Morals, Manners, and "Marriage": Marianne Moore's Art of Conversation

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1999 by Heather Cass White

When I Buy Pictures

or what is closer to the truth,

when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the imaginary possessor,

I fix upon what would give me pleasure in my average moments:

the satire upon curiosity in which no more is discernible than the intensity of the mood;

or quite the opposite--the old thing, the medieval decorated hat-box,

in which there are hounds with waists diminishing like the waist of the hour-glass,

and deer and birds and seated people;

it may be no more than a square of parquetry; the literal biography perhaps,

in letters standing well apart on a parchment-like expanse;

an artichoke in six varieties of blue; the snipe-legged hieroglyphic in three parts;

the silver fence protecting Adam's grave, or Michael taking Adam by the wrist...

The casual tone of this poem comes from several places: the immediate modification of the phrase which is also its tide, as though the speaker were speaking without much planning, making necessary corrections as she goes; the focus on the personal experience of the "I" who speaks, including the admission that she is guided by her "average moments"; and the eclecticism of her examples, as though she were looking around a room at her accumulations and mentioning each as she sees it. As a model of a lady speaking casually about her preferences in art it differs considerably from Eliot's depiction. In the first place, this poem is structured around a particular list. If the speaker is casual she is also informed, and ready to be precise about her responses: the diminishing waists of the hounds and the six (she has counted) varieties of blue are what please her. Unlike the women in "Prufrock," this conversationalist has a varied and exact idea of what she responds to in art and has examples at hand to discuss thos e responses. Unlike the woman in "Conversation Galante," this conversationalist needs no gallantry to compensate for her talk; she is not flirting but discussing art.

Thus, when Moore describes her poetry as conversational, she is assuming, in the face of stereotypes to the contrary, a certain level of conversation, in which the talk is in some ways informal but nonetheless pointed, precise, and informed. These were qualities she looked for in other poets, qualities she sought at the level of their phrasing; recurrent throughout her reviews of poetry is the question of how poems sound. Vachel Lindsay, for example, comes in for criticism because Moore finds it difficult to enunciate some of his word combinations (Complete Prose 282). When she is displeased with Conrad Aiken's poetry, it is because "one is not always sure whether the note is that of singing or speaking" (282). In contrast, some of her highest praise goes to poets who write in ways that make her think of the spoken word. For example, she says of H.D. that her aesthetic "values simultaneously ivory and the chiseled ivory of speech" (81) and of Hardy that his phrases "stay in the mind like the timbre of heard speech" (195). In describing the special "virtuosity or prodigiousness of diction" of certain writers she admires, she says it comes from "a kind of effortless compactness,. . suggesting conversation and strengthened by etymology" (165) [6]