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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1999 by Heather Cass White

The essay "Feeling and Precision" comments on the issue in a wellknown passage:

One of New York's more painstaking magazines asked me, at the suggestion of a contributor, to analyze my sentence structure, and my instinctive reply might have seemed dictatorial: you don't devise a rhythm, the rhythm is the person, and the sentence but a radiograph of personality. The following principles, however, are alds to composition by which I try, myself, to be guided: if a long sentence with dependent clauses seems obscure, one can break it into shorter units by imagining what phrases it would fall into as conversation; in the second place, expanded explanation tends to spoil the lion's leapuan awkwardness which is surely brought home to one in conversation; and in the third place, we must be as clear as our natural reticence allows us to be. (396)

The role of conversation in these principles is varied, standing as an example both of technique and of tact. Paraphrased, the three principles might be that well-composed sentences must have conversation's intelligibility, agility, and sense of propriety Moore's description of the corrective value of conversation in written composition suggests also that conversation may be presumed to have all of those qualities, that it is a medium in which matters of form and taste act instinctively (like the lion leaping) and reliably (as awkwardness is "surely" brought home in it). These are high standards for conversation, but they make sense if conversation is the public face of "rhythm [which] is the person, and the sentence [which is] a radiograph of personality." The conception of the sentence as an X ray indicates the intimate links Moore sees between style and person, a connection she makes explicit more than once.

When Moore writes of the "unequivocal accents which are responsible for" an author's "distinct tone of voice" (32), and when she says flatly, "you don't devise a rhythm, the rhythm is the person," she means by "rhythm" qualities different from those that can be caught on tape. To understand a poet's rhythm, in Moore's scheme, is to understand a great deal about how she thinks, about the sources as well as the habits of her expression. In this way it resembles an intricate slang, if slang is understood as a conversational idiom that grows increasingly intelligible as one becomes more familiar with the community where it is in use. Apropos of slang Moore says regretfully, "it is true that in America we sometimes lack altitude and as masters of slang, we do, as we are often told, excel" (165). However, the insider's knowledge on which slang depends allows the poet certain freedoms. For example, Moore describes the conversational intimacy between her and her mother with reference to the slangy word rump:

Ordinarily, I would never use the word rump. But I can perfectly well say to Mother, "Mother, there's a thread on your rump," because she knows that I'm referring to Cowper's pet hare, "Old Tiney," who liked to play on the carpet and "swing his rump around!" (qtd. in Bishop 130)