398
PARTISAN REVIEW
phase of admiration, as also (sometimes) of love. Marianne
Moore had not yet appeared in book form in this country; and I
hadn't seen her attractive, small, Egoist Press publication, paper–
bound, which had come out in London that year. But in the
Harper Library at the University of Chicago and at the office of
Poetry
magazine, whose office boy I had been for a few months, I
had copied out all of her poems that I could find in magazines.
Prior
to
meeting the three MacDowell Colony poets, I had made
acquaintance with the Middle Westerners: Vachel Lindsay,
Sandburg, Masters, rather great men-but what simple creatures
they all seemed, compared
to
the beautiful young spinster of St.
Luke's Place.
I especially admired her softly blond hair, braided and put
up in a crown, but not a tight crown. Her mother, Mary Warner
Moore, coresided with her and was present that afternoon. I recall
Mrs. Moore's intent, prophetic gaze so exactly that I still seem to
shrink from it; a mysterious woman. But doubtless her scrutiny
was meant to do me honor, not
to
intimidate me. What I re–
member best about the poet-daughter from that initial visit was
her mentioning to me a songbird' that I had to confess my unfa–
miliarity with. This prompted her to bring down out of a clothes
closet a shoe box brimful of various wild feathers; and as she
sought for the feather that was
to
educate me, she kept coming
upon others that stirred her remembrance and inspired her bril–
liancy of discourse. For perhaps fifteen minutes she talked
plumage, evoked the avian life, specified habit and habitats, and
(it almost seemed) transposed the distant warbling and trilling
into words. The room filled up with spiritual entities of the
winged world, unforgettable, and
to
that extent immortal.
I offer you this as an image of one of the processes of poetry;
of Miss Moore's poetry especially - a gathering and a preserva–
tion, a retrospect and a meditation, with her very own way of
philosophizing or moralizing about things, and now and then, a
sudden power of conveying, all over again, as in the present
tense, old feelings of enchantment and bliss. Suddenly the feathers
SIng.
A part of the interest of Miss Moore's vocation and career has
little or nothing to do with her art of poetry, depends only slightly
if at all on how one reacts
to
that-it is the matter of her position
in present-day American and English creative culture; her relation
