book or magazinenarticle she happens to have comenacross in the library. What is evennmore exasperating is her inclusion ofnfamily in-jokes and nicknames. Itnsometimes seems as if she were writingnfor an audience that included hernmother and brother and, at most, a fewnclose friends, although even her brotherncomplained that her work lackednfocus.nIt is not that Moore’s work is notnworth the effort it takes to plownthrough it. She has her own dissonantncharm, a sense of irony about herself andnall she holds dear, an oddly strikingnway of juxtaposing bits in what couldnbe called the structural equivalent ofnthe callida juncture. Her most impressivenlonger pieces, e.g., “The Pangolin,”n” Virginia Britannica,” “Spenser’snIreland,” and “In Distrust of Merits,”nare full of fresh observations andna humane concern with the implicationsnof nadonal history. What is most oftennmissing is any sense of passion, any delightnin the ordinary music of whichnEnglish verse is capable.nMoore’s career might be taken as anparadigm of the modernistnmovement. Like Eliot, Pound, and Stevens,nshe was socially and politicallynreactionary, although closer in spirit tonStevens’ big-business Republicanismnthan to Eliot’s and Pound’s visions ofnclerical fascism. Her earlier poems arenwritten in more or less conventionalnforms, whose eccentricities are more antribute to Emily Dickinson than to anpioneering spirit. She eventually settlednupon a sort of irregular ode, shotnthrough with internal rhymes andnbroke-backed rhythms as her customarynform. Hers is a bookish poetry, morenbookish even than Pound’s, and Moorenspent hours of preparation in librariesnbefore actually composing a majornpiece.nAlthough she numbered Eliot,nPound, Cummings, Stevens, and GlenwaynWestcott among her admirers,nMoore was never able to attract anythingnlike a wide readership. In the 50’snand 60’s, however, and after her bestnwork was done, she was graduallynturned into a publicity icon: the dottynold poetess in the tricorne hat whonloved the Dodgers. Even after she hadnmoved (in 1965) from the nightmarenthat Brooklyn had become, she wouldnbe invariably described as a Brooklynite.nIt was a small part of 50’s ideology ofnanticommunist good times, the greatnpublic lies on which we were refoundingnthe postwar nation.nEariier in her career Moore had beennquick to see through the literary politicsnof Alfred Kreymborg and ArchibaldnMacLeish (who offered to make hernpoetry consultant at the Library ofnCongress, as she thought, in order toningratiate himself with Pound andnEliot). As she evolved from poet intoncelebrity, she allowed herself to be usednby George Plimpton, who wanted tontake her to ball games and prize fightsnand then write up the event for Harper’s,nor Truman Capote, who invitednher to his famous “black-and-whitenparty” — a rich white-trash occasionnthat confirmed the status of Americannliterature as a branch of interior design:nwe now order writers in 12 runningnfeet of leatherbound editions or arrangednas part of a nicely contrastingnpair of Marianne Moore and the Fiatnheiress (the actual seaHng at Capote’snparty).nNearly all of the ironies are lost onnMoore’s biographer, who cannot men-nHon Pound without bringing up hisnanti-Semitism, who thinks chauvinismnper se has something to do with malenarrogance, and who wastes page afternpage speculating over the lives andnthoughts of Moore’s college friends butncannot bring himself to quote a singleninstance of the poet’s growing politicalnconservatism. Professor Molesworthndoes, however, do a competent job ofntracing the themes in Moore’s poetrynand of excavating the layers of personalnand historical allusion. The result is ancommentary masquerading as a biography.nBut even as a commentary, MariannenMoore: A Literary Life fails tonelucidate the essential qualities of hernwork as successfully as a few sentencesnof Robert Bly, who describes her poetrynas “a treasure-house: a femininenone.nThe objects in the poem arenfragments, annexed, and thennnpoem is a parior full ofnknicknacks carefully arranged.nMelville leaves such a room andngoes to sea: there he sees whalesnmoving about in the sea theirnwhole lives, winds thrashingnfreely, primitive forces that actnout their own inward strength.nReturning to land he becomes anrevolutionary because in societynhe sees such elementary forcesncurtailed. . . . The purpose ofnMarianne Moore’s art is exactlynopposite: it is to reconcile us tonliving with hampered forces.nShe brings in animals and fish,nbut only fragments ofnthem. . . . Everything isn’ reduced in size, reduced tonhuman dimensions, as in oldnNew England parlors, wherenthere was a “shark’s backbonenmade into a walking stick.”nHere in a nutshell is what is right andnwrong with Moore, here is also annexplanation that relates her politicalnconservatism to her modernist technique,nand here is a concise metaphornfor what Robert Bly thinks is wrongnwith American poetry. It is too cautious,ntoo domesticated, too taken up withnthings rather than with the interior life.nWhile Spanish and Italian modernistsnhave been exploring the private world ofnconscious experience, Americans likenMoore, William Carlos Williams, andntheir disciples have been insistent uponndetailing the surfaces of things.nEven where such poetry is successful,nBly argues, it should breed a counterrevolution.nIt hasn’t because poetry isnnow an academic machine that cranksnout young disciples as so many replicasnof their masters. The M.F.A. programsncan teach the students certain tricks ofnthe modernist and postmodernist trade;nthey cannot serve as a substitute fornexperience or passion, as Bly tellsnWayne Dodd in an interview. “Whatnhas taken place is the domestication ofnpoetry,” and while otters or minks “willnreproduce better in captivity,” their offspringnwill grow up without knowingnanything of the real world in which theirnkind is meant to survive. “That’s onenmetaphor to explain the amazing tamenessnof the sixty to eighty volumes ofnpoetry published each year, comparednwith the compacted energy of a book bynRobinson Jeffers that appeared the samenFEBRUARY 1991/23n