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“The complete prose of Marianne Moore” (Publication, 1986)

Year

1986

Text

Moore, Marianne. The complete prose of Marianne Moore. Ed. and with an introd. by Patricia C. Willis. (New York, N.Y. : Viking, 1986). (Moo7)

Type

Publication

Contributors (1)

Moore, Marianne  (Kirkwood, Miss. 1887-1972 New York, N.Y.) : Dichterin, Schriftstellerin
[Permission for quotations by Cynthia Stamy and Qian Zhaoming].

Subjects

Literature : Occident : United States of America : Prose / References / Sources

Chronology Entries (37)

# Year Text Linked Data
1 1924 Moore, Marianne. The Lost Flute of the Book of Franz Toussaint. In : The Dial ; no 77 (Sept. 1924). [Review].
The Lost Flute of the Book of Franz Toussaint, translated by Gertrude Joerissen (Brentano). In this collection of Chinese lyrics, early and modern, the decoratively perfect poetic properties of the East are like the titles of the poems, themselves, dazzling. The subject matter of a number of the poems seems insufficient or unworthy, but there are certain masterpieces, and since the labor of translation has been undertaken with delight, the reader deplores an ingratitude which permits him to confiscate the meaning of words with which he quarrels.
2 1925 Moore, Marianne. "Literature the noblest of the arts". In : The Dial ; no 79 (Oct. 1925). [Review of The collected essays and papers of George Saintsbury, 1875-1920.]
"The contributor who is not allowed to contribute", says Mr. Saintsbury, "is fierce as a matter of course ; but not less fierce is the contributor who thinks himself too much edited, and the contributor who imperatively insists that his article on Chinese metaphysics shall go in at once, and the contributor who, being an excellent hand at the currency, wants to be allowed to write on dancing : and, in short, as the Shepherd says, all contributors."
3 1926 Moore, Marianne. "New" poetry since 1912. In : Anthology of magazine verse for 1926. Ed. by William Stanley Braithwaite. (Boston : B.J. Brimmer, 1926).
The "new" poetry seemed to justify itself as a more robust form of Japanese poetry – that is perhaps to say, of Chinese poetry – although a specific and more lasting interest in Chinese poetry came later.
4 1926 Moore, Marianne. Roving through southern China. In : The Dial ; no. 81 (July 1926). [Review of Roving through southern China, by Harry A. Franck (Century)]. [ID D3164].
In this 'plain' account of people, of places, and of methods of travel in southern China – with many photographs – a seemingly experiences elasticity of judgment is, in matters not topical nor topographical, multifariously contradicted. The religious philosopher, the political scientist, the student of civilization would, in certain opinions diverge from this author : the 'littérateur' would not accompany him. Mr. Franck is scientific as a wanderer if not as a thinker or as a writer. His itinerary is impressive and he is, if one may have in one's feet a science which one has not in one's head, an accomplished traveler.
5 1927 Moore, Marianne. Academic feeling. In : The Dial ; no 82 (May 1927).
One cannot be dead to the sagacity inherent in some specimens of sharkskin, camellia-leaf, orange-peer, semi-eggshell, or sang-de-boeuf glaze ; nor be blind to the glamour of certain 'giant', 'massive', 'magnificent' objects in pork-fat or spinach-green jade as shown last winter in the collection of Mr. Lee Van Ching at the Anderson Galleries.
[Betr. Chinese carved jades & objects of art : a collection formed by Lee Van Ching, Shanghai : rare antiques in crystal, agate, jade, rose quartz & malachite, statuettes, snuff bottles, porcelains & enamels, old Chinese pottery, Anderson Galleries, New York, Jan. 1927.]
6 1927 Moore, Marianne. To accept congratulations. In : The Dial ; no 84 (March 1928).
We confessed to admiring instinctiveness, concentration, and tentativeness ; to realizing that gusto is not incompatible with learning, and to favoring opulence in asceticism. It is apparent also in lines by Sung Lien that such liking is not recent.
"In the dormitory I had two meals a day, but nothing fresh, fat, or of any good taste. All other schoolmates were dressed up in fine silk and with embroidery ; their hats were decorated with jewels ; their girdles made of white jade. Every one bore a sword on his left, and perfume at his right. They looks as shining and dignified as angels. While living among them I wore my cotton robe and tattered clothes, but had not the slightest desire to be like them, for I had my enjoyment focused upon something different, knowing not that my bodily wants were not as well supplied as those of others." Translated from the Chinese by Kwei Chen. Literary Magazine of the University of Wisconsin. December, 1927.
[Betr. Song, Lian. Farwell to my young friend.]
7 1928 Moore, Marianne. Guide-posts to Chinese painting. In : The Dial ; no 84 (April 1928). [Review of Guide-posts to Chinese painting, by Louise Wallace Hackney, edited by Dr. Paul Pelliot (Houghton Mifflin)]. [ID D30326].
That a delighted consideration of art should be less than delightful ; that as writing and as thinking it should be occidentally 'promt' is in this survey compensated for by illustrations such as 'Winter Landscape', 'Narcissus', a 'Ming Ancestral Portrait' ; and one is as attentive as the author could wish one to be, to the 'ideals and methods' of Chinese painting, to 'influences and beliefs reflected in it', and the influence exerted by it. Any lover of beauty may well be grateful to a book which commemorated the blade of grass as model for the study of the straight line, the skill of calligraphers, with 'hog's hair on finely woven silk', 'methods of treating mountain wrinkles', 'tones of ink to give color', 'the thought of genii, winged tigers, and Emperor crossing' 'weak waters' on a 'bridge made of turtles', 'or a theme so romantic as that of Yang Kuei-fei' [Yang Guifei] going, 'lily pale, between tall avenues of spears to die'.
8 1928 Moore, Marianne. Thomas Heriot. In : The Dial ; no 85 (Aug. 1928). [Review of The divine origin of the craft of the herbalist by Sir E.A. Wallis Budge].
Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Assyrian herbals are her shown to be the foundation of Greek herbals – disseminated also, by way of Arabic, through Asia, Turkestan, and China…
9 1931 Moore, Marianne. The cantos. In : Poetry ; no 39 (Oct. 1931). [Review of A draft of XXX cantos, by Ezra Pound].
These Cantos are the epic of the farings of a literary mind… In Canto III we have an ideograph for the Far East, consisting of two parts : Green veins in the turquoise, Or, the gray steps lead up under the cedars… Mr. Pound took two thousand and more pages to say it in prose, and he sings it in a hundred-forty-two. The book is concerned with beauty. You must read it yourself ; it has a power that is mind and is music ; it comes with the impact of centuries and with the impact of yesterday. Amid the swarming madness of excellence, there is the chirping of 'the young phoenix broods', the Chinese music, the slender bird-note that gives one no peace…
In Canto XIII, in the symbolic discussion of the art of poetics, what is said is illustrated by the manner of saying :
And Tseu-lou said, "I would put the defences in order",
And Khieu said, "If I were lord of a province
I would put it in better order than this is".
And Tchi said, "I would prefer a small mountain temple,
"With order in the observances,
with a suitable performance of the ritual"…
And Kung said, "They have all answered correctly,
"That is to say, each in his nature"…
And Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves:
If a man have not order within him He can not spread order about him; …
And if a man have not order within him ;…
"Anyone can run to excesses,
"It is easy to shoot past the mark,
It is hard to stand firm in the middle.
10 1932 Moore, Marianne. If a man die. In : Hound and horn ; no 5 (Jan.-March 1932). [Review of The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones and Preludes for Memnon,by Conrad Aiken (Charles Scribner's Sons).]
If a man die shall he live again ? and what Buddha and Confucius and Christ have said about this, and what would make morality's instinct for continuance valid and everlasting ?...
11 1933 Moore, Marianne. Emily Dickinson. In : Poetry ; no 41 (Jan. 1933). [Review of Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd (Harper & Brothers)].
An element of the Chinese taste was part of this choiceness, in its daring associations of the prismatically true ; the gamboge and pink and cochineal of the poems ; the oleander blossom tied with black rib bon ; the dandelion with scarlet ; the rowan spray with white.
12 1936 Moore, Marianne. Perspicuous opacity. In : The Nation ; no 143 (24 Oct. 1936). [Review of The Geographical History of America, or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, by Gertrude Stein, with an introduction by Thornton Wilder (Random House).]
To like reading and writing is to like words. The root meaning, as contrasted with the meaning in use, is like the triple painting on projecting lamellae, which – according as one stands in front, at the right, or at the left – shows a different picture. "In China china is not china it is an earthen ware. In China there is no need of China because in china china is china."
13 1936 Moore, Marianne. Courage, right and wrong. In : The Nation ; no 143 (5 Dec. 1936). [Review of New Directions in Prose and Poetry, edited by James Laughlin IV (New Directions).
Marsden Hartley, chivalrous and shrewd – a painter writing about painters – has in two reminiscences given us what one hopes is part of a book. He speaks of the hands of Charles Demuth, "Chinese in character", that seemed "to be living a life of their own" ; of his paintings, "harmonious, possibly to excess" but reflecting "a master of the comic insinuation".
14 1937 Moore, Marianne. Ichor of imagination. In : The Nation ; no 144 (6 Febr. 1937). [Review of The Infernal Machine, by Jean Cocteau, in the English version by Carl Wildman (Oxford University Press).
One sees it in Le Grand Ecart, in the Narcissus passage, where the river "cares nothing about the nymphs or the trees it reflects – longing only for the sea" ; and in the Sphinx's self-characterization : "A judge is not so unalterable, and insect so voracious, a bird so carnivorous, the egg so nocturnal, a Chinese executioner so ingenious…"
15 1942 Moore, Marianne. Who seeks shall find. In : The Nation ; no 155 (17 Oct. 1942). [Review of Have Come, Am Here, by José Garcia Villa (The Viking Press).
The delicacy with force of such writing reminds one of the colors of black ink from a hogs'-hair brush in the hand of a Chinese master.
16 1943 Moore, Marianne. "We will walk like the tapir". In : The Nation ; no 156 (19 June 1943).
"Be gentle and you can be bold" is an ancient Chinese saying ; "be frugal and you can be liberal ; if you are a leader, you have learned self-restraint."
17 1944 Moore, Marianne. Feeling and precision. In : Sewanee review ; no 52 (Autumn 1944).
Instinctively we employ antithesis as an aid to precision, and in Arthur Waley's translation from the Chinese one notices the many paired meanings - "left and right" ; "walking and sleeping" ; "one embroiders with silk, an inch a day ; of plain sewing one can do more than five feet."
18 1948 Moore, Marianne. High thinking in Boston. In : The Saturday review of literature ; no 31 (6 Nov. 1948). [Review of Miss Gifford's, by Kathrine Jones (Exposition Press)].
At Miss Gifford's, a boarding-house in the South End of Boston, such subjects were discussed as Chinese poetry, the title-page of a Dutch Bible, Seurat's "La Grande Jatte", Thoreau, and fear of daisies.
19 1949 Moore, Marianne. E. McKnight Kauffer. [In the American British Art Gallery's Drawing for the Ballet and the Original Illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe by E. McKnight Kauffer. New York : The Gallery, Batsford House, 1949.]
E. McKnight Kauffer is a very great artist… Shadows are as arresting as objects ; numerals and letters are so rare in themselves that opposing angles, contrasting sizes, and basic parallels, are of consummate elegance – the only kind of eloquence not intrusive. This language of blacks and grays is color in the sense that Chinese brush masterpieces are color.
20 1951 Moore, Marianne. Impact, moral and technical. In : Harvard Summer School Conference on the Defense of Poetry. (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University, 1951).
There is no room for furious virtuosity. A master axiom for all writing, I feel, is that of Confucius : "When you have done justice to the meaning, stop". That implies restraint, that discipline is essential.
21 1953 Moore, Marianne. "Teach, stir the mind, afford enjoyment". [From a series of commentaries on selected contemporary poets, Bryn Mawr, 1952 ; betr. Ezra Pound].
Mr. Pound admires Chinese codifyings and for many a year has been ordering, epitomizing, and urging explicitness, as when he listed "A Few Don'ts" for Imagists…
Confucius says the fish moves on winglike foot ; and Prior, in his life of Edmund Burke, says Burke "had a peculiarity in his gait that made him look as if he had two left legs…
"As for Cathay, it must be pointed out", T.S. Eliot says, "that Mr. Pound is the inventor of Chinese poetry of our time" ; and seeing a connection between the following incident and "the upper middlebrow press"…
In The Great Digest and Unwobbling Pivot of Confucius, as in his Analects, Ezra Pound has had a theme of major import. The Great Digest makes emphatic this lesson : He who can rule himself can govern others ; he who can govern others can rule the kingdom and families of the Empire.
The men of old disciplined themselves.
Having attained self-discipline they set their houses in order.
Having order in their own homes, they brought good government
To their own state.
When their states were well governed, the empire was brought
Into equilibrium.
We have in the Digest, content that is energetic, novel, and deep : "If there be a knife of resentment in the heart or enduring rancor, the mind will not attain precision ; under suspicion and fear it will not form sound judgment, nor will it, dazzled by love's delight nor in sorrow and anxiety, come to precision." As for money, "Ill got, ill go". When others have ability, if a man "shoves them aside, he can be called a real pest." "The archer when he misses the bullseye, turns and seeks the cause of error in himself." There must be no rationalizing. "Abandon every clandestine egoism to realize the true root." Of the golden rule, there are many variants in the Analects : "Tze-kung asked if there was a single principle that you could practice through life to the end. He said sympathy ; what you don't want, don't inflict on another" (Book Fifteen, XXIII). "Require the solid of yourself, the trifle of others" (Book Fifteen, XIV). "The proper man brings men's excellent to focus, not their evil qualities" (Book Twelve, XVI). I am not worried that others do not know me ; I am worried by my incapacity' (Book Fourteen, XXXII). Tze-chang asked Kung-tze about maturity. Kung-tze said : To be able to practice five things would humanize the whole empire – sobriety (serenitas), magnanimity, sticking by one's word, promptitude (in attention to detail), Kindliness (caritas). As for "the problem of style. Effect your meaning. Then stop" (Book Fifteen, XL).
22 1956 Moore, Marianne. Selected criticism. In : Poetry London-New York ; no 1 (March-April 1956). [Review of Selected criticism – prose, poetry, by Louise Bogan (Noonday Press)].
The book rises above literariness, moreover, and fortifies courage, in practicing a principle which is surely Confucian ; implying that one need not demand fair treatment, but rather, see that one's others is fair.
23 1956 Moore, Marianne. Of miracles and kings. In : The New York Times book review ; 11 November, 1956. [Review of The Borzoi Book of French Folk Tales, selected and edited by Paul Delarue, translated from the French by Austin E. Fife, illustrated by Warren Chappell (Alfred A. Knopf)].
M. Delarue finds tales of all countries, European, Asiatic, to be part of a common fabric : "There are very pretty versions in all European, Asiatic and North African countries, and an American Chinese scholar, Jameson, has recently made known to us a Chinese Cinderella of the ninth century who gets her golden slippers not from a fairy but from a marvelous fish and who loses one of them not in escaping from a ball but on coming back from a festival in a neighboring region…"
24 1958 Moore, Marianne. Idiosyncrasy and technique. (Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, 1958).
Laurence Binyon, reflecting on the state of letters after completing his Dante, said : "How indulgent we are to infirmity of structure…" and structural infirmity truly has, under surrealism, become a kind of horticultural verbal blight threatening firmness to the core ; a situation met long ago in The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius [by Erzra Pound]:
Enjoy the good yet sink not in excess.
True scholar stands by his steadfastness…
Lamb-skin for suavity, trimmed and ornate,
But a good soldier who will get things straight.
25 1959 Moore, Marianne. "Senhora Helena". In : Poetry ; no 94 (July 1959). [Review of The Diary of Helena Morley, translated and edited, with a preface and introduction by Elizabeth Bishop (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy).
The attitude to life revealed by the Diary, Helena's apperceptiveness, and innate accuracy, seem a double portrait ; the exactness of observation in the introduction being an extension, in manner, of Miss Bishop's verse and other writing, as when she differentiates between marbleized or painted window-frames to imitate stone, and stone ones painted to imitate grained wood ; again, in the description of rain-pipe funnels 'flaring like trumpets', or sometimes with 'tin petals or feathers down them and around the mouth… repeated in tiles set edgewise up the ridges of the roofs, dragonlike and very 'Chinese'.
26 1960 Moore, Marianne. Brooklyn from Clinton Hill. In : Vogue ; no 136 (1 August 1960).
The Bridge – a word associated with fantasy, a sense of leisure, shade under willows or at sunset, a pair of Chinese herdmen 'enjoying the breeze in a fishing-boat' – is in Brooklyn synonymous with endurance – sacrifice…
27 1961 Moore, Marianne. Foreword to A Marianne Moore reader. (New York, N.Y. : Viking Press, 1961).
As antonym, integrity was suggested to me by a blossoming peach branch – a drawing by Hsieh Ho – reproduced above a New York times Book Review notice of The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting formulated about 500 A.D. – translated and edited by Miss Mai-mai Sze, published by the Bollingen Foundation in 1956 and as a Modern Library paperback in 1959. The plum branch led me to The Tao of Painting, of which 'The Mustard Seed Garden' is a part, the (not 'a') Tao being a way of life, a 'oneness' that is tireless ; whereas egotism, synonymous with ignorance in Buddhist thinking, is tedious. And the Tao led me to the dragon in the classification of primary symbols, 'symbol of the power of heaven' – changing at will to the size of a silkworm ; or swelling to the totality of heaven and earth ; at will invisible, made personal by a friend at a party – an authority on gems, finance, painting, and music – who exclaimed obligingly, as I concluded a digression on cranes, peaches, bats, and butterflies as symbols of long life and happiness, 'O to be a dragon !' (The exclamation, lost sight of for a time, was appropriated as a title later).
Note : The dragon as lord of space makes relevant Miss Mai-mai Sze's emphasis on 'space as China's chief contribution to painting ; the essential part of the wheel being the inner space between its spokes ; the space in a room, its usefulness' in keeping with the Manual : 'a crowded ill-arranged composition is one of the Twelve Faults of Painting' ; as a man 'if he had eyes all over his body, would be a monstrosity'.
28 1962 Moore, Marianne. Worth of Rue de la Paix. In : Harper's bazaar ; no 96 (April 1962).
In this day of jets, blenders, and a page of print grasped at a glance, the perfected workmanship – inside and out – of a dress by Worth seems as unaccountable as the flawless replica – wrong side like right – of antennae, wing-spots, eyes and moth-fur, of Chinese embroidery on imperial satin : an abnormal calligraphy of the imagination-by-finger (finger in gold thimble, as one pictures it), faintly etched…
Forsaking the armorers, the gem of the collection, I would say, is a featherweight azure tissue velvet jacket matching a ball dress, edges with snow leopard down, or at a guess, owl down bronzed by guard hairs ticked like Abyssinian car fur, lined with China silk of the same blue, quilted in wide diagonals. As important as the Beardsley jacket, Mrs. Cheney's riding tunic with Chinese collar double jabot, and deep points traced in steel, has much going on…
29 1963 Moore, Marianne. E.E. Cummings, 1894-1962. In : Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters ; 2nd series, no 15 (1963).
"Art", E.E. Cummings said, "is pure personal feeling". His work says it again – the painting, writing, drawing : especially the line drawings comprising curves, wirls, and leaning ellipses, like Chinese calligraphy which does not hesitate.
30 1963 Moore, Marianne. The knife. In : House and garden ; no 123 (Febr. 1963).
In valor, there is small room for egotism. As Confucius says, "If there be a knife of resentment in the heart, the mind fails to act with precision".
31 1963 Moore, Marianne. Profit is a dead weight. In : Seventeen ; no 22 (March 1963).
The asset of assets was summed up by Confucius when asked, "Is there a single principle that you can practice through life to the end ?" He said, "Sympathy. What you don't want, don't inflict on others."…
How discuss verity with cynics – cynicism being a plant with no fruit or interesting seed ? As Confucius says, "If there be a knife of resentment in the heart, the mind fails to attain precision".
.
32 1963 Moore, Marianne. Of beasts and jewels. In : Harper's bazaar ; no 87 (Dec. 1963).
Those of us who do not spend time in bogs, near ponds, or by streams, where water plants abound and gnats, newts and spiders hatch out, may be obliged to console ourselves with frogs and toads in replica - Verdura's frog of blistered gold, with emerald and diamond blazoned back and eyes of ruby ; or an amethyst quartz Chinese 'sage and toad', or imperial embroidered bat ; and may have to forgo the excitement of seeing an owl's amber and onys eyes change with the changing light in dusky woodland ravines…
33 1964 Moore, Marianne. Malvina Hoffman. In : Texas quarterly ; no 7 (Spring 1964).
Sculpture Inside and Out is a contribution to knowledge and to living – a conspectus of tasks not slighted – maser work – primitive and later, which one hopes not to mislay. Shown in it are the animal monuments ornamenting the road to the Ming Tobs ; the Chariot of the Moon (Ankor Vat)…
Miss Hoffman's friends are a book in themselves ; her furniture also (refectory, French, and early American). Besides white and gold Napoleon 'N' china, she has a pheasant-and-butterfly dinner set of the variety with design on strange semi-dark Lowestoft Chinese apple green. Her gilded ivory painted French sofa is covered with old Persian brocade, woven in a bird-and-flower-cluster design on green. Among her costume rarities, a square black corded cap from Tibet of 'permanent' satin should be studies – in the hand ; and her Tibetan wildcat fur coverlet – deep reddish fur, light as thistledown on a turquoise satin back.
34 1964 Moore, Marianne. Ten answers : letters from an October afternoon. In : Harper's, no 229 (Nov. 1964).
Dear Mr. Plimpton ; The questions.
Q. What other pets than Elson Howard (your alligator) have you =? Was there a crow there ? Haven't I read that you have a crow ?
A. … Other animals ? I have a mechanical elephant with plush skin, named Seneca, given me by Loren MacIver and Lloyd Frankenberg. I have a bronze elephant and mahout (Chinese and old) and a bronze baby pheasant (Chinese) with its head turned back the opposite way from the way it is sitting, also old ; a ceramic elephant made by Malvina Hoffmann ; have an ebony elephant from Ceylon ; ebony llama and lambs-wool Llama – ears tied with scarlet silk to designate ownership ; black clay Zni turtle ; Chinese brass lizard…
35 1965 Moore, Marianne. Dress and kindred subjects. In : Women's wear daily ; 17 Febr., 1965.
The military cape is the most graceful wrap we have – with Chinese straight-up collar…
Have a Dresden leopard with green eyes standing on oval green grass ; a mahout on an Indian brass elephant ; a Chinese gilt-brass baby pheasant with head turning to look back…
A porcupine-quill birchbark round basket with quills woven into a square on the lid ; a baby adderskin sewn by Alyse Gregory on a strip of lemond and silver Chinese brocade…
Do not relive desperate experiences or anticipate others. Observe this rule and half one's troubles will vanish. Much wisdom is epitomized by Confucius. Tze-Kung – asked if there is a single principle that you could practice through life to the end – said, 'Sympathy' – analogous to our "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you". Confucius said, "If there be a knife of resentment in the heart, the mind fails to act with precision".
36 1967 Moore, Marianne. Foreword. In : Prospect Park handbook, by Clay Lancaster. New York : Walton H. Rawls, 1967.
Mr. Lancaster is a selective writer ; his pages are art. I envy this book. The Chinese concept of nature for man to 'enjoy' captivates me like Mr. Lancaster's exact, careful but unstilted writing.
37 1968 Moore, Marianne. Introduction. In : Central Park country : a tune within us, edited by David Brower, text by Mireille Johnston. San Francisco : Sierra Club, 1968.
Entering the park at 72nd Street, one pauses to admire the ancient, small-leafed Chinese elm, one of the original planting, the largest Chinese elm in America.

Cited by (1)

# Year Bibliographical Data Type / Abbreviation Linked Data
1 Zentralbibliothek Zürich Organisation / ZB