GLENWAY WESCOTT
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parents perished; their homestead and the contents of it were
splintered by the blades of wind and dispersed, whirled away to
nowhere; but she in her cradle was wafted down softly, safe! In a
vitrine in a one-room museum in a county courthouse the once–
wafted lady showed my grandmother a segment of oak tree with
straws and other bits and pieces of wheatfield thrust into it, like
pins in a pincushion . The absolute concentration of the convulsed
air held the straws up tight and straight and the wind hammered
them into the hardwood. Even as a child, when this was reported
to me, I wondered what it could be a symbol of; surely something!
When I began to try to write poetry, to comprehend what litera–
ture is, this image sprang from juvenile memory into my working
mind.
And indeed, almost humorously , it is an image of young
Miss Moore's appearance in our literature during World War I,
when the storm of modernism in art was first breaking, and the
things she cared about, quaint erudition and extreme percep-
. tiveness and inspired imagery, began to be driven by her, as in
mysterious meteorology, needle-straight into the wooden mind
of the day and age.
Louise Bogan, the lyric poet and important critic, from
whom, Miss Moore told me not long before she died, she learned
more about verse writing than from anyone else, once inquired
who her masters were during the early stages of the development
of her talent. "No masters; no mystery either," she replied.
"It
was internal pressure.
"I like symmetry," she added. She liked-indeed revered in
what I take to be a religious spirit-shapeliness in every respect:
in man, in the arts of man, and in nonhuman nature. I warmly
advocate her somewhat controversia l word-for-word translation
of La Fontaine. Once someone pointed out to me that in the first
fable, "The Grasshopper and the Ant," she kept precisely to the
same length as the French origina l, the same number of English
or American words: one hundred nine. Perhaps if I had been
consulted (W. H. Auden was consu lted, I believe) I might have
asked her for a volume of original prose, about zoos, sports, and
certain eccentricities, and certain foreign travels, instead of this
tour de force in verse. I like her being a fabulist in her own right,
which is even more difficult than translating baroque French.
Moralist and naturalist are
(I
think) in better balance in her na-
