Marianne Moore

“ One questions the cogency of Mr Lindsay's thought when he says in alluding to the San Francisco earthquake, "Here where her God has scourged her." Not that San Francisco was or is a godly city, but many another city has gone unscourged. As a visionary, as an interpreter of America, and as a modern primitive—in what are regarded as the three provinces of his power, Mr Lindsay is hampered to the point of self-destruction by his imperviousness to the need for aesthetic self-discipline. ”

“ You do not seem to realise that beauty is a liability rather than an asset—that in view of the fact that spirit creates form we are justified in supposing that you must have brains. For you, a symbol of the unit, stiff and sharp, conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority and liking for everything self-dependent, anything an
ambitious civilisation might produce: for you, unaided to attempt through sheer reserve, to confute presumptions resulting from observation, is idle. You cannot make us think you a delightful happen-so. ”

“ The fairy-tale, like the question, bespeaks faith in the outcome of what is not yet evolved; and in their prime quality of illusory credibility, Mr Housman's tales command belief. One reads eagerly until the end has been reached, infinitesimally disaffected by an occasional flaw. Although usually in the fairy-tale, good triumphs over evil and virtue is synonymous with beauty, an appearance of moral insouciance is essential ”

“ The barnacles which encrust the side of the wave, cannot hide there for the submerged shafts of the [Pg 15]
sun, split like spun glass, move themselves with spotlike swift- ness into the crevices— in and out, illuminating
the turquoise sea of bodies. The water drives a wedge of iron through the iron edge of the cliff, whereupon the stars,
pink rice grains, ink bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like green lilies and submarine toadstools, slide each on the other. ”

“ In his essay on Poetic Diction, Robert Bridges says, "the higher the poet's command of diction, the wider may be the field of his Properties; . . . and this is a very practical point, if a writer with no command of imaginative diction, should use such Properties as are difficult of harmonization, he will discredit both the Properties and the Diction." Despite the fact that Mr Lindsay's properties are abundant and often harmonious as in the fantasy of the gipsies ”

“ Then when the ratcatcher finds that the prince will marry her only in the event that she can be made natural, in order to effect a retransformation, he is obliged to relinquish to the gnome his last penny. The White Doe maintaining throughout the image of a creature springing this way and that across a narrow forest stream, A Capful of Moonshine with its theme of the man who wished to know 'how one gets to see a fairy," The Gentle Cockatrice monumentally patient despite a recurring desire to identify its tail, and The Man Who Killed the Cuckoo, are tales one does not forget. ”

“ It could not be dangerous to be living in a town like this, of simple people, who have a steeple-jack placing danger signs by the church while he is gilding the solid- pointed star, which on a steeple stands for hope. ”

“ One must not monopolize; one need not avenge oneself; in improving the morals of the world, one should begin by improving one's own; these are the mordant preoccupations about which Mr Housman's fancy plays. ”

“ This elephant skin which I inhabit, fibred over like the shell of the coco-nut, this piece of black glass through which no light
can filter—cut into checkers by rut upon rut of unpreventable experience— it is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the
hairy toed. Black but beautiful, my back is full of the history of power. Of power? What is powerful and what is not? ”

“ Mr Lindsay says; "practically every copy will be first opened on the lap of some person . . . trying to follow me as I recite as one follows the translation of the opera libretto." He is not to be refuted. There is a perhaps not very exact analogy between him in his rôle of undismayed, national interpreter, and a certain young eagle conveyed by American naval officers to the Philippines, styled "an American rooster," and pitted invariably with mortal consequence against Philippine gamecocks. ”

“ A complexity moreover, that has been committed to darkness, instead of granting it-
self to be the pestilence that it is, moves all a- bout as if to bewilder with the dismal fallacy that insistence is the measure of achievement and that all truth must be dark. ”

“ THE outstanding impression made by Mr Lindsay's collected poems is that the author pities the fallen, deplores misunderstandings, and is saddened that the spirit should so often be at the mercy of the body. One cannot but revere his instinctive charity and determination to make a benevolent ordering of the universe possible. One knows that it is not an assumed attitude which leads Mr Lindsay to say:
"I want live things in their pride to remain. ”

“ All palms and tail; how delightful! There is the sea, moving the bulk- head with its horse strength; and the multiplicity of rudders and propellers; the signals, shrill, questioning, peremptory, diverse; the wharf cats and the barge dogs—it
is easy to overestimate the value of such things. One does not live in such a place from motives of expediency but because to one who has been accustomed to it, shipping is the most congenial thing in the world.
[Pg 21]
RADICAL
Tapering to a point, conserving everything, this carrot is predefined to be thick. ”

“ Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this, with eight stranded whales to look at; ”

“ Factory windows are always broken.
Somebody's always throwing bricks,
are expertly captivating. Lincoln is not added to, but he is not travestied in Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight; there is glory in the conception of. ”

“ Prince Rupert’s drop, paper muslin ghost, white torch—“with pow’r to say unkind things with kindness, and the most irritating things in the midst of love and tears,” you invite destruction.
You are like the meditative man with the perfunctory heart ”

“ Some of Mr Lindsay's work would lead one to infer that "a man is out on three wide balls but walks on four good strikes." The literary reader tends not to be compensated by moral fervour for technical misapprehensions, but there is life in any kind of beauty and in these poems avoidance of grossness and the entirely vengeful, is fortifying. Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket is full of contagious vigour:
"I am unjust, but I can strive for justice. ”

“ So far as magic carpets are concerned, she knows that although the semblance of speed may attach to scarecrows of æsthetic procedure, the substance of it is embodied in such of those tough-grained animals as have outstripped man’s whim to suppose them ephemera, and have earned that fruit of their ability to endure blows, which dubs them prosaic necessities—not curios. ”

“ Also, evolving from an affection for the child mind and perhaps from a wish not to labour the matter, we have from time to time a kind of diminutive conversation as of an adult in the nursery, which is death to the illusion of make-believe. ”

“ PICKING AND CHOOSING
Literature is a phase of life: if one is afraid of it, the situation is irremediable; if one approaches it familiarly, what one says of it is worthless. Words are constructive when they are true ”

“ Mohammed, St Francis, Dante, Columbus, Titian, Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, Milton, Napoleon, Darwin, Lincoln, Emerson, Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Socrates. Like paintings in public buildings of the world's cultural and scientific progress, such groups sacrifice impact to inclusiveness. ”

“ In the meantime, if you demand on one hand, in defiance of their opinion— the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is, on the other hand, genuine then you are interested in poetry. ”

“ It is not Hardy the distinguished novelist and Hardy the poet, but one man
“interpreting life through the medium of the emotions.” If he must give an opinion, it is permissible that the critic should know what he likes. ”

“ A wind of wooing blows,"
unconsciously to Mr Lindsay no doubt, but suicidally, recall Swinburne.
Although it was not intended that the poems should be read to oneself, they will, on occasion, be so read, and so surely as they are it is inevitable that the author will in certain respects be presented amiss. Certain repetitions suggest the pleonasm of the illiterate preacher who repeats a phrase in order to get time to formulate another:
"Love is not velvet, not all of it velvet" ”

“ With an elephant to ride upon—“with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,” she shall outdistance calamity anywhere she goes. Speed is not in her mind inseparable from carpets. Locomotion arose in the shape of an elephant, she clambered up and chose to travel laboriously. ”

“ that which it is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder. ”

“ when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the autocrats among us can be “literalists of the imagination”—above insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have it. ”

“ As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one’s attending upon you, but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists. ”