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it a theme, a binding immanent significance? It has, I think. The
theme, never made vulgarly explicit, is a set of persuasions toward an
agonizingly alert exactness of response to the "minute particulars," the
surprising details, of the world. This exactness, like an acid bath, dis–
solves away the stale encrustations of custom (Miss Moore, for instance,
will make me
look at
a sycamore tree the next time I come across one).
It enables the adult, in his confusingly multifarious world, to preserve
or regain an innocent eye.
It
is an exactness that picks out examples- of
excellence; and attention to the excellence of parts of experience pre–
vents one from brooding, unprofitably, on what might be the nature
of experience as a whole. There is something religious in the attitude.
Examples of excellence bear witness to something, and what seems not
excellent, or capable of excellence, may be what has been mishandled
or misapprehended by us. William James might have called all this a
mystique
of pluralism. That, anyway, is what I think Miss Moore's
~iting
is "about": that is the "human interest" of her apparently bril–
liantly inhuman poetry. Bittiness and scattiness become the expression
of an almost fanatic scrupulosity.
For the roots of that scrupulosity one could not do better, perhaps,
than turn to John Berryman's ambitious attempt to bring alive again
a fine woman poet of early New England,
Homage to Mistress Brad–
street.
He brings out the strength, the stimulus, the uncongeniality of
that harsh Puritan springtime, of which Mrs. Bradstreet was the fine
flower. She might, he knows, have flowered more exuberantly in another
setting. A note is significant: "Sylvester (the translator of Du Bartas)
and Quarles, her favorite poets; unfortunately." He gets the strange
unhomeliness of the scene for the woman and the deep jarringness of
a jabbering, sermonizing, wrangling male religion:
Our chopping scores my ears,
our costume bores my eyes,
St George to the good sword, rise! chop-logic's rife
&
fever
&
Satan
&
Satan's ancient fere .
..
Forswearing it otherwise, they starch their minds.
Folkmoots,
&
blether, blether.
He displays, and makes actual to us, that sexual tenderness which in a
Puritan woman is all the more touching because there is nothing in
her background to give it any moral support:
