The #1952Club: Marianne Moore and a Blunder

This week marks the start of the #1952Club, a reading event co-hosted by Simon Thomas (Stuck in a Book) and Karen Langley (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings). The idea is simple: Pick any book published in 1952, read it, and share your thoughts – on your blog, on social media, or just in the comments. No pressure, just the pleasure of discovering or revisiting books from a specific year. You can read one book or several, dip in and out, and participate as much (or as little) as suits you.

I’d planned to start my #1952Club reading with poetry. I poked around and The Collected Poems by Marianne Moore caught my attention. I haven’t read many of her poems so here was an opportunity to catch up on a major American poet. And so I did. 

My online edition is from the library of the now defunct New College of San Francisco and comes with one of those wonderful old library lending cards. And it was there that I saw the book dated from 1951. Duh!

1952 was the year it won all the major literary prizes, Hence my mistake. 

But this hardly constitutes a crisis. I was enjoying dipping into Moore’s menagerie (she did love writing about animals) so why stop?  It’s all good.

And what a menagerie it is. And what closely observed and recorded details! She has;

snakes with hypodermic teeth,

the sand-brown jumping rat,

the fawn-breasted bower-bird,

swans with and ‘gondoliering legs, so fine’,

the hell-diver frigate-bird, 

the elephants with their fog-colored skin

  The food of a wild
mouse in some countries is wild parsnip – or sunflower –
   or
morning-glory-seed, with an occasional
grape.

I remember a swan under the willows in Oxford, with flamingo-coloured, mapleleaf-like feet. It reconnoitred like a battleship.

an obedient chameleon in fifty shades of mauve and amethyst.

This is not anthropomorphism. This is close observation and precision.

And farther up, in stag-at-bay position
as a scintillating fragment of these terrible stalagmites,
stands the goat
its eye fixed on the waterfall which never seems to fall –
an endless skein swayed by the wind,
immune to force of gravity in the perspective of the peaks.

‘the nine-striped chipmunk
running with unmammal-like agility along a log’;

And some of her animals are human:

the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse

And then there are the questions:

Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous?

What is more precise than precision? Illusion

And Moore on poetry and poets in her poem Poetry is perfect:

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
        all this fiddle.
 Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
       discovers in
 it after all, a place for the genuine.
   Hands that can grasp, eyes
   that can dilate, hair that can rise
       if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
   they are
      useful.

OK – so enough. Time to move on to 1952 and to a poet whose works were actually published that year: Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems 1934-1952.  And what a contrast with Moore! Where she is all restraint, precision, and quiet humor Thomas is all bombast and the exhilaration of emotional excess.

Onwards!