Marianne Moore

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

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

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”