Marianne Moore at 74

...As T. S. Eliot wrote in his introduction to her Selected Poems of 1935, she is "the greatest living master" of the light or inconspicuous rhyme, rhyming on an unaccented syllable or even on an article...

...WRITERS & WRITING Marianne Moore at Seventy-Four By Stanley Edgar Hyman She is the Great Lady of modern poetry, an institution as timeless and lovely as the Brooklyn Bridge near which she lives...

...Alston and Reese," or turn Ogden-Nashery, like the end of "The Arctic Ox (or Goat...

...Her art inheres where William Blake said it must, in "minute particulars," and her moral is Blake's moral, "Everything that lives is holy...

...Yet "Rosemary" is a lovely poem, "No Better Than a 'Withered Daffodil' " has much of the old economical perfection, "Sun" (almost the latest written) is magnificent, and Miss Moore effortlessly defies retirement...

...Inns are not residences...

...The final item is the interview by Hall that appeared in The Paris Review early this year...

...Miss Moore may have grown tired of "Poetry," but surely we have not...

...The poem is too long to quote here, but if its chiseled and radiant 10-line stanzas are formless, a barrel of Moore Formlessness ought to be dispatched to all the poets...

...She proposes "Hurrican Hirundo," "The Intelligent Whale," "Mongoose Civique," "Utopian Turtletop" and a hundred others—for the car eventually named "Edsel...

...In it Miss Moore is modest, referring to her "so-called poems" or "observations...

...It shows the same fine eye for detail that the poetry does...

...The Reader includes three other things worth having...

...she is even still loyal to the Edsel, explaining, "It came out the wrong year" (Perhaps it would have done better named "Utopian Turtletop...

...The later poems included are on the whole less impressive than the poems of the Collected volume...

...A Marianne Moore Reader (Viking, 301 pp., $6.95) is a sampler that puts all her skills on display, and afterwards sends us scurrying back to her other books...

...not in silence, but restraint...

...More than anything, she is Marianne Moore...

...A gem of autobiography, one says...

...The CRITICAL prose in the Reader includes four essays from Predilections, along with some later articles and reviews...

...Secrecy and guile are the only refuge of a down-trodden sex," she quotes from Carey Thomas, but here they take the form of "subtlety" and "craft...

...At least one of the late pieces, Miss Moore's excessively kind review of George Plimpton's contrived and worthless Out of My League, should not have invited preservation...

...She is inimitable, and a very great lady...

...Miss Moore's subtlety of form is unrivaled in our time...

...These translations are best where she is very free, as in "The Fox and the Crow," or La Fontaine is very Moorish, as in the moral to "The Serpent and the File," or she is preoccupied with her own music, as in the harmonies beginning "Bitch and Friend": A bitch who approached each hutch with a frown, Since a-shiver to shelter an imminent litter, Crouched perplexed till she'd coaxed from a vexed benefactor A lean-to as a loan and in it lay down...

...We see her receiving the confidential sketches, done in what she calls "toucan tones," studying them upside down, and discovering in them "a sense of fish buoyancy...

...Magnificently alive as her animals, plants, or musical compositions are, they are not really her subjects, but occasions for reflections on the human world, or parables, what she calls in a poem about Italy, "mythologica esopica...

...Almost all of the wonderful poems on esthetics are omitted, even her most famous poem, "Poetry," with its bold beginning, "I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle," and its classic formulation, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them...

...It is interesting to learn from the interview with Donald Hall, reprinted in the Reader, that Miss Moore now finds "In Distrust of Merits" too formless to call a poem, referring to it as "testimony," and explaining, "Emotion overpowered me...

...The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence...

...she is sparse and eloquent, explaining, "We did foregather a little," or remarking of Hart Crane's The Bridge, "he could have firmed it up...

...Among so many triumphs, perhaps the finest of all is "In Distrust of Merits," the most eloquent and permanent poem to come out of the Second World War...

...Self-reliant like the cat— that takes its prey to privacy, the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth— they sometimes enjoy solitude, and can be robbed of speech by speech which has delighted them...

...Miss Moore is a real critic, with a rich insight into poetry, not only the Moorish, like Cowper's "The Snail," but work worlds apart from hers, like Eliot's "Ash Wednesday...

...The later prose is sometimes, as in the 1956 "Idiosyncrasy and Technique," almost a mosaic of quotations, a commonplace book...

...Like her, I lived for many years in Brooklyn (although my Brooklyn was not as bounded by Presbyterian churches as hers seems to be), and I am a fan of the former Brooklyn Dodgers...

...Here is "Silence," that beautiful tribute to her father's tact: My father used to say, "Superior people never make long visits," have to be shown Longfellow's grave or the glass flowers at Harvard...

...She says in the preface to the Reader that she prefers end-stopped lines, but the stanza above shows how jauntily her lines can run on...

...It is a priceless encounter between the frail lady poet and the mammoth corporation, and in the war of wits the Ford Company had about as much chance as Goliath had...

...They are all exactly detailed, since, as she tells us in "Four Quartz Crystal Clocks," "The lemur-student can see/that an aye-aye is not/an angwan-tibo, potto, or loris...

...There is a lesser, but substantial, richness of botanical life in such poems as "Virginia Britannia," and a preoccupation with the art of music in such poems as "Propriety...

...From forty-five to seventy/is the best age,' she tells us in "Marriage," quoting Trollope, but surely 74 is the best age for a retrospective show—and what a show it is...

...Here too are "Ireland," with its "linnet spinetsweet," and that powerful and delicate tribute to fortitude, "Nevertheless," with its famous ending (which I will always hear in Miss Moore's brave small reading-voice): What sap went through that little thread to make the cherry red...

...I claim these ties with pride, because she confers distinction on everything she touches...

...Sometimes they go flat and prosy, like parts of "The Staff of Aesculapius," or fall into doggerel, like parts of "Hometown Piece for Messrs...

...Yet the notes show that Miss Moore created it, miraculously, out of a reminiscence by Miss A. M. Homans of her father, and the inn quotation from Edmund Burke...

...Perhaps the Pound essay, which dates, could have been omitted to make space for one or two of them...

...The apparent subjects of Miss Moore's poems are most often exotic animals: the pangolin, the plumet basilisk, the ostrich, the Indian buffalo, the frigate pelican and innumerable others...

...It is a shame that more of the essays from Predilections could not have been included, particularly those on Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden, and the delightful reminiscence of the Dial...

...Not for these the paper nautilus constructs her thin glass shell...

...She has revised one poem for the occasion, "The Steeple-Jack," with an additional stanza and a few word changes, and has I think revised it for the better...

...A real treasure in the book is her exchange of correspondence, first printed in The New Yorker, with the Ford Motor Company regarding a name for its new car...

...One is a liberal selection of about two dozen fables from Miss Moore's translation of The Fables of La Fontaine...

...Instead of those "rigorists," the Lapp reindeer, the hero is now apt to be President Eisenhower, "our/hardest-working citizen...

...Many excellent poems are omitted from the Reader, among them "No Swan So Fine," "The Past is the Present," "Novices," "Elephants," and most of the syllabic ones, including "The Jerboa...

...Some of her poems are syllabic rather than accentual, like French poetry, with stanzas in which each line has a fixed number of syllables (perfectly so in the eight stanzas of "The Fish" and the 27 stanzas of "The Jerboa," less regularly so in such poems as "Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain...

...Writers entrapped by teatime fame and by commuter's comforts...

...But all of the critical prose has Miss Moore's enchanting pawky quality (like the gnomic comment on obscurity, "One should be as clear as one's natural reticence allows one to be"), and she is sometimes gently stern, as when she whispers that Beat poetry might be better still were it not so formless and exhibitionistic...

...The first third of the Reader consists of selections from the Collected Poems, two complete later volumes of verse—Like a Bulwark and ? To Be a Dragon— and five recent poems...

...Give A Marianne Moore Reader for Christmas to all the people you respect, or love...

...Nor was he insincere in saying, "Make my house your inn...

...La Fontaine would have seemed the perfect subject for her, since they are both bestiary fabulists, but actually he is her inferior, and his prosy didacticism fetters her imagination...

...Thus "The Paper Nautilus" begins: For authorities whose hopes are shaped by mercenaries...