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Modern American literature began with a statement of enthusiasm from Emerson's writing in Nature. 'Enthusiasm', in Emerson, is a knowing word. Sometimes its use is as description, invariably approving, of a historic form of religious experience. Socrates' meaning of enthusiasm, and the image of the enthusiast it throws up, is crucial to this book. The book is a portrait of the writer as an enthusiast, where the portrait, as will become clear, carries more than a hint of polemic. It is about the transmission of literature, showing various writers taking responsibility for that transmission, whether within in their writing or in their cultural activism. Henry David Thoreau's Walden is an enthusiastic book. It is where enthusiasm works both in Immanuel Kant's sense of the unbridled self, and in William Penn's sense of the 'nearer' testament, and in Thoreau's own sense of supernatural serenity. Establishing Ezra Pound's enthusiasm is a fraught and complicated business. Marianne Moore composed poems patiently, sometimes over several years. She is a poet of things, as isolated things - jewels, curios, familiar and exotic animals, common and rare species of plant - are often the ostensible subjects of her poems. Homage to Frank O'Hara is a necessary book, because the sum of his aesthetic was to be found not just in his writing, but also in his actions to which only friends and contemporaries could testify. An enthusiastic reading of James Schuyler brings to the fore pleasure, the sheer pleasure that can come of combining, or mouthing, or transcribing.
4 Presenting: Marianne Moore There was no frenzy about Marianne Moore. She composed not in fits and bursts, but patiently, sometimes over several years. She steadfastly refused to envisage herself as inspired. Her writing doesn’t flirt with gibberish. Her principal mode of production was accumulation. In her various notebooks – of quotations and conversations – she amassed the materials that would sometimes, eventually, constitute the fabric of her poems. One readily available way to view her, therefore, is as a collector, an antiquarian, rooting among the
been made and, ultimately, about the making of poetry into prose. In The Hatred of Poetry, the poet recommends working with the feeling many have that, like Timms, they ‘don’t get poetry in general or my poetry in particular and/or believe that poetry is dead’.22 He says that many poets dislike poetry too; he quotes Marianne Moore’s ‘Poetry’ (the 1967 version, he says, in its entirety) for she was another who hated it well. She doesn’t say why she hates it, only that reading it with the contempt it deserves, it is possible, grudgingly, to find something genuine – her
progeny of the Easter Rising signals a rebirth of poetic expression, beyond the violence and change that political events have engendered, that brings the dual modes of enchantment and disenchantment to the fore. This chapter will assess the extent of enchantment and disenchantment with Ireland in political poems by Americans Lola Ridge and Marianne Moore during a troubled period of history. And, in using ‘Easter 1916’ as a model, it will also ask to what extent a poet, even when writing a political poem, is always writing for herself. Responses to the Easter Rising
. Generally speaking, in fact, ‘enthusiasm’ features little in high Modernist writing, though Marianne Moore presents an exception. This is no surprise. Modernism, as directed by Pound, involved rebranding art as an anti-Romantic, aristocratic activity. Enthusiasm, from this point of view, was a Romantic idea, rehabilitated but also, as Jon Mee argues, regulated in the face of eighteenth-century political suspicions, suspicions recently rearticulated for Modernism by Nietzsche. ‘In an even more decisive and profound sense,’ Nietzsche asserts in On the Genealogy of Morality
writer and a European, as an individualist and a cultural nationalist. Such readings are pertinent to Yeats, as a poet of multiple identities who (as Diggory puts it) ‘created his nationality out of himself ’.9 Taking into account some of these multiple identities, this chapter takes as its focus poets and critics who engaged directly with Yeats as man and poet. It considers, through Marianne Moore, the 1910s to early 1930s when his star was in the ascendant in America; through John Berryman and Louise Bogan, the mid to late 1930s when Yeats and others were
dominate – literary enthusiasm stands for the ceaseless and unfettered circulation of works and their insights. It is, isn’t it, the most natural thing in the world, when you have read a great work of literature, to want to pass it on; the reading is barely complete before that recirculation has happened. This is what each of the writers in this book believed, each building that insight into their writing practice. As Marianne Moore said, ‘If you are charmed by an author, I think it’s a very strange and invalid imagination that doesn’t long to share it. Somebody else
singular impotence’ of the ‘creative spirit’ of American writing, and expressed his concern for ‘the chronic state of our literature’.4 Likewise, two of the writers discussed in this book, John Steinbeck and Marianne Moore, questioned the dissatisfaction that they identified at the core of American culture. As mentioned in the Preface, in an editorial ‘Comment’ in The Dial in March 1928, Moore described the ‘restiveness’ of the American spirit as akin to a disease that had to be cured;5 similarly, in an essay, ‘Paradox and dream’, in his America and Americans collection
Edmund Wilson Fitzgerald, he declared his desire to ‘prove myself a Celt’, and signed off another ‘Gaelically yours’.17 Marianne Moore was similarly disingenuous in her attitude towards her apparently ‘purely Celtic’ background. While Moore’s family inheritance was not ‘purely Celtic’ – being derived from an English/Anglo-Irish/Scots-Irish, Dublin/ Ulster background – in her poem ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ (1941) she uses an imagined conversation to remark sarcastically upon a dismissal of a potential suitor on grounds of race: ‘Although your suitor be perfection, one
Chapter 3 Rural Ireland, mythmaking and transatlantic translation a place as kind as it is green the greenest place I’ve never seen.1 In her poem ‘Spenser’s Ireland’, Marianne Moore asserts (with some self-mockery) a practice that was becoming ever more common within the work of her contemporaries – an idealisation of the Irish landscape from afar, despite an awareness of this act. Fintan O’Toole theorises that the ‘invention of modern Ireland was driven by the Romantic search for a culture organically rooted in an authentic landscape. What was to be read in