Although, for the most part, Marianne Moore’s style is more comparable to other contemporaries of her time, she still remained a great influence for Richard Wilbur and his poetry. In an interiview with Image magazine, Wilbur was asked:
“Marianne Moore’s poetics of careful, precise observation seems to have influenced not only Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, but often your own. How important was Moore to your development? In what ways do you find yourself writing a poetry with a kinship to Bishop’s, and where are the formal and metaphysical divergences between you?”
and he replied:
“From my early high school days on, I was reading poets like Robert Frost and Hart Crane. But I didn’t get knowledgeably excited about contemporary poetry until I was in college and had been taught by a number of wonderful teachers in Amherst’s English department, teachers who had the greatest enthusiasm for, among other things, Marianne Moore. The enthusiasm of people I admired was one thing that steered me toward her. But I also felt a natural affinity for her kind of thing: for poetry of close observation, for poetry that acknowledges the importance of things however small, poetry that aims to fuse moral and other thought with the creatures of this world.”
Marianne Moore and Wilbur had two things in common: a.) They both thought that clear language was needed to make observation and b.) believed that imagery was important to the overall feeling of the poem. Moore decided to do this through enjambment, dashes and other punctuation, and shorter sentences, while Wilbur chose a more traditionalist pathway. Wilbur:
“Found [him]self most convinced by talk upon any subject which was fully involved in the material and the circumstantial. [He] still feel[s] militantly that way: the poetry that most appeals to [him] is the least abstract and the most inclusive. “
He kept with rhyme and meter in order to portray emotions and imagery in this formalist fashion.
For example, let’s take the poem:
“The Fish” by Marianne Moore
wade through black jade. Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps adjusting the ash-heaps; opening and shutting itself like an injured fan. The barnacles which encrust the side of the wave, cannot hide there for the submerged shafts of the sun, split like spun glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness into the crevices— in and out, illuminating the turquoise sea of bodies. The water drives a wedge of iron throught 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. All external marks of abuse are present on this defiant edifice— all the physical features of ac- cident—lack of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and hatchet strokes, these things stand out on it; the chasm-side is dead. Repeated evidence ahs proved that it can live on what can not revive its youth. The sea grows old in it.
(note: This poem will not show up right on this post, click on the name of the poem in order to see its form)
With the exception of a few poems, like “He Made This Screen”, Moore does not use a rhyming scheme. This poem is this way for a reason. She wants to point out the characteristics of the fish, and use her imagery to demonstrate these. The text is in the shape of a water current, and it “flows” (haha) with the poem itself. Moore wanted to stress imagery. Wilbur took this, and his love of nature and the things in it, and used it in his poetry, in a formalist method. In the poems below he uses rhyme, rythm and meter, but imagery is still CENTRAL to his poetry:
“Orchard Trees, January” by Wilbur
It’s not the case, though some might wish it so
Who from a window watch the blizzard blow
White riot through their branches vague and stark,
That they keep snug beneath their pelted bark.
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They take affliction in until it jells
To crystal ice between their frozen cells,
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And each of them is inwardly a vault
Of jewels rigorous and free of fault,
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Unglimpsed until in May it gently bears
A sudden crop of green-pronged solitaires.
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OR
“Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” by Wilbur
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded
soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and
simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with
angels.
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Some are in bed-sheets, some are
in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there
they are.
Now they are rising together in calm
swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they
wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal
breathing;
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Now they are flying in place,
conveying
The terrible speed of their
omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now
of a sudden
They swoon down in so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks
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From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every
blessed day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on
earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising
steam
And clear dances done in the sight of
heaven.”
—————————————————-
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks
and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter This is my favorite stanza. Great imagery.
love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns
and rises,
——————————————————
“Bring them down from their ruddy
gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs
of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be
undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure
floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult
balance.”
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In this poem, Richard Wilbur does use enjambment, and some punctuation differences. Again, imagery is crtical in this poem, as Wilbur describes “a soul” that has escaped from his body, and wanders around, and then returns again into the “waking body”.
Here is the an example of a poem where Moore uses rhyme. I referenced it above, and is just here if anyone needs it.
“He Made This Screen” by Moore
not of silver nor of coral,
but of weatherbeaten laurel.
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here, he introduced a sea
uniform like tapestry;
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here, a fig-tree; there, a face;
there, a dragon circling space-
———————————-
designating here, a bower;
there, a pointed passion-flower.
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