34 - Marianne Moore: a Presbyterian Poet?

Marianne Moore: a Presbyterian Poet?
By Daniel T. Jenkins

"She expresses and celebrates some of the best qualities of the attitudes toward life which churches of the Reformed type should foster. If we cherished these qualities as we should, we might have been quicker to appreciate Marianne Moore. "

CHRISTIAN literary critics, who are usually Anglicans or Roman Catholics, often observe that the Reformed churches fail to produce many creative artists. It might be nearer the truth to say that they do produce them but are not much interested in their work, and the artists leave.

What is significant about Marianne Moore is that she did not leave. All her long life she was a faithful Presbyterian whose poetry reflected her faith. Robert Browning was an active Congregationalist but Donald Davie has argued that his best poetry did not reflect his faith, and that when Browning touched on religious themes related to his own church tradition, he was at his worst.

I

This could not be said of Marianne Moore. She was very close to the other members of her very Presbyterian family. After her father's death, she shared a home for many years with her mother, who was a minister's daughter and herself a deeply committed church member. Her brother, a graduate of Princeton Seminary, was also a minister, and she wrote to him daily when he was a naval chaplain. In her notes on her poems, she makes several references to the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn. She is reported to have read Calvin's Institutes. Her poetry, as I will argue, exemplified "the Presbyterian virtues."

Although she was, perhaps, the most widely honored American poet of her time, no Presbyterian seminary was among the sixteen institutions who gave her honorary degrees, and no study of her poetry has been made by a Reformed theologian. The only partial exception I know of is Gabriel Vahanian's perceptive short review of Laurence Stapleton's book Marianne Moore in the Journal of Presbyterian History in 1981,

Daniel T. Jenkins is Professor of Systematic Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary. A minister of the United Reformed Church in Britain, he has taught at the Universities of Sussex and Chicago. He is the author of numerous volumes on church, ministry, and theology, the two most recent being The British: Their Identity and Their Religion (1 975) and Christian Maturity and Christian Success (1982). A brief biographical note about Marianne Moore is appended at the conclusion of this article.

35 - Marianne Moore: a Presbyterian Poet?

in which he expresses his bewilderment that she should have been so neglected by theologians. There are also some appreciative references to the Christian character of her work in the Anglo-Catholic Hoxie Fairchild's comprehensive Religious Trends in English Poetry.

This neglect is the more extraordinary because her attitude to her background was positive and affirmative. Unlike many artists in her time, she appears not to have had a period in the wilderness, and she enjoyed the world about her and her fellow human beings too much to be conscious of alienation. The very first poem in her Complete Poems, "The Steeple-Jack," sets the tone. It is a loving evocation of a small seaside town-"Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this"-and it ends:

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.

It may not be immediately obvious that Marianne Moore's poetry exemplifies what I choose to call "the Presbyterian virtues." By that phrase, I have in mind delight in the responsible use of reason for humane purposes, enjoyment of the natural creation, humility and self-criticism arising out of the awareness of justification by faith alone, hatred of egocentricity and "highbrowism" by artists, reticence in approaching the mysteries of faith which is part of the fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. She wrote very little that would normally be considered religious poetry. There is more religious reference than appears on the surface, but even if there were not, this would not make her work out of keeping with a Presbyterian attitude to the arts. Mature Reformed theology and spirituality have frequently shown a certain reserve in making the deepest matters of faith the subject of direct artistic expression. When Milton, instead of becoming a minister of the Word, produced Paradise Lost with the intention of making it a "poem doctrinal to a nation," he was beginning to cease to be representative of a classic Reformed position. Contrary to popular misconceptions, educated Reformed Protestants have rarely been opposed to the arts. The Puritan point was that nothing should be allowed to divert people from the authority and priority of Scripture in divine worship, but the arts had their place as means of celebrating our life together on earth and the wonders of the natural creation. Many English Puritans wrote love poetry and nature poetry, and Cromwell was an accomplished fiddler. The great Dutch painters concentrated on domestic scenes and landscapes, and when they dealt with religious themes did not presume to offer portraits of the Godhead or details of the face of the mature Jesus. In showing a like reserve, Marianne Moore stands within and not outside the tradition. It is in responding as a poet to the human mind and spirit in action and to the mystery of the animal world that she

36 - Marianne Moore: a Presbyterian Poet?

exemplifies "the Presbyterian virtues." One reason for her neglect by those who should be especially interested may be that many modern Presbyterians fail to realize that they should possess these distinctive virtues and, therefore, do not recognize them when they see them.

II

Marianne Moore's fascination with birds and animals, especially those which are strange and little esteemed, recalls the "physical theologians" of the eighteenth century. Their language would have been more pious than hers but they would have recognized a kindred spirit in the author of "The Jerboa" and "The Pangolin" and the delightful "Arctic Ox (or Goat)." I hope also that they would have admired her championship of that unjustly maligned bird, the ostrich, in "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron.' " Her respect for scientific integrity and her admiration for technical skill and her hatred of mere pretentiousness show how much she appreciated that Presbyterian genius for discovery and invention which, especially in its Scottish form, has brought untold benefit to humankind. "Four Quartz Crystal Clocks" and "The Icosa-sphere" are among the few modern poems which celebrate the sharpening of imagination evoked by both science and practical rationality.

It has to be admitted that her wit and playfulness have not been so evident in the Presbyterian tradition, yet they are of a piece with that respect, admiration, and hatred. They are intelligent, self-deprecating without being wearisomely introspective, and astringent without being malicious. To possess that last quality in the intellectual milieu of mid-twentieth century New York is itself evidence almost of sanctity. It is certainly evidence of a moral courtesy without loss of sharpness of judgment which should be the mark of those who know that even the best of people are justified by faith alone. "To a Steam Roller" implies a devastating criticism of one common type of mind, not least among those preachers of whom she had heard many, but no names are mentioned and readers are left to draw their own conclusions.

The illustration
is nothing to you without the application.
You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down
into close conformity, and then walk back and forth on them.

She also possesses a public sense, that quality whose lack in the British Reformed churches of his time P. T. Forsyth used so eloquently to deplore. All poetry, of course, is personal, but she is careful not to trouble her readers with what should properly be merely private. She has a strong awareness of occasion and of public responsibility. Her greatest poetry is evoked by WWII, and her imagination is stimulated by places visited, news items, pictures seen at exhibitions, objects in museums, sermons heard. She takes delight in sport, even unfamiliar sport like horse-racing, as in "Tom Fool at Jamaica," and she passionately supported the Brooklyn Dodgers.

It is this public quality which makes her an accessible poet. It is true

37 - Marianne Moore: a Presbyterian Poet?

that she can be difficult at first reading, and some of her allusions are too recondite. I am still puzzled by "the shaft that gilds the sultan's tower" at the end of "Blessed is the Man." Yet once the meaning is reached, the experience is readily understood and shared. She is no Bloomsbury-like Superior Person but pays us the compliment of entering into easy conversation with us as equals, assuming that any point she sees can be taken by us. Tributes on the back jacket of the Penguin edition of the Complete Poems feature a quotation from the Chicago Tribune to the effect that Marianne Moore is an eccentric genius. I disagree. She has a fine independence of spirit and true originality but takes it for granted that these are to be placed at the service of our common humanity. As a more apt quotation from John Ashberry, on that same back jacket, puts it, "More than any modern poet, she gives us the feeling that life is softly exploding around us, within easy reach."

A related quality places her even more firmly in the Reformed tradition at its Puritan best-her horror of artistic egoism and of self-dramatization. As she says, "Poets, don't make a fuss." She would have liked to have said of herself what she said of the Arctic ox:

Its great distinction
is not an egocentric scent
but that it is intelligent.

She is reticent without being aloof and gives the impression that she will take pleasure in conversing with us provided we respect her right to be silent over certain matters. She quotes with approval a saying of her father's, "The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence but restraint."

III

The virtues discussed so far emerge throughout her poems, but specifically religious references are also not absent. On a superficial level, the notes she provided to elucidate some of her recondite allusions contain no less than twenty-three referring to sermons, religious lectures, works of devotion, and biblical scholarship. The poem "The Pedantic Literalist" is based on a series of excerpts from Richard Baxter's The Saints' Everlasting Rest. She quotes from George Adam Smith in The Expositor's Bible and from P. T. Forsyth. Biblical phrases and echoes abound throughout her work. More profoundly, in her major poems she is moved by a Christian passion which is reminiscent of the best kind of preaching.

This emerges clearly in what is widely regarded as her greatest poem, "In Distrust of Merits." The poem was evoked by reports and newspaper pictures of dead soldiers in WWII. Her realization of the sacrifices of those having to fight fills her not only with a conviction of the necessity of what they have to do but also with an awareness of how, in her own undependability, she fails them.

38 - Marianne Moore: a Presbyterian Poet?

They're
fighting in deserts and caves, one by
one, in battalions and squadrons;
they're fighting that I
may yet recover from the disease, my
self; some have it lightly; some will die. "Man's
wolf to man" and we devour
ourselves.

Stung to shame, she goes on later to say:

We
vow, we make this promise
to the fighting-it's a promise-"We'll
never hate black, white, red, yellow, Jew
Gentile, Untouchable." We are
not competent to
make our vows.

Brief quotation cannot convey the poem's intensity of feeling, but it is a moving example, worked out in terms of the grimmest public events, of how the sacrifice of others, even in our common just cause, produces contrition rather than self-righteousness. In the presence of sacrifice, faith must express itself in love, and yet the resolution to love becomes itself suspect unless, in making it, we are also made aware of our own inadequacy and unreliability.

No other poem is as explicit as "In Distrust of Merits," but there are several in which the religious implications are clear. "By Disposition of Angels" makes her reflect on how the mysterious steadfast independence of the universe, of the " Star that does not ask me if I see it," is like the steadfastness of those she has known and loved the best, deriving, it is hinted, from the same Source. "Blessed is the Man," with its obvious echoes of the first Psalm and the Beatitudes, has the characteristic line:

Blessed the geniuses who know
that egomania is not a duty.

Melchior Vulpius" ends with "love's signature cementing faith." What are years?" poses the questions:

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt?
All are naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage ... ?

and goes on to celebrate courage in the face of mortality. This courage implies a faith very different from that of the defiant humanist courage commended by the then fashionable atheistic existentialism.

He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be

39 - Marianne Moore: a Presbyterian Poet?

free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.

IV

r I am not claiming that Marianne Moore was a poet of greater stature than her reputation would suggest. Her reputation in the literary world is securely high, and few poets received more general recognition in their lifetime. It has to be acknowledged that, for all the wide range of her interests, she produced no large-scale masterpiece and, perhaps, lacked the sheer creative vitality of a major poet. There is more music in her work than casual reading might discover but few of her lines are so memorable as to become part of the language. In this respect, she cannot compare with her friend and contemporary, T. S. Eliot. It would probably be widely agreed that she holds an honorable place as one of the best poets of the second rank.

What I am claiming is that she is very much a poet of the Reformed faith and deserves far more attention from those of her own and related churches than she received in her lifetime. This is not because hers is a useful name to drop in the company of unbelievers who charge church-going Christians with being dull and ungifted, or to counter the assertion of Catholics that they have all the good artists. As she herself might well have said, better than that by far a benign neglect. She expresses and celebrates some of the best qualities of the attitudes toward life which churches of the Reformed type should foster. If we cherished these qualities as we should, we might have been quicker to appreciate Marianne Moore.

This is particularly true for those of us who are preachers. We know that she frequently discussed sermons with her mother, who was herself a discerning critic. We also know that she was in the habit of making suggestions for sermon themes to her brother. I wonder if anyone has made a study of their correspondence to see if it provides any homiletical illumination? Meanwhile, we have the poems themselves and, though they will provide few striking quotations with which to garnish sermons, there is much to learn from their tone and style. They are unsentimental, except on the few occasions when sentimentality is amusing and consciously less than serious, as in her poem celebrating the Brooklyn Dodgers. They are crisply economical in expression, an effect achieved by ruthless pruning and a refusal to labor the obvious. Her poem on "Poetry" is composed of three short lines but the Complete Poems also prints an original rejected version of thirty lines which, despite its many virtues, she had the courage to jettison. She respects the intelligence of her readers almost to the point of excess. She is a moralist whose judgments are never merely conventional, yet she has sufficient independence and freedom from self-consciousness to reinforce a conventional judgment when it seems to be right. Although she does not dwell much on the stormy frontiers of existence, she knows that they exist because there is no hint of complacency in her celebration of what Bonhoeffer

40 - Marianne Moore: a Presbyterian Poet?

would have called life in the center of the village. Her approach to the mysteries of Christian faith is cautiously reverent, one might almost say shy, as in her deceptively simple poem "Rosemary," which helps us look at those mysteries with fresh eyes. Can it be denied that these are all qualities that present-day preachers particularly need to cultivate?

Donald Davie was mentioned earlier. He also is a poet and critic highly regarded in literary circles but not much heeded by his fellow Protestants. In his books The Gathered Church (1978) and The Dissentient Voice (1982), he has praised what he calls the Calvinist aesthetic, one which emphasizes simplicity, sobriety, and measure. He sees it clearly exemplified in the hymns of Isaac Watts but says it was lost in the crude populism of the nineteenth century. Whether such an aesthetic is as sharply defined as he claims is a matter for debate, but it would be a debate well worth having. Americans might reasonably maintain that Jonathan Edwards should also be a party to it. If there is a Calvinist aesthetic, it is still a question as to whether simplicity, sobriety, and measure are its main characteristics. Although mentioned by Calvin, they became relevant chiefly when the more open forms of Calvinism met the Enlightenment. Earlier Calvinism had an intensity arising out of existential tension which was not so prominent in the eighteenth century, at least in Europe. Edward Taylor in New England possessed it. Marianne Moore provides many examples of simplicity, sobriety, and measure. When sufficiently aroused, as in "In Distrust of Merits," she also expresses Calvinist intensity. What should make us even more grateful is that she is able to combine all these qualities with generosity, affection, and wit, and all without obtrusive self-preoccupation.

"Poets, don't make a fuss." There are a few gifted people, like Kierkegaard, who are called to make a fuss, to travel the long road of discovering all that it means to be an individual in order to point the way to the achievement once more of authentic spontaneity. As Kierkegaard knew well, it is a dangerous vocation, a test which the Lord's Prayer tells us to ask that we might be spared. In these days, when many artists and not a few theologians are preoccupied with their own individuality in ways which do not point to spontaneity, we can be grateful that Marianne Moore was called to show us how to enjoy the world and make the most of life with grace and without making a fuss.

41 - Marianne Moore: a Presbyterian Poet?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Marianne Moore (1887-1972) was born near St. Louis, graduated from Bryn Mawr, moved to Manhattan, and then to Brooklyn. She was associated with the "imagist" movement and said of herself, "I like straight writing, end-stopped lines, an effect of flowing continuity." She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and received the National Book Award as well as the Bollingen Prize. In addition publishing poetry, she also served for several years as Acting Editor of The Dial, the well known literary magazine. The following editions of her works may be mentioned: Poems (1921), Marriage (1923), Observations (1924), Collected Poems (1951), The Complete Poems (1967; Penguin edition 1982).

See also: Craig S. Abbot, Marianne Moore: A Descriptive Bibliography (1977); Bonnie Costello, Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions (1981); Bernard F. Engel, Marianne Moore (1964); Pamela White Hadas, Marianne Moore: Poet of Affection (1977); Donald Hill, Marianne Moore: The Cage and the Animal (1970); George W. Nitchie, Marianne Moore: An Introduction (1970); Elizabeth Phillips, Marianne Moore (1982); Laurence Stapleton, Marianne Moore: The Poet's Advance (1979); Sister Therese, Marianne Moore: A Critical Essay (1969).