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Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
Twenty-First
Century
Marianne Moore
Essays from a
Critical Renaissance
Edited by Elizabeth Gregory

and Stacy Carson Hubbard
Modern and Contemporary Poetry
and Poetics
Series Editor
David Herd
University of Kent
Canterbury, UK
Founding editor
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Temple University
Philadelphia
PA, USA
Founded by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and continued by David Herd,
Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and p ursues
topics in the burgeoning field of 20th and 21st century poetics. Critical
and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series
includes: social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the con-
struction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and
dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the inter-
section of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority,
and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the
dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets
and inside poems. Since its inception, the series has been distinguished
by its tilt toward experimental work—intellectually, politically, aestheti-
cally. It has consistently published work on Anglophone poetry in the
broadest sense and has featured critical work studying literatures of the
UK, of the US, of Canada, and of Australia, as well as eclectic mixes of
work from other social and poetic communities. As poetry and p oetics
form a crucial response to contemporary social and political c onditions,
under David Herd’s editorship the series will continue to broaden
understanding of the field and its significance.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14799
Elizabeth Gregory · Stacy Carson Hubbard
Editors
Twenty-First Century
Marianne Moore
Essays from a Critical Renaissance
Editors
Elizabeth Gregory Stacy Carson Hubbard
Department of English Department of English
University of Houston University at Buffalo, SUNY
Houston, TX, USA Buffalo, NY, USA
Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

ISBN 978-3-319-65108-8 ISBN 978-3-319-65109-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65109-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951545
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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Acknowledgments
This book is an outgrowth of the vitality and generosity of a committed

and expanding community of Marianne Moore scholars. Their ideas,
encouragement and eagerness to offer rigorous new perspectives on
Moore’s poetry have sustained us through our labors in b ringing this vol-
ume to completion. In particular, we owe thanks to all the participants
in the Twenty-First Century Moore Conference held at the University
of Houston in March 2015, from which this collection emerged. During
three days of electrifying panels and resonant conversations, it became
clear that new research, such as Linda Leavell’s biography of Moore,
Holding On Upside Down (2013), new editions of Moore’s poems, such
as the (then upcoming) New Collected Poems edited by Heather Cass
White (2017), and innovative scholarly voices were taking Moore stud-
ies into previously unexplored territory. This volume aims to capture the
excitement of those conversations, and to provide a platform for the new
work and an impetus for continued developments in the exploration of
Moore’s poetry, life, and impact on American culture.
We want to thank the underwriters of the Twenty-First Century Moore
Conference, without whom the initial exchanges that led to this book
would not have occurred: the Houstoun Endowment in the University of
Houston Department of English, the Center for Public History Lecture
Series Endowment at UH, the UH College of Liberal Arts and Social
Sciences Dean’s Office, Chinhui Juhn and Eddie Allen, and the UH
Friends of Women’s Studies. Thanks also to the University of Houston’s
Small Grants Program.
v
vi Acknowledgments
Thanks are also owed to our helpful readers and editors at Palgrave
Macmillan, in particular series editor Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and to
the Rosenbach Museum and Library and especially Moore archivist
Elizabeth Fuller. We are also grateful to our families for bearing with us
when the work overtook our days and evenings, and for listening when
we couldn’t resist reading out bits of wonderful poems and essays.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publishers and
individuals for permissions to reprint materials from copyrighted sources.
Permission for citations from unpublished Moore material is granted
by the Literary Estate of Marianne C. Moore, David M. Moore, Successor
Executor for the Literary Estate of Marianne Moore. All rights reserved.
“By Disposition of Angels,” “Light Is Speech,” “Smooth Gnarled
Crape Myrtle,” and “The Hero,” from THE COLLECTED POEMS
OF MARIANNE MOORE by Marianne Moore. Copyright © 1935,
1941, 1951 by Marianne Moore, renewed © 1963, 1969, 1979 by
Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, and Lawrence E. Brimm and Louise
Crane. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon
& Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. E-book and world rights for these
poems are granted by the Literary Estate of Marianne Moore and by
Faber and Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the copy-
righted images herein. They include: An image by William Blake at the
British Museum: The Ancient of Days, from Europe: A Prophecy, 1794.
Photo © 2017 Trustees of the British Museum.
An image by William Blake at the TATE: Elohim Creating Adam, 1795-
c.1805, by William Blake (1757–1827). Photo © Tate, London 2017.
Three Illustrations to Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” 1808, by William
Blake (English, 1757–1827) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: The
Expulsion from Eden, 50 x 38.7 cm (19 11/16 x 15 ¼ in.). Adam and
Eve Sleeping, 49.2 x 38.7 cm (19 3/8 x 15 ¼ in.). The Temptation and
Fall of Eve, 49.7 x 38.7 cm (19 9/16 x 15 ¼ in.). All three are pen and
watercolor on paper, and museum purchases with funds donated by con-
tribution. Photographs © 2017 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
A photograph of E. H. Kellogg is reprinted courtesy of the
Presbyterian Historical Society.
Though every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners
of all images in this book, in some instances this has proved impossible.
The editors will be glad to receive information leading to more complete
acknowledgments in any subsequent printings.
Contents
Introduction 1
Elizabeth Gregory and Stacy Carson Hubbard
Part I Moore’s Methods
Marianne Moore’s Gustatory Imagination 15

Robin G. Schulze
“These Things”: Moore’s Habits of Adduction 33

Roger Gilbert
Moore’s Numbers 49
Fiona Green
Yellow Roses and Bulbuls: Marianne Moore’s Persian Effects 67

Stacy Carson Hubbard
Part II Early Days/Poetic Roots
“Contrarieties Equally True”: Marianne Moore

and William Blake 89
Patricia C. Willis
vii
viii Contents
“The Teacher Was Speaking of Unrhymed Verse”:

Marianne Moore, E. H. Kellogg, and the Poetry
of Modernist Hermeneutics 113
Jennifer L. Leader
Part III Middle Period
Editorial Compression: Marianne Moore at The Dial

Magazine 131
Victoria Bazin
Marianne Moore and Modern Labor 149

Linda A. Kinnahan
Marianne Moore’s “Light Is Speech,” Decision Magazine,

and the Wartime Work of Intellectual Exchange 167
Emily Setina
“Mysteries Expound Mysteries”: Marianne Moore’s

Influence on John Ashbery 185
Karin Roffman
Part IV Late Phase
“The First Grace of Style”: Marianne Moore

and the Writing of Dancing 203
Aurore Clavier
“Passion for the Particular”: Marianne Moore, Henry James,

Beatrix Potter, and the Refuge of Close Reading 221
Zachary Finch
Is Andy Warhol Marianne Moore? Celebrity, Celibacy

and Subversion 237
Elizabeth Gregory
Contents ix
Part V Scholar/Activists: Looking Back on Forwarding

Moore Studies
Archiving Marianne Moore 255

Patricia C. Willis
Finding Moore: No Search Engines, No Indexes,

No Computers 261
Bonnie Costello
Documenting Moore 265

Cristanne Miller
Discovering Moore 269

Robin G. Schulze
Advertising Moore 273

Linda Leavell
Editing Moore 277

Heather Cass White
Index 281
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Elizabeth Gregory directs the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies

Program at the University of Houston, where she is Professor of English.
Her work on Moore includes Quotation and Modern American Poetry:
“‘Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads’” (1996), The Critical Response to
Marianne Moore (2003), essays, and a book in progress entitled “The
Later Poetry of Marianne Moore: Celebrity, Age, Affect, and Democratic
Authority.” She is the author of Ready: Why Women Are Embracing the
New Later Motherhood (2007/2012), and blogs on fertility and work at
www.domesticproduct.net.
Stacy Carson Hubbard is Associate Professor of English at the
University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her research and teaching focus on mod-
ernist poetry, women’s writing, and American cultural studies. She has
published several essays on Marianne Moore and is currently at work on
a book manuscript entitled “‘The Past Is the Present’: Marianne Moore’s
Histories.” She has published essays about other modernist women poets
such as Gertrude Stein, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Gwendolyn Brooks,
and is a recipient of the Florence Howe Award for Feminist Studies from
the MLA Women’s Caucus.
xi
xii Editors and Contributors
Contributors
Victoria Bazin is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at

Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Her mono-
graph, Marianne Moore and the Cultures of Modernity, was published
by Ashgate in 2010, and she is currently working on a second mono-
graph that focuses on The Dial magazine. She has also published on the
Objectivist poet Lorine Niedecker and on contemporary British women’s
writing.
Aurore Clavier, a former student of the École Normale Supérieure and
the Sorbonne Nouvelle in France, is Associate Professor of American
Literature at Lille 3 University, France. Her research bears on the histori-
cal and geographical redefinitions of American modernism, with a spe-
cific focus on the works of Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, William
Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound. She is the author of several articles and
a forthcoming book on Marianne Moore and the question of American
origins and originality.
Bonnie Costello is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor
and Professor of English at Boston University. She is the author of
many books and articles on modern poetry, including Marianne Moore:
Imaginary Possessions; Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Travel; Shifting
Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry; and Planets
on Tables: Poetry, Still Life and the Turning World. Her new book, The
Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others, was published
in Fall 2017 by Princeton UP. Costello is co-editor, with Cristanne
Miller and Celeste Goodridge, of The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore.
Zachary Finch is Assistant Professor of English at Massachusetts
College of Liberal Arts. His essays on modern and contemporary poetry
have been published in Anglophonia, Boston Review, ESQ, Jacket2, and
The Wallace Stevens Journal, and his poetry has appeared in journals
including Poetry, Tin House, American Letters & Commentary, Fence,
and Denver Quarterly.
Roger Gilbert teaches in the English department at Cornell University.
He is the author of Walks in the World: Representation and Experience in
Modern American Poetry (Princeton, 1991). He is currently finishing a
critical biography of the poet A.R. Ammons.
Editors and Contributors xiii
Fiona Green is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University

of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College. She has published articles
on American poetry in Contemporary Literature, Critical Quarterly,
and The Journal of American Studies, and most recently on Moore in
her edited collection Writing for the New Yorker: Critical Essays on an
American Periodical (Edinburgh University Press, 2015).
Linda A. Kinnahan is Professor of English at Duquesne University
in Pittsburgh. Editor of the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century
Poetry by Women (2016), her publications include Poetics of the Feminine:
Literary Tradition and Authority in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy,
Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser (1994) and Lyric Interventions:
Feminist Experimental Poetry and Contemporary Social Discourse (2004),
and numerous essays. Her forthcoming books explore interdisciplinary
contexts for discussing poetry, Mina Loy, Twentieth-Century Photography,
and Contemporary Women Poets; and Feminist Modernism, Poetics and the
New Economy: Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore.
Jennifer L. Leader is Professor of English at Mt. San Antonio College
in Walnut, California. She is the author of Knowing, Seeing, Being:
Jonathan Edwards, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and the American
Typological Tradition (2016).
Linda Leavell’s Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of
Marianne Moore (2013) won the PEN award for biography and was a
finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. She is also the author
of Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color.
Cristanne Miller is SUNY Distinguished and Edward Butler Professor
at the University at Buffalo. She has published two books important to
Moore studies—Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority and Cultures
of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Else Lasker-Schuler—and
co-edited Moore’s Selected Letters. Additionally, she has written exten-
sively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century (mostly American) poetry.
Currently, she directs the Marianne Moore Digital Archive at https://
moorearchive.org/.
Karin Roffman is Senior Lecturer at Yale University. Her first book,
From the Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and
Libraries (2010), won the University of Alabama’s Elizabeth Agee prize.
Her second book, The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life, the
xiv Editors and Contributors
first biography of the poet, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
in Spring 2017. She has published essays in Raritan, Modern Fiction
Studies, and Artforum.
Robin G. Schulze is Dean of the University at Buffalo, SUNY’s College
of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English. She is the author of The
Degenerate Muse: American Nature, Modernist Poetry, and the Problem of
Cultural Hygiene (2013) and Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens: The
Web of Friendship (1995) and editor of Becoming Marianne Moore: The
Early Poems, 1907–1924 (2002). She has published articles on modernist
poetry, textual studies and editorial theory, and literature and nature.
Emily Setina is Assistant Professor of English at the University of
Nevada, Las Vegas. With Susannah Hollister, she co-edited Gertrude
Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition. Her essays have
appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, MLN,
Genre, and English Language Notes.
Heather Cass White is Professor of English at the University of
Alabama. She has published two facsimile-based volumes of Moore’s
work, and her edition of Moore’s New Collected Poems appeared in June
2017.
Patricia C. Willis is the former curator of the Marianne Moore
Collection at the Rosenbach Museum & Library and of the Yale
Collection of American Literature. She is the author of Marianne Moore:
Vision into Verse (1987) and editor of The Complete Prose of Marianne
Moore (1986) and Marianne Moore: Woman and Poet (1990).
Abbreviations
Adversity and Grace: Marianne Moore, 1936–1941. Edited by

Adversity
Heather Cass White. Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2012.
A-Quiver A-Quiver with Significance: Marianne Moore 1932-1936. Edited by
Heather Cass White. Victoria, BC: ELS, 2008.
Becoming Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907–1924. Edited by
Robin G. Schulze. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
CP The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. Revised Edition. New York:
Macmillan/Viking, 1981.
CPr The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore. Edited by Patricia C. Willis.
New York: Viking, 1986.
CRMM The Critical Response to Marianne Moore. Edited by Elizabeth
Gregory. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
Obs Observations, by Marianne Moore [1924]. Edited by Linda Leavell.
NewYork: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
Poems The Poems of Marianne Moore. Edited by Grace Schulman. New
York:Penguin, 2005.
RML Marianne Moore Collection, Rosenbach Museum and Library, of
the Free Library of Philadelphia. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Selected Selected Letters of Marianne Moore. Edited by Bonnie Costello,
Celeste Goodridge, and Cristanne Miller. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1997.
xv
List of Figures
“Contrarieties Equally True”: Marianne Moore and William Blake

Fig. 1 William Blake, The Ancient of Days, from Europe:
A Prophecy, 1794. Photo © 2017 Trustees of the British Museum.
The original is in color, and may be viewed on the British
Museum website 96
Fig. 2 William Blake, Elohim Creating Adam, 1795-c. 1805.
Photo © Tate, London 2017. The original is in color,
and may be viewed on the Tate website 100
Fig. 3 William Blake, The Temptation and Fall of Eve (Illustration
to Milton’s “Paradise Lost”), 1808. Photograph © 2017
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The original is in color,
and may be viewed on the MFAB website 101
Fig. 4 William Blake, The Expulsion from Eden (Illustration
Fig. 5 William Blake, Adam and Eve Sleeping (Illustration
“The Teacher Was Speaking of Unrhymed Verse”: Marianne Moore,

E. H. Kellogg, and the Poetry of Modernist Hermeneutics
Fig. 1 E. H. Kellogg, Presbyterian Historical Society 115
xvii
xviii List of Figures
Editorial Compression: Marianne Moore at The Dial Magazine

Fig. 1 Dial Advertisement (photo by author) 138
Marianne Moore’s “Light Is Speech,”Decision Magazine,
and the Wartime Work of Intellectual Exchange
Fig. 1 Decision masthead (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Yale University) 171
Fig. 2 Eugene Berman, Sentinelles de la Nuit (Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, Yale University) 176
“The First Grace of Style”: Marianne Moore and the Writing

of Dancing
Fig. 1 Anna Pavlova in The Dragonfly. Photograph by Mishkin 213
Introduction
Elizabeth Gregory and Stacy Carson Hubbard
Openly, yes
with the naturalness
of the hippopotamus or the alligator
when it climbs out on the bank to experience the
sun, I do these
things which I do, which please
no one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub-
merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object
in view was a
renaissance; shall I say
the contrary?
(—from “Black Earth,” Observations 43)1
Both poetically and personally avant-garde in her own day, Marianne

Moore (1887–1972), who plotted her life and career against the grain of
E. Gregory (*)
University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA
S.C. Hubbard (*)
University at Buffalo, SUNY, Buffalo, NY, USA
© The Author(s) 2018 1

E. Gregory and S.C. Hubbard (eds.), Twenty-First Century
Marianne Moore, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65109-5_1
2 E. GREGORY AND S.C. HUBBARD
received ideas, “pleas[ing] / no one but [her]self,” has become newly au

courant for twenty-first-century readers. One hundred and thirty years
after her birth, we’re in the midst of a Moore renaissance as increasing
numbers recognize the work as “no [merely] formal thing” (though
form plays a vital part) but a set of deeply acculturated texts that still
speak exuberantly and thoughtfully about what matters, including the
politics and practices of valuation, race, gender, class, democracy, pas-
sion, species, authority, spirit, knowledge, performance, ecology, and
more. With the recent publication of Linda Leavell’s field-redefining
biography (2013), six new editions of Moore’s work out since 2000,
expanded ancillary materials, and a new online archive of her notebooks
underway, readers of Moore are clearing space on their bookshelves and
clearing away preconceptions to make way for fresh encounters with this
dazzling individual and her still challenging, still deeply engaging work.
The recent proliferation of her work follows many years of relative
obscurity for Moore. Though always included in catalogs of impor-
tant modernists, her work has been little taught or collected, com-
pared with that of her peers Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stevens, H.D., and
Stein. Moore’s complicated publication history played a significant role
in limiting her renown. Practicing what Robin Schulze calls a “poetics
of radical instability” (1996, 120), Moore often drastically revised her
poems from one publication to another, to an extent much greater than
other revision-prone poets. This practice, along with her habit of delet-
ing poems—many of them brilliant—from her canon over time, meant
that new readers were denied a sense of how her work had evolved,
and how it looked to its original audiences. Her famously incomplete
Complete Poems omits nearly half the poems she published before 1951,
among them the wonderful “Black Earth,” “Dock Rats,” “Half Deity,”
“Pigeons,” “Roses Only,” and “Radical,” and includes many in versions
quite unlike those in which they initially appeared.
Though we still have no full variorum edition of Moore’s work, we do
now have several scholarly editions that make early versions of the poems
available, as well as a new reader’s edition (New Collected Poems), which
provides broad access to poems too long out of print and to comparative
versions of some poems. These volumes make clear that a single Moore
poem often has multiple texts and that this multiplicity fruitfully informs
analysis of Moore’s oeuvre. While many critics prefer specific versions of
the poems, Moore’s view of her work as endlessly open to ongoing revi-
sion is itself worthy of critical and readerly attention. It challenges the
idea of the poem as stable artifact and of the poet as static subject.
INTRODUCTION 3
Though, unlike the early publications, Moore’s later work was never
out of print, it has also begun to be read in new ways recently. When
the elder Moore became a celebrity in the 1950s after winning the tri-
ple crown of poetry prizes (the Bollingen, the Pulitzer, and the National
Book award), she altered her style and material to speak to her widened
audience. The shift toward popular material and easier access created the
impression for some readers that the later work was entirely distinct from
the earlier, more difficult (but equally playful and democratic) poems.
After Moore’s death, critics overwhelmingly agreed that the later work
was also less interesting, and it has received almost no critical notice until
recently. But that is changing fast.
Greater cultural understanding of gender variation has also set the
scene for less clamped-down readings of Moore’s sexual status and of her
writing about the body. These have combined with Leavell’s work to con-
vey an expanded sense of Moore as an individual whose unusual personal
choices and various styles in different contexts call for more nuanced con-
sideration than has been the case. All of these factors together are fueling
the current “Marianne Moore revival” (Raphel 2016).
As our epigraph documents, Moore had a distinctive voice from her
earliest forays into poetry. As a woman aiming to establish her own
authority, she openly broke with tradition concerning who could speak
and about what, flaunting her difference through her unique syllabic
meter, disjunctive line breaks, and visually challenging stanza forms as
well as through her challenging materials. Rather than espousing any one
line of thought, she presented herself as an interlocutor, engaging in dia-
logue with the world around her, sometimes critically, sometimes appre-
ciatively, often both, through inclusion of quotations from all sorts of
sources that converse within the poems and their notes, and sometimes
through direct address—from the early poems that apostrophize admired
figures (Bernard Shaw in “To a Prize Bird,” Disraeli in “To a Strategist”)
or admonish anonymous others (“To a Steam Roller,” “Those Various
Scalpels”) to later poems that reassess American history (“Virginia
Britannia”), engage political urgencies (“In Distrust of Merits”), or call
for communal action (“The Camperdown Elm”).
The speaker of Moore’s poems is, early to late, a curious investiga-
tor of the world—social and natural, aesthetic and ethical—who presents
herself as an arbiter. She assesses the world around her afresh, asking
what do I like? what is of value? what is worth doing? Her poetic self is
expressed in her evaluative choices. In this sense, Moore was always
both a “critic” and a “connoisseur,” whose outward-directed interest in
objects, people, plants and animals was both discriminating and impas-
sioned. One might say that the title of Moore’s first authorized book,
Observations, aptly names all of her poems, which simultaneously offer
commentary and teach us to see anew.
Moore’s poetry also requires work of her readers. Her agile vocabu-
lary and her disdain for connectives demand acute readerly attention in
order to track (and to co-invent) the poems’ unfolding logic. Her poems
shadow the twists and turns of a highly informed mind in motion—
touching on the huge spectrum of material that all minds encounter as
they hop from stimulus to stimulus in our endlessly distracting world:
ranging from war, to fashion, to animal behavior, to religion, to food, to
the details of plant life—and drawing on the sources she meets in daily
life, as diverse as the Illustrated London News, sermons, conversations
overheard, folk songs, Greek philosophers, letters from friends, advertise-
ments, and, later, TV performances of circuses and operas. Moore’s asso-
ciative methods are entirely familiar to all Internet users.
Understanding of Moore’s work has been greatly assisted by the arrival
of Leavell’s biography, Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of
Marianne Moore, the first written with full access to the Moore family
papers. Happily for posterity, the family members documented them-
selves prolifically. Their many letters, along with Moore’s 120+ note-
books and extensive correspondence with friends far and wide, convey
with great depth the complexity of their family dynamics and demon-
strate that Moore’s skills at innovation in the poetic realm extended also
to her self-fashioning. After an unusual childhood in a tightly knit, idi-
osyncratic, highly educated and religious family, Moore (along with her
mother) moved to Greenwich Village in 1918. There she immediately
joined the Modernist literary revolution, first as a poet and then in the
late 1920s as editor of the influential Dial magazine. She lived at the core
of the New York cultural scene as it evolved over the next six decades.
For years, critics worked under the biased misimpression that Moore
essentially had no personal story because she was not romantically
involved; this fed the view of her career as a regrettable decline into sen-
timentality and idiosyncrasy from an early Modernist height. However,
as biographical material has become more available and critics have
expanded their openness to alternative life narratives, new lines of insight
into the relations between the life and the poems have emerged. Within
her family, Moore was called by male pronouns and nicknames, and she
often dressed in masculine styles. This makes new sense to contemporary
INTRODUCTION 5
readers more familiar with alternative genderings. Though readers of

Moore’s family letters have long known that Mary Warner Moore had a
love relationship with Mary Norcross, their pastor’s daughter, Leavell’s
biography has clarified the dimensions of their nine-year partnership.
Images of Moore (or her mother) as naïve or strait-laced moralists come
undone when we learn that she grew up in a matter-of-fact Christian
lesbian household.
Our sense of Moore sharpens further in light of Leavell’s claim that
her mother’s frugality and controlling ways effectively aided her poetry
by pushing her to develop an alternative realm of complexity and free-
dom into which her mother could not follow. That complexity included
the fact that Moore’s relationships with her mother and brother were
also close and sustaining. They offered companionship and a strong
sense of family identity, and that too is reflected in the work, as are
Moore’s many strong friendships, with Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Crane,
Hildegarde and Sibley Watson, Monroe Wheeler, Bryher and H.D.,
Joseph Cornell, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden, among many others.
Coming to understand these relationships of mutual influence as they
evolved over years and their significance for twentieth and twenty-first-
century American culture will be the fertile focus of decades of critical
work to come. Moore studies have steadily expanded to include readings
that explore her environmental, political, gendered, religious, artistic,
and cultural investments, based in a combination of reference to histori-
cal and biographical materials and engaged close readings of the poems.
All of these lines of inquiry bear fruit in this volume.
Changes in the landscape of Moore scholarship have been building
gradually for decades. Accompanying and feeding this growth have been
several conferences devoted to Moore’s work. The present volume devel-
oped out of a 2015 conference at the University of Houston—the fourth
conference devoted to Moore over roughly thirty years (following two in
1987, her centennial, at Orono and Chicago, and a third at Penn State
in 2003). Where the Chicago celebration (sponsored by Poetry) brought
together established poet/critics, the Orono, Penn State, and Houston
conferences included emerging Moore scholars, many of whom have
gone on to make significant contributions to the field, along with estab-
lished scholars. The first three conferences led to exciting volumes that
moved Moore studies forward and continue to serve as resources.2 We
hope this collection will do the same.
Drawing on new approaches and on Moore’s archive, the essays in

this volume are part of a new wave of culturally situated and contextually
rich readings of Moore’s poems. Many of these chapters explore Moore’s
sometimes surprising relationships to a wide network of artists and think-
ers, including Lola Ridge, the Rev. E.H. Kellogg, Beatrix Potter, Omar
Khayyam and Edward Fitzgerald, William Blake, Klaus Mann, Anna
Pavlova, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and Andy Warhol. This collec-
tion breaks ground in looking at all stages of Moore’s career, from her
early days in Carlisle where as a young suffragist she developed her inno-
vative voice and reached out confidently to the burgeoning international
community of politically and aesthetically astute modernists, through
her arrival and aesthetic prominence in NYC in the late teens and twen-
ties, her Dial editorship, her deeply political and historical poetry of the
1930s, her committed war poetry of the 1940s, and her populist, celeb-
rity phase in the 1950s and 1960s in which she took on a whole new
range of causes and aesthetic experiments.
This volume is organized in five sections—the first dealing with trans-
temporal dynamics in Moore’s work, the three that follow anchored in
specific periods, and the fifth offering commentaries by major Moore
scholars and editors on the evolution and future of Moore studies.
The essays in all these sections deal with the many interactive dialogues
through which Moore engaged the wider world.
The first section, “Moore’s Methods,” explores new approaches to
thinking about Moore’s vocabulary, rhetoric, metrics, structure, and
style. In the opening essay, “Marianne Moore’s Gustatory Imagination,”
Robin Schulze takes Linda Leavell’s biographical account of Moore’s
troubled relation to food as a springboard for examining her frequent use
of appetite-related terms such as “gusto,” “fastidiousness,” “disgust” and
“taste” in her poetry. She argues that Moore’s taste for such language
encodes her investment in the importance of absorbing new ideas and
avoiding narrow judgments, balancing appetite with self-control and scar-
city. Tracking these images across the first few decades of Moore’s career,
Schulze offers a fresh perspective on some of Moore’s best-known poems.
Roger Gilbert’s essay, “‘These Things’: Moore’s Habits of
Adduction,” continues the exploration of Moore’s processes of selec-
tion, analyzing her use of the phrase “these things” to conjoin disparate
particulars while simultaneously giving them categorical status. Through
incisive analysis of rhetoric, organization, and punctuation, Gilbert illu-
minates the ways that Moore’s poetic assemblages invite us to puzzle out
INTRODUCTION 7
the hidden principles that bind them together, opening connections to

modernist collage and disjunctive poetics. Approaching Moore’s accu-
mulations from a mathematical angle, Fiona Green’s essay on “Moore’s
Numbers” analyzes Moore’s lifelong fascination with counting and
numbering. Again using Leavell’s biography as prompt, Green notes
that Moore suffered from “dyscalculia,” a difficulty with mathemati-
cal thinking, to which doubling down on counting is often a response.
Green argues that “dyscalculia” can at once elucidate Moore’s syllabics,
her focus on enumeration, and her poetry’s foregrounding of numbers
that refuse to meld into the background of meaning or into naturalizing
rhythms.
Stacy Carson Hubbard’s essay, “Yellow Roses and Bulbuls: Marianne
Moore’s Persian Effects,” furthers the discussion of taste and appetite in
examining the allusions to Persian decorative objects, paintings, poetry,
and gardens that abound in Moore’s poems from the mid-teens through
the 1960s, where they signify beauty and extravagance, and work to
displace the primacy of European culture. Hubbard argues that such
Persian cultural influences helped Moore to develop a modernist aes-
thetics of the “arabesque” that embodied her contradictory attractions
to elaboration and reduction, passion and restraint, and suggested ways
of valuing pleasure and passion unavailable within Judeo-Christian tradi-
tions. This essay is in dialogue with several others in the volume around
Moore’s views of pleasure, restraint, and censorship.
From the wide views of the opening chapters, we move in the second
section to explore two early and profound influences on Moore’s poet-
ics. Patricia C. Willis, the scholar with the deepest knowledge of Moore’s
archive, demonstrates in “‘Contrarieties Equally True’: Marianne Moore
and William Blake” the enthralling effect that Blake had on Moore.
Willis reveals that together Blake’s poems and images shaped Moore’s
early work at a genetic level—affirming the essential nature of para-
dox and the power of the invisible within the visible, and initiating the
ekphrastic practice that animated much of her work thereafter. Willis
deftly traces the evolution of some of Moore’s basic principles and most
affective images.
In “‘The Teacher Was Speaking of Unrhymed Verse’: Marianne
Moore, E.H. Kellogg, and the Poetry of Modernist Hermeneutics,”
Jennifer L. Leader further unwinds the religious thread, exploring the
difficulty Moore’s readers have sometimes felt in attempting to recon-
cile her anti-authoritarian free thought with her lifelong Presbyterian
piety. Remarkably, Leader makes the dynamics of cutting-edge, early

twentieth-century biblical criticism entirely comprehensible, tracking the
impact on Moore’s work of her Carlisle pastor, “believing critic” Edwin
H. Kellogg—a figure who was, like Blake and Moore, at home with
paradox.
In 1925, just months after she won the Dial Award for poetry, Moore
took over as editor of The Dial magazine, and stopped writing poems
for the five years she worked there. When she returned to verse in the
1930s, her methods had evolved, responding to the Depression and to
her changing sense of the poet’s role in a democratic society. As World
War II approached, she became even more actively engaged with explor-
ing the terms through which liberty is defined and can prevail.
The third section focuses on Moore’s editorial and creative work
between the 1920s and the 1940s. In “Editing Modernism: Marianne
Moore at The Dial Magazine,” Victoria Bazin reconsiders Moore’s edi-
torial work as an extension of her poetic practice, involving juxtaposition,
montage, and a principle of “contractility” that is distinctly modernist
as well as distinctively Moore’s. Her analysis rethinks the “cut” in order
to revise dominant narratives of modernist periodical culture that have
underestimated Moore’s editorial influence or characterized it as destruc-
tive. In her essay, “Marianne Moore and Labor,” Linda A. Kinnahan also
reveals connections in what formerly have seemed like discrete sectors of
Moore’s work. Kinnahan enriches our sense of Moore’s relations with
her contemporaries and her political engagements across her poems of
the teens, 1920s, and 1930s, by exploring the evolution of her concerns
with labor and social justice, including her connections to activist poet
Lola Ridge and labor theorist Thorstein Veblen.
Emily Setina’s essay, “Marianne Moore’s ‘Light Is Speech,’ Decision
Magazine, and the Wartime Work of Intellectual Exchange,” furthers
our sense of Moore as a political poet by discussing her little-treated
poem about the Nazi occupation of France in its original publication
context in the March, 1941, issue of Decision magazine. Analyzing the
poem’s allusions, puns, and intertextuality, Setina illuminates the vision
of intellectual exchange as political action and artistic acts as resistance
that Moore shared with the editors of the magazine. This section’s
final essay, Karin Roffman’s “‘Mysteries Expound Mysteries’: Marianne
Moore’s Influence on John Ashbery,” tracks the dynamics of intergen-
erational literary dialogue, looking at the impact of Moore’s poetry on
the younger poet. Documenting Ashbery’s multiple discoveries and
INTRODUCTION 9
rediscoveries of Moore’s work from the forties forward, Roffman argues

that Moore’s methods of indirection profoundly shaped Ashbery’s
expressions of powerful feeling in ways hitherto unrecognized, offering
us yet another way of thinking about Moore’s passion and restraint.
Immediately after World War II, Moore struggled with caring for
her mother and with her own health issues. After Mary Warner Moore’s
death in 1947, Moore immersed herself in translations of La Fontaine’s
fables (published in 1954), and in organizing her Collected Poems. When
that book won the three major poetry prizes in 1952, Moore became
a celebrity, famous with Americans of all brow levels for being famous.
Moore reframed her persona and her poetry to engage her expanded
audience, with poems about sports and popular culture. Her turn toward
the popular won her many fans in her day—her poems appeared on the
front page of the New York Herald Tribune, and in magazines such as
Vogue and The New Yorker aimed at middlebrow audiences with aspira-
tions to elite knowledge. But in the decades after her death her work of
this period was little appreciated, or even discussed, by critics. With time,
however, as celebrity culture has come to be more thoughtfully analyzed,
Moore’s canny negotiation of the multiple audiences for her poetry, her
performance of her insistently democratic George-Washington-in-drag
persona, and the links of that negotiation to prior evolutions in her poet-
ics, is increasingly being recognized and valued.
The fourth section collects three essays on aspects of Moore’s late
phase. As a performer herself, the always-stylish Moore drew on and
expanded her longstanding love of dance in several late works. Aurore
Clavier’s lively essay, “‘The First Grace of Style’: Marianne Moore and
the Writing of Dancing,” explores Moore’s twinned uses of dance: her
miming of dance’s fleeting nature in poems such as “Arthur Mitchell”
(1962) to trope the transitory, ungraspable qualities of a given moment
or person, balanced with her love of the arresting quality of artfully styl-
ized fixed poses that seem to stop time, as expressed in her 1944 essay on
Anna Pavlova and her 1956 poem “Style.”
Focusing on Moore’s final volume, Tell Me, Tell Me (1966), and par-
ticularly its title poem, Zachary Finch emphasizes the personal element in
Moore’s work, frequently overlooked but often underlying. Finch’s care-
ful close reading of this poem makes the case that Moore is telling the
story of her own aesthetic and social development through analogies with
those of Henry James and Beatrix Potter. He demonstrates that she calls
on her readers, through the title’s injunction, to actively engage in the
process of meaning-making with her—like the mice who assist the tailor
in Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester. Elizabeth Gregory’s “Is Andy Warhol
Marianne Moore?” closes out the essay sections with a reading of Moore’s
poem “Rosemary,” which appeared in Vogue’s 1954 Christmas issue, a
few pages away from Andy Warhol’s first Vogue ad. Noting the strong par-
allels between the lives of the two Pennsylvania-raised celebrities, Gregory
explores their shared investment in the liberating possibilities of artistic
and personal self-fashioning and their shared critiques of high/low hier-
archies, and reads their work and careers as both actively subversive of
received ideas—about gender, value, and what constitutes art.
The volume closes with a collection of brief memoirs by six lead-
ing Moore scholars who have been active in opening up Moore stud-
ies to new audiences: Patricia Willis, Bonnie Costello, Cristanne Miller,
Robin Schulze, Linda Leavell, and Heather Cass White. While Moore
studies have been too-long limited by a lack of textual resources, they
have always been rich in the energies and insights of engaged scholars
who have worked individually and collectively to increase access to the
full range of Moore’s work. These accounts provide a quick retrospec-
tive of the trajectory of Moore studies over the past 40 years that has
brought us to the current renaissance and they foresee new avenues of
future endeavor, both editorial and critical, that will put ever-expanding
audiences in conversation with Moore’s democratic genius. She will be
here when the next critical waves have gone by.
Notes
1. This poem was first published in The Egoist (April 1918) as “Melancthon,”
republished in Poems, Observations and Selected Poems as “Black Earth,”
then retitled “Melancthon” for the Collected, and omitted from the
Complete.
2. Willis 1990; Parisi 1990; Leavell, et al. 2005.
Works Cited
Leavell, Linda, Cristanne Miller, and Robin G. Schulze (eds.). 2005. Critics and
Poets on Marianne Moore: “A Right Good Salvo of Barks.” Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press.
Moore, Marianne. [1924] 2016. Observations. ed. Linda Leavell. New York:
Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
INTRODUCTION 11
Parisi, Joseph (ed.). 1990. Marianne Moore: The Art of a Modernist. Ann Arbor,
MI: University of Michigan Press.
Raphel, Adrienne. 2016. “The Marianne Moore Revival.” The New Yorker
(April 13): online.
Schulze, Robin G. 1996. “The Frigate Pelican’s Progress: Marianne Moore’s
Multiple Versions and Modernist Practice.” In Margaret Dickie and Thomas
J. Travisano eds. Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their
Readers, 117–139. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Willis, Patricia C. (ed.). 1990. Marianne Moore: Woman and Poet. Orono, ME:
National Poetry Foundation.
PART I
Moore’s Methods
Marianne Moore’s Gustatory Imagination
Robin G. Schulze
I have to admit that, while I love Linda’s Leavell’s 2013 biography of

Marianne Moore, Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of
Marianne Moore, I also find it disturbing. While I knew that Moore
had made certain sacrifices in order to pursue her life as a poet in the
company of her mother, Mary, I don’t think any of us imagined the
extent of the deprivations involved. Mary held the money. Every penny
that Moore made, whether from salary, poetry, or prizes, went to sav-
ings that Mary never touched. The basement apartment that the two
women shared after they moved to Greenwich Village was tiny and
afforded Moore neither mental nor physical privacy. Mary supervised
Moore’s bedtimes, personal hygiene, and meals, which consisted of mea-
ger fare prepared on a hot plate that Moore ate sitting on the edge of
the bathtub. Thanksgiving dinner one year, Leavell writes, consisted of
leftover sardines. Moore internalized her frustration and anxiety by not
eating. Leavell charts the frightening fluctuations in Moore’s weight.
R.G. Schulze (*)

University at Buffalo, SUNY, Buffalo, USA
© The Author(s) 2018 15

E. Gregory and S.C. Hubbard (eds.), Twenty-First Century
Marianne Moore, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65109-5_2
16 R.G. SCHULZE
Healthy and robust at 130 pounds at best, she frequently dropped

below 90.1 When Moore became attached to a stray kitten the two had
taken in, Mary chloroformed it, ostensibly to save the cost of feeding it
(2013, 206–207).
Food, Glorious Food

While reading any work of art through the artist’s biography has its pit-
falls, Leavell’s revelations have led me back to Moore’s poems with food
on the brain. Leavell’s book prompts the question of Moore’s frequent
use of eating as a metaphor.2 Indeed, throughout her career, many of
Moore’s favorite terms in relation to the production and consumption of
art—fastidiousness, taste, distaste, disgust, and gusto—are terms rooted
in food and appetite. In many of her verses, Moore uses gustatory met-
aphors to encourage her readers to eat up—to ingest new things and
avoid the narrowness of appetite that defines “good taste” as a matter of
exclusion. On the other hand, Moore’s poems appreciate, at times, those
who eat little or nothing at all, adapting themselves to live on “every
kind of shortage.” So how to make sense of Moore’s metaphors of eat-
ing? How do Moore’s poems look different in light of Leavell’s revela-
tions about Moore’s problematic relationship with food?
A good place to start to answer this question is Moore’s poem
“Critics and Connoisseurs.” “Critics and Connoisseurs” is, in essence, a
poem about food. Or, more precisely, a poem about consuming art that
figures this process in terms of eating. Moore first began taking notes
that she would shape into “Critics” in 1914. She did not begin to work
on the poem in earnest, however, until after her now famously trans-
formative ten-day trip to New York City with the Cowdrey sisters in
December of 1915. In a letter to her brother, Warner, Moore referred
to her journey as the equivalent of Moses’ journey across the Red
Sea—a passage of pure emancipation, during which she acquired Alfred
Kreymborg, the irrepressible editor of Others: A Magazine of Verse, as a
mentor, visited Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, and hobnobbed with mem-
bers of the New York artistic avant-garde.3
The trip buoyed Moore at a critical time in her life. In the previous
year, Moore had stepped away from her job teaching at the Carlisle
Indian School and her mother Mary had lost her job as a teacher at
the Metzger Institute. These events, Leavell reports, led to distinct
changes in household habits that put stress on Moore. While a teacher
MARIANNE MOORE’S GUSTATORY IMAGINATION 17
at Metzger, Mary boarded her family at the school and did none of the
cooking. Once she began to cook at home, frugality became the order
of the day. “Priding herself on the thrift of her meals rather than their
heartiness,” Leavell writes, “[Mary] learned that she could get five meals
per week out of one chicken or duck and eat cheese or bacon for the
other two.” Vegetables became a “luxury.” As Mary reported to Warner,
the disruptions led Moore to lose her appetite. “Rat,” she wrote, using
Marianne’s family nickname, “hates his food” (2013, 128–129).
In the face of new regimens, Moore devoted her energy full time to
her poems and, throughout 1914 and 1915, began to write with a new
sense of professional purpose and drive. The trip to New York was part
of a spiritual and bodily renaissance. Released into a new space of free-
dom and possibility, Moore consumed new art of all kinds, an aesthetic
smorgasbord that led her to rethink both the form and the content
of her verse. She also, it seems, ate new foods. As she reported to her
brother, she went one day to lunch at a Turkish restaurant called The
Constantinople. “We had soup and pieces of meat roasted on skewers
and meat fried in grape leaves and rice and pastry and ice cream,” she
gushed to Warner (Moore 1997, 103). The shish kebab and dolmades
were clearly novel and exotic treats.
A product of Moore’s trip to New York and her concerted efforts to
change her poetic style, “Critics and Connoisseurs” strikes most readers
as a bridge to Moore’s mature verse. The poem hinges on two terms,
“unconscious fastidiousness” and “conscious fastidiousness,” and the
images that define them.4 “There is a great amount of poetry,” Moore
begins, “in unconscious/ Fastidiousness.” At first pass, the statement
seems to be an oxymoron. To be fastidious, in the word’s modern sense,
is to be overly nice, exacting to the point of annoying, proper in ways
that are inhibiting. To be fastidious is to be disdainful and prideful and
over think just about everything—the utter antithesis of unconscious-
ness. Moore clarifies her terms, however, by offering examples of what
unconscious fastidiousness looks like:
Certain Ming
Products, imperial floor coverings of coach
Wheel yellow, are well enough in their way but I have seen something
That I like better—a
Mere childish attempt to make an imperfectly ballasted animal stand up,
A determination ditto to make a pup
Eat his meat on the plate. (Becoming 215)
18 R.G. SCHULZE
Beautiful carpets notwithstanding, the soul of “unconscious fastidi-

ousness” lies in the act of training—or trying to train—a puppy. The idea
of getting a wee dog to walk on hind legs and eat from a plate seems
absurdly fussy. Yet, Moore suggests, the activity is elementally different
from a conscious effort to maintain propriety that is rooted in disdain.
Teaching a wobbly little dog table manners is a “mere childish” diversion,
an inconsequential, playful, silly expression of affection. Such attention to
detail is loving and not meant, as Moore would write in another poem
about taste and distaste, to “set people right.” Moore’s best example of
“unconscious fastidiousness” is also one of feeding and being fed. The
owner of the pup offers up food that the pup, it seems, is all too eager to
eat. The puppy is the opposite of fussy. Puppy appetite constitutes a coun-
ter-force to any effort to exact fastidious control over life’s imperfections.
Indeed, as the next three stanzas of the poem reveal, the very notion
of “conscious fastidiousness” that Moore wants so badly to critique is
best imagined in the body of a picky eater:
I remember a black swan on the Cherwell in Oxford

With flamingo colored, maple-
Leaflike feet. It stood out to sea like a battle-
ship. Disbelief and conscious fastidiousness were the staple
Ingredients in its
Disinclination to move. Finally its hardihood was not proof against its
Inclination to detain and appraise such bits
Of food as the stream
Bore counter to it; it made away with what I gave it

To eat. I have seen this swan and
I have seen you; I have seen ambition without
Understanding in a variety of forms. Happening to stand
By an ant hill, I have
Seen a fastidious ant carrying a stick, north, south, east, west, till
it turned on
Itself, struck out from the flower-bed into the lawn,
And returned to the point
From which it had started. Then abandoning the stick as

Useless and overtaxing his
Jaws with a particle of whitewash, pill-like but
Heavy, he again went through the same course of procedure.
(Becoming 215–216)
In the image of the Oxford swan, Moore conflates a closed mind that
won’t accept new ideas with an unadventurous palate that won’t try new
food. Moore’s speaker offers up food to a bird that stands “out to sea
like a battleship,” actively defending itself against anything that it doesn’t
immediately recognize as its usual fare. The swan, Moore states, is a crea-
ture of “staple ingredients,” the routine stuff of a standard diet. While
Moore depicts the puppy as an “imperfectly ballasted” ship, a bundle
of spontaneous energy bound to capsize, the swan is a sturdy ship that
can “stand” very well, thank you. Stolid immobility is its trademark.
“Conscious fastidiousness,” then, is the equivalent of not giving into or
being moved by appetite, of feigning disgust for the sake of a haughty
notion of propriety. The soul of “conscious fastidiousness” is a picky
eater.
It is important to note, however, that the swan does ultimately eat.
The swan’s initial “hardihood,” its stubborn insolence, finally gives
way to its hunger. The bits of food that the swan first views as running
“counter” to its tastes are, in fact, delicious. “Conscious fastidiousness,”
determining what tastes good before one has eaten is, Moore suggests,
utterly foolish.
Moore’s second example of “conscious fastidiousness” pictures a
problematic eater of a different sort. In “The Pangolin,” Moore refers
to the ant as a “tractor of foodstuffs.” In “Critics and Connoisseurs,”
Moore pictures that same ant as unable to figure out what might be fit
to eat. While the swan resists good food because it doesn’t recognize it,
the ant recognizes things as food that it cannot possibly consume. The
ant collects scraps—a stick, a particle of whitewash—that it mistakes for
nourishment and carries them around to no purpose. “Pill like, but/
Heavy,” the whitewash seems like something the ant might be able to
swallow, but it, like the stick, is merely a useless burden, a thing that
it would be poison to actually ingest. The ant grabs whatever is within
reach and thinks it will prove satisfying. Like the swan, the ant deter-
mines what tastes good before it has tasted anything.
What Tastes Good, Good Taste

The genius of Moore’s poem lies in the way she promotes a literally gut-
level engagement with art and ideas over an abstract rubric of aesthetic
discernment. Consuming art properly is the equivalent of eating—of
digesting a work and determining whether, on a deeply personal level, it
20 R.G. SCHULZE
satisfies a hunger. As the title of the poem, “Critics and Connoisseurs,”

implies, those whose job it is to make aesthetic judgments, to determine
matters of “taste,” rarely, in Moore’s opinion, experience art on a vis-
ceral level. In my reading of the poem, Moore finds fault with both con-
noisseurs, those who claim to know about art and collect it, and critics,
those who pass from knowledge and collecting into the realm of judge-
ment. The swan, which judges, makes decisions of taste without sam-
pling the fare; the ant, which collects, does the same thing. As Moore
writes in “Poetry,” academic “dislike” for a work of art is of no conse-
quence if that work appeals to our most basic instincts. “Hands that can
grasp, eyes/ that can dilate, hair that can rise/ if it must” are the tests for
good poetry—the bodily responses that mark a poem as a genuine article
rather than an affected attempt to follow a poetic “course of procedure.”
The connection between food and art was clearly on Moore’s mind
around the time she crafted and published “Critics and Connoisseurs.”
Indeed, images of eating as the equivalent of aesthetic consumption
appear again in the 1916 poems Moore contributed to Guido Bruno’s
quirky Greenwich Village magazine, Bruno’s Weekly. Moore met Bruno
during her December 1915 trip to New York City. As she reported to
her brother, Bruno invited her to partake in his own brand of artistic
smorgasbord. Determined to see Bruno’s garret, an infamous Bohemian
art space on Washington Square, Moore tracked down Bruno at his
Fifth Avenue office when she found the garret locked. Bruno offered to
escort Moore to the garret after he finished his work. To keep her enter-
tained, he passed her a stack of avant-garde publications. She recorded
the moment for her brother in yet another letter: “‘Perhaps you can find
something here,’ he [Bruno] said reaching me a pile of chapbooks and
pamphlets. ‘Look through them.’” Bruno then told her to take what-
ever she might like from the pile. He fished up tickets for her to the lit-
tle Thimble Theater and gave her the last five issues of Bruno’s Weekly.
Ultimately, he ended their visit by serving up an invitation for Moore to
“write for the Weekly” (Moore 1997, 111–112). Of the four poems that
appeared in Bruno’s magazine in October and December of 1916, two,
“Apropos of Mice” and “The Just Man And,” drew parallels between
eating food and devouring art. The little poem “Apropos of Mice”
begins with an invitation to nosh:
Come in, Rat, and eat with me;

One must occasionally—
If one would rate the rat at his true worth—

Practice catholicity.
Cheeseparings and a pork rind

Stock my house—good of their kind
But were they not, you would oblige me? Is
Plenty, multiplicity? (Becoming 370)
Like “Critics and Connoisseurs,” “Apropos of Mice” constitutes a plea

for aesthetic openness made through a meal.5 Moore’s family nickname
was Rat, a male persona she adopted from the classic children’s book The
Wind in the Willows, in which Ratty is a generous and accommodating
soul with literary aspirations. “Apropos of Mice,” pictures the Rat receiv-
ing a rare invitation. Asking a rat to table is not, the speaker of the poem
admits, normal procedure. Keeping rats out of the larder is more the
standard practice. If, however, the speaker concedes, one is to discover
the rat’s “true worth,” to value what it can do, the ideas that it has, and
the art that it makes, one needs to be more comprehensive in one’s own
tastes. To “practice catholicity” is to be open to the idea of sharing what
a rat might find good to eat.
Rats, of course, are already “catholic” sorts when it comes to food. In
the Wind in the Willows, Ratty eats just about everything. He befriends
Mole by offering him lunch. Hauling up an enormous wicker basket, he
announces the menu:
“There’s cold chicken inside it,” replied the Rat briefly;
“coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwi-
chespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater—”
“O stop, stop,” cried the Mole in ecstasies: “This is too much!”
“Do you really think so?” enquired the Rat seriously. “It’s only what I
always take on these little excursions; … ” (Grahame 1915, 8–9).
Compared to Rat in Wind in the Willows, however, the speaker doing

the inviting in Moore’s poem doesn’t have much to offer a rat of wide-
ranging, catholic appetite. The speaker’s cupboard consists of only a few
scraps of cheese and a single pork rind. The meager fare suggests that the
speaker’s own intellectual “stock,” the net “worth” of his or her ideas, is
low indeed even though the speaker considers it his or her job to “rate”
22 R.G. SCHULZE
the rat. The speaker promises that his or her nibbles are “good of their
kind,” but then immediately suggests that they might not be good at all.
“But were they not,” the speaker asks the rat, would you still come to
dinner?
The question turns the poem on its head, a common Moore trick.
The first stanza puts the speaker in charge of determining matters of
taste. It is the speaker who invites the rat to eat—a seemingly big favor
that changes standard “practice.” It is the speaker who claims to have
the power to determine the rat’s value. The second stanza, however,
makes it clear that the rat, too, has power. It might not take the favor of
a bad meal. The rat determines what tastes good, what constitutes “good
taste” for the rat, and the speaker needs to beg the rat to come in and
eat—to take the speaker’s ideas seriously.
The final question that the speaker leaves hanging, “Is/ Plenty, multi-
plicity?” is one that, the poem implies, will determine the rat’s presence
at table. Plenty, the speaker’s questions imply, does not promise multi-
plicity. A table might offer heaps of only one kind of food. If the rat,
however, thinks of multiplicity as a form of plenty, then he will show up
because the lack of sheer abundance of food will be compensated by the
variety of the scraps and the novelty of the company. (In this case the
host offers limited variety and a new context.) The poem thus argues for
the diversity of artistic taste that can bridge gaps and bring thinkers of
all sorts together—multiplicity as plenty. Determining the “true worth”
of things depends on catholicity of taste. Open-minded catholicity, a
comprehensiveness of taste, demands multiplicity in that one must try a
variety of nibbles. Just as in “Critics and Connoisseurs,” Moore pushes
tastemakers to truly ingest things before deciding whether or not they
are “good of their kind”—to be consumers of new experiences, rather
than those who make up their minds before they taste anything at all.
Indeed, the very idea of being utterly open to art of various “kinds”
is one that centrist critics of Moore’s day rarely considered. Moore was
determined, however, to advocate for appetite over and against “con-
scious fastidiousness” when it came to ingesting art. Like “Apropos
of Mice,” “The Just Man And,” also makes the case that consum-
ing only what others deem suitable is deeply unsatisfying. In “The Just
Man And,” Moore invokes the Mother Goose rhyme, “Sing a Song of
Sixpence,” another poem that imagines the acts of feeding and being fed.
To quote the rhyme, which dates back to Tudor England, in full:
Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye,

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie,
When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing,
Was not that a dainty dish to set before the king?
The king was in the counting house, counting out his money;
The queen was in the parlor, eating bread and honey.
The maid was in the garden, hanging out the clothes,
When along came a blackbird and snipped off her nose. (Walter 1919, 15)
The blackbird pie in the rhyme is “dainty,” a term that in the Tudor
period both indicated food pleasing to the palate and food meant to sat-
isfy those who displayed delicate, over-nice tastes. The pie in the rhyme
thus resembles a product of Moore’s maligned “conscious fastidious-
ness,” the careful effort to create a dish that, while it “sings,” leaves the
gut-level appetite unsatisfied. At the end of the rhyme, the live birds fly
away. Lively chaos triumphs over efforts at order. No one gets fed and
the blackbirds wreak their revenge by snipping off noses, key organs of
taste, in the garden.
Moore’s poem recasts the Tudor rhyme as a modernist aesthetic
parable—A further critique of “conscious fastidiousness.”
The Just Man And

His pie. “I would be
Repossessed of all the
Superlatives that I have squandered,
That I might use them in praise of it.”
The four and twenty
Birds were singing while he
Apportioned it off casually
And found in it nothing for himself. (Becoming 371)
The irony of Moore’s poem is that the splendid pie, the pie worthy of
the most florid compliment imaginable, the pie that inspires the “just
man,” who gives everyone and everything its due, to consider all the
superlatives he has ever uttered in praise of anything other than the
pie as “squandered,” that fabulous pie contains, it seems, nothing that
the man really wants to eat. The pie that the “just man,” the man who
decides what is proper, deems so magnificent and worthy of sharing is
24 R.G. SCHULZE
one he doles out “casually,” without truly caring about his own por-
tion. Ultimately, the aesthetic judge who praises the singing, the poetry
the pie represents, finds “nothing” in the pie “for himself.” The pie fails
to inspire his hunger and he never tastes it. The effusive and excessive
acclaim he has offered up is a lie at the level of his own appetite. He, too,
embodies “ambition without understanding,” which, as Moore states in
“Critics and Connoisseurs,” takes a “variety of forms.”
After reading Leavell’s biography, I now see that eating is every-
where in Moore’s poems of the mid-1910s and that it functions as a
key metaphor for making aesthetic and spiritual judgments. The poems
that Moore wrote and published in this period again and again preach
the value of eating broadly and widely—of being comprehensive in
one’s appetites and open to tasting new things. She applauds the cha-
meleon who “snaps the spectrum up for food,” taking in not one, but
all the colors of the rainbow. She appreciates the chameleon-like states-
man Benjamin Disraeli who refuses to see the world as black and white,
but employs instead his “parti-colored mind.” An ideological omnivore,
his flesh is “fed on a fine imagining” (Becoming 181). The speaker of
“Feed Me, Also, River God,” offers up a prayer for food, disparaging
an obsessive singular appetite for pride and power (Becoming 367). In
“The Labors of Hercules,” Moore’s speaker challenges those whose
“austere tastes” never let them try anything new to be open to artis-
tic free play (Becoming 265). In “England,” she berates those who
refuse to consume American art by comparing them to those who do
not eat mushrooms simply because they resemble poisonous toadstools
(Becoming 250–251). Really, it won’t kill you, she chides. Try it, you’ll
like it.
In light of Leavell’s revelations about the many times that Moore sim-
ply stopped eating in response to family stress, however, it seems utterly
poignant that Moore invests so much effort in offering up aesthetic sat-
isfaction as the equivalent of bodily nourishment. As Leavell points out,
Moore hated to be interrupted and told to eat (2013, 162–164). Mary
was a horrible cook and her extreme economies did nothing to improve
the fare she provided. Poems and art and ideas, it seems, were often
Moore’s food—the things she turned to in order to fill herself up and
keep herself going. Playing with the notion of taste, Moore offers an ele-
gant conflation of gustatory and aesthetic appetite that makes sense given
the relish she had for art of all kinds. Sadly, the conflation also makes
some sense in terms of the actual, material deprivations of her home life.
Ultimately, Leavell contends, Moore accepted and adapted to life with

her mother and all its challenges and trials because it granted her enough
intellectual freedom to pursue the literary work she loved.6 Mary was a
complicated and often repressive force in Moore’s life, but the domes-
ticity she provided gave Moore time and space to create. Such a read-
ing of Moore’s relationship with Mary, however, suggests a darker side
to Moore’s indulgence of aesthetic, as opposed to physical, appetite.
Indeed, the evolution of Moore’s poetic images of food and eating sug-
gest that she not only reached a point of acceptance of her home life,
but began to see the constraints as necessary trials—asceticisms, includ-
ing a spare diet, that made her strong and facilitated her vision. Images
of feasting give way, over time, to images of fasting, a shift that reflects
Moore’s evolving sense of both her art and her audience.
One key text that reflects this shift is Moore’s tour de force poem of
the 1920s, “An Octopus.” A poetic journey through the forbidding
landscape of Mount Rainier, Moore’s poem is a masterful considera-
tion of different types of looking, a reflection on how various modes of
observing and encountering the world reveal some truths and obscure
others. Near the end of the poem, Moore lists the variety of ways in
which tourists and adventurers, readers and seekers, assault Mount
Tacoma in quest of knowledge, employing “guns, nets, seines, traps and
explosives” to uncover truths, a bad cocktail of destructive behaviors
that, as the “cool official sarcasm” of the signs on the mountain prohibit-
ing such things suggest, are truly stupid if one wishes to enter paradise.
“It is self evident,” Moore’s speaker confirms,
that it is frightful to have everything afraid of one;

that one must do as one is told
and eat “rice, prunes, dates, raisins, hardtack, and tomatoes”
if one would “conquer the main peak” of Mount Takoma
this fossil flower concise without a shiver,
intact when it is cut,
damned for its sacrosanct remoteness—
like Henry James “damned by the public for decorum”;
not decorum, but restraint;
it was the love of doing hard things
that rebuffed and wore them out—a public out of sympathy with neatness.
Neatness of finish! Neatness of finish!
Relentless accuracy is the nature of this octopus
with its capacity for fact. (Becoming 317)
26 R.G. SCHULZE
In one of the most famous passages in Moore’s verse, Moore again puts
eating front and center. Getting to the main peak of the mountain, to
the windy summit where even the trees are bent double with cold and
stress, requires self-denial. The frigid mountain feels neither cold nor
pain. Whatever vision space the mountain represents, whatever secrets
it holds, are accessible only through similar forms of resistance and
self-abnegation. Rather than urge her seekers on Mount Tacoma to
eat up and indulge their appetites, she insists that those who approach
the mountain must eat next to nothing—dried fruit and hardtack—the
rations for sailors long at sea. Such, Moore suggests, is the sort of diet,
one of neither plenty nor multiplicity, a seeker must endure if he or she is
to understand the mountain at all. Vision requires sacrifice.
Thoughts about what one must eat, or rather NOT eat, in order
to see the summit, however, give way to thoughts about art and, once
again, as In “Critics and Connoisseurs,” about artistic “taste” and the
sorts of art people are inclined to consume.7 The mountain, Moore
asserts, resembles a work by Henry James, an artist “damned by the
public for decorum.” The word “decorum,” is, of course, another word
for “good taste.”8 Readers, Moore suggests, found James off-putting
because he chose to write only for polite society and refused to pander
to the public’s baser needs. The public interpreted his “remoteness” as
a desire to cater to polite aesthetic standards—Moore’s dreaded “con-
scious fastidiousness,” the premeditated squeamishness that rejects
instinctual appetite out of a sense of propriety.
Nothing, Moore concludes, could be farther from the truth. James’
work proved difficult for his readers, Moore asserts, not because of his
“decorum,” but because of his “restraint.” He modulated his passions
and controlled his appetites not to satisfy any sense of social propriety,
but to facilitate his artistic vision. His greatness as an artist was a prod-
uct of his ability to hold back—to do the “hard thing” of not letting
his emotions run so he could see life clearly. His “restraint” was deeply
personal, a part of who he was. He served up his own version of “hard-
tack” to a public used to tea and cakes and ices, to all manner of excess.
The public could not stomach what he served, a “relentless accuracy”
too hard for them to swallow. Hard “facts,” “hardtack,” “Tacoma”—
Moore plays with homonyms that figure James as a necessary timeless
sustenance, the tough, dry, unsalted ration that readers must ingest in
order to travel to the heart of knowledge. Through James, Moore recasts
“unconscious fastidiousness” as a form of necessary asceticism.
Alongside her poems that figure art and ideas in terms of food and
encourage eating, then, there are also poems that valorize resisting rather
than indulging appetite. By the time Moore arrives at “The Hero” in
1932, the height of bravery is to suffer and not say so, to let go and
not covet what you can possibly live without, to feed on what you do
NOT innately desire. “It is not what I eat that is/ my natural meat,/ the
hero says.” Getting to the “rock/ crystal” heart of art and life is a mat-
ter of personal denial (A-Quiver 128). By the the time Moore arrives at
“Rigorists” and “He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron,’” in 1940 and 1941, her
poems picture not only creatures who eat little, but creatures who are
themselves eaten by others—models of restraint and self-sacrifice that
contradict the horrors of the endless, rapacious maw of war. The rein-
deer of “Rigorists” are “adapted// to scant reino,” able to live on little
(Adversity 150–151). The ostrich of “He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron,’” the
title of the poem asserts, digests what is indigestible. It lives on “harde
yron,” John Lyly’s metaphor in Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit—for the
bitter pill of vigorous instruction that all young people must swallow
for their own good. The antipodes of ostrich appetite, the Romans,
Moore’s exemplar of gluttonous imperial power, devour “six hundred
ostrich-brains …/ at one banquet.” “Heroism is exhausting,” Moore
concludes, but it contradicts the “greed” that “swallowed up” all giant
birds into mass extinction with the exception of the ostrich, the lone sur-
vivor that proves the value of living on the sparest of diets as a strategy
of rebellion (Adversity 158–160). These poems posit the value of eating
what one might not find appealing, of learning to live on little or noth-
ing, of ignoring one’s visceral preferences for the sake of a higher pur-
pose. Writing into a world challenged to live on every kind of shortage,
Moore, once again, made adaptive use of her gustatory imagination.
Notes
1.
See Leavell’s summary account of Moore and Mary’s relationship and
Moore’s weight issues (2013, 160–168).
2.
While I know of no other scholar who has systematically approached
Moore’s poetry through images of food, the intersections between food
culture and modernist literary culture have inspired a number of studies,
including Michel Delville’s Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption:
Eating the Avant-Garde, Allison Carruth’s, “War Rations and the Food
Politics of Late Modernism,” Sandra Gilbert’s The Culinary Imagination:
28 R.G. SCHULZE
From Myth to Modernity, and a special issue of Resilience: The Journal of the
Environmental Humanities, devoted to “Tasting Modernism.” Behind all
of these studies lie the earlier works of feminist scholars—such as Gilbert
and Susan Gubar’s, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and
the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, and Leslie Heywood’s,
Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture—that
address literary images of eating and eating disorders in relation to cul-
tural constructions of the female body. In Madwoman, Gilbert and Gubar
analyze the ways in which 19th-century texts valorized the woman of no
appetite as an analog of the “angel in the house,” the perfect, self-sacri-
ficing, self-suppressing female soul with no bodily drives (85–86). In
Dedication to Hunger, Heywood argues that the male authors of high lit-
erary modernism adopted an anorexic aesthetic as a means to distinguish
their art from the personal, the emotional, the bodily, and the feminine
(15–19). White, male, high modernist art suppressed materiality in a quest
for purity beyond appetite, a transformation of female disease into male
textual practice (56). While Leavell clearly states that Moore had anxi-
ety issues throughout her life and ceased eating periodically in response
to stress, she stops short of suggesting that Moore exhibited symptoms
of anorexia nervosa. There is no compelling evidence, Leavell insists, that
Moore struggled with her body image. She lost weight, but she gained it
back. Leavell does speculate, however, that Moore was, either consciously
or unconsciously, trying to avoid the complications of her own sexual mat-
uration after witnessing the conflicts with Mary that attended her brother’s
coming of age (2013, 163–65). Heywood argues that the anorexic woman
is usually a “white male-identified woman” who has accepted white male
philosophical ideals and standards while simultaneously rejecting the tra-
ditional gender roles that go along with those standards (29). Moore, who
openly adopted a male persona in her young years, might fit this descrip-
tion. Moore’s early poems that experiment with the “radical reduction of
the textual body,” however, picture eating widely and well as a sign of cul-
tural health. Her later poems, most of which eschew her earlier compact
style in favor of long passages of free verse filled with complex description,
tend to picture cultural health as a matter of eating little. Such a pattern
works against Heywood’s thesis.
3. See Marianne Moore’s letters to John Warner Moore dated December 12,
1915 and December 19, 1915, in the Selected Letters of Marianne Moore,
103–112.
4. These two terms, and the poem generally, have generated a good deal of
critical commentary. Most critics agree that the poem champions sponta-
neity and naturalness over artificiality and prescriptiveness. In Marianne
Moore, Subversive Modernist, Taffy Martin claims that “Critics and
Connoisseurs” expresses Moore’s philosophy that art need not be “finished,

balanced, or polished” (29). Cristanne Miller follows suit in Marianne
Moore: Questions of Authority. She argues that “Critics and Connoisseurs”
offers an example of Moore’s artistic preference for “beauty” that is “wild,
prickly, and ethical rather than iconic, aesthetic, and elite and for a speaker
who is idiosyncratic and emotional without being . . . representative, or
transcendent.” In “Critics and Connoisseurs,” she continues, “the speaker
unapologetically prefers ‘childish’ behavior to ancient art” (115). Alison
Rieke asserts in “‘Plunder’ or ‘Accessibility to Experience’: Consumer
Culture and Marianne Moore’s Modernist Self-Fashioning” (2003) that
Moore’s creatures in the poem bridge the gap between “poetic artifice and
natural habit” (158–59). I agree that Moore’s poem values an immediate,
instinctual, and highly idiosyncratic response to art that rejects prescribed
notions of artistic value.
In addition, many critics take the swan in the poem to be an image
of the “consciously fastidious” critic and the ant to be an image of the
“unconsciously fastidious” connoisseur. Those who make this distinction
commonly assert that Moore sides with the connoisseur, which is to say
the ant, who seems to love what it loves impulsively, even though Moore
critiques both the swan and the ant as examples of “ambition without
understanding.” For examples, see Jeanne Heuving, Omissions Are Not
Accidents (1992), 59–60, and Evan Kindley, “Picking and Choosing:
Marianne Moore Among the Agonists” (2012). Heuving sees Moore’s
“Critics and Connoisseurs” as championing the “unreasoned and spon-
taneous behaviors” that the poem pictures as nurturing (59–60). But,
she states, the poem ultimately complicates the terms “conscious” and
“unconscious” and finds both the behaviors of swan critic and ant con-
noisseur to be “reasonable and unreasonable behavior” (59). Kindley con-
tends that Moore’s main mission is to dress down the cynical swan critic,
but that she does so by siding with the “lesser of two evils,” the ant con-
noisseur whose trips around the lawn suggest an “idiotic ritual of apprecia-
tion” every bit as bad as the critic’s mean-spirited snub (698). In Criminal
Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery and the Struggle Between the Arts
(2011), Ellen Levy identifies the swan as Moore’s aristocratic connoisseur,
a holder of cultural dominance independent of professional expertise. The
ant, in her reading, is the critic, who labors to make his aesthetic opinions
known. Levy claims that Moore finds something to value and to critique in
each stance toward art. Moore, Levy contends, is less interested in taking
sides in the debate between connoisseur and critic than she is in defining
the intellectual and social “struggle for dominance” (48–49). In my read-
ing of the poem, the direct identification of the creatures as either critic or
connoisseur is not all that important in light of the fact that neither crea-
ture exhibits an instinctual, natural response to animal appetite.
30 R.G. SCHULZE
5. In “Scrapping Modernism: Marianne Moore and the Making of the

Modern Collage Poem” (2011), Bartholomew Brinkman argues that it is
the poem’s already “catholic” speaker who encourages the rat to develop
more “catholic” tastes and find nourishment in poetic source material of
all kinds (48). In my reading of the poem, it is the speaker who conde-
scends to “practice catholicity” in inviting the rat of already “catholic”
tastes to table. The speaker establishes him or herself as the “rater” of rats.
The “one” in the poem’s first stanza and the rat are not the same entity.
6. Such is essentially the driving thesis of Leavell’s biography, which focuses
on the relationship between Marianne Moore and her mother. Over time,
Leavell concludes, Moore made peace with the life she had chosen with
Mary. She came to understand the ways in which her mother’s constrain-
ing brand of love had led to, rather than blocked, her success. The obsta-
cles and frustrations that life with Mary presented kept Moore hungry
for the pure intellectual satisfactions that her work provided. Writing was
Moore’s means of survival. But, Leavell shows, her art came at a high cost.
7. In “‘One must make a distinction, however’: Marianne Moore and
Democratic Taste,” Patrick Redding argues that Henry James was a key
figure for Moore in her efforts to make sense of the role of aesthetic taste
in a democratic culture. “Like James,” Redding argues, “Moore is drawn
to a way of imaging the acquisition of good taste as an aspect of the acqui-
sition of national identity” (305). Like James, Moore was unwilling “to
conflate political equality with an undiscriminating attitude toward liter-
ary style and structure” (307). Instead, her early poetry makes a case that
aesthetic complexity and those who appreciate it are functional expressions
of the individuality that a democratic society is designed to protect (308).
While Moore’s 1916 poems that equate consuming art with eating make
just such an appeal for individual “taste” over and against dictated notions
of “good taste,” “An Octopus” seems to me a darker poem. Redding
does not engage a full-blown reading of “An Octopus,” but he does com-
ment in passing that the poem “celebrates” James’s “’love of doing hard
things.’” The poem, however, also dwells on the sacrifices that attend pur-
suing an individual notion of “taste.”
8. In Quotation and Modern American Poetry: “‘Imaginary Gardens with
Real Toads,’” Elizabeth Gregory traces Moore’s comment about James and
decorum to a remark by Mary Moore that Moore recorded in one of her
conversation notebooks: “Mrs. Moore, commenting on Carl Van Doren’s
The American Novel said: He says what damns James w[ith] the public is
his decorum—It isn’t his decorum it’s his self control, his restraint [,] his
ability to do hard things w[ith] suavity. It wears them out” (214–215).
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Öt napig vártak. Bécs megnyugodott, a nagyok tovább mulattak,
a polgárok tovább küzdöttek az élettel. Metternich bált adott és épen
az ő bálján jött meg a vészhír, hogy Napoleon Cannesnál partra
szállt. Partra szállt és a franciák tárt karokkal fogadják. A sok száz
gyertya fénye egyszerre aludt ki, a táncnak hirtelen vége szakadt. A
szerelem, a mámor édes álmából felébredt mindenki. „Háború!“ ezt a
borzalmas szót suttogták az utcán, a Grabenen, a kávéházakban, a
nagy szalonok sarkában, mintha az égő Moszkva lángjai világítanák
meg ismét a rémületben eltorzult arcokat.
És jöttek az újabb hírek. A császár Lyonban van, a császár Páris
felé vonul! XVIII. Lajos menekül! Napoleon ura ismét
Franciaországnak!
Mária Lujza levelet kapott Napoleontól, a császár hívta őt, a
császár elfoglalta elvesztett trónját, a király elűzve, a nép
lelkesedése határtalan. Jöjjenek Párisba: – Csak te hiányzol nekem,
ma bonne Louise, te és a kis fiam!
A császárné megijedt, a Burgba szaladt ismét a lieber Papahoz,
a lieber Papa rosszkedvű volt. A bécsi nép pedig feketesárga
kocsiját is körülvette és megostromolta szidalmaival a Napoleon
feleségét.
Még akkor is zokogott Mária Lujza, mikor a schönbrunni kastély
feljárójához ért hintója.
Alkonyodott, karos gyertyatartókkal kezükben álltak az inasok a
lépcső alján, francia udvari ruhákban ismét. Montesquiou grófné,
Anatole, Franciska, a kis Napoleon, a titkára Meneval, a komornák,
felolvasónők, egész udvara várta őt.
Mária Lujza leszállt kocsijáról és akkor ujjongva tört ki a
lelkesedés:
– Éljen a császárné, éljen a császár, éljen Mária Lujza!
Anatole magasra emelte a kis Napoleont, aki teli torokból
kiabálta:
– Vive mon papa, vive maman!
Mária Lujza megállt, mosolygott, örült az ünneplésnek. Asszony
volt és hiú, annyi keserűség után, ennyi odaadás meghatotta.
A kis fia feléje szaladt, kézen fogta:
– Úgy-e, megyünk Párisba, haza a papához? Úgy-e, most
mindjárt megyünk?
Mária Lujza pedig csak állt és mosolygott, a sok melegség
simogatta lelkét, nagynak érezte magát, mint egyszer régen a
francia trónon.
Percek teltek el így, mámorosan szép percek. Senki sem vette
észre, hogy Neipperg gróf kocsija befordul a schönbrunni kastély
udvarára és a gróf váratlanul, egyszerre ott állt a feljáró előtt.
Végig jártatta szemét a jeleneten, aztán nyugodtan, fölényesen
meghajolt a császárné előtt.
– Felség, én itt csak zavarok, amint látom. Búcsúzom is, felség…
örökre – tette hozzá és újabb meghajlás után távozott.
Mária Lujza megdöbbenve nézett utána, karjával gyámoltalanul
kapott a levegőbe, mintha támaszt keresne, aztán zsebkendőjét
arcához szorítva, eltűnt a lakosztályában.
– Most mi lesz, istenem, mi lesz? – kérdezte Franciska.
– Most a miénk egészen – felelte diadallal Montesquiou grófné.
– El kell készítenünk mindent az útra – mondta Anatole. – Holnap
reggel Bécsbe kell mennünk. Engedélyt kérünk az elmenetelre,
anyámnak, kegyednek, nekem. A császárnét és a kis fiút
megszöktetjük, míg nem gondol velünk a bécsi udvar, a
kongresszus.
– Holnap Párisba megyünk – ismételgette a kis Napoleon és
boldogan aludt el.
Mária Lujza szobájában ült és sírt. Montebello hercegnő is
bezárkózott, haragudott ma mindenkire és a császárné tudta, hogy
holnap jelentést tesz Bécsben a történtekről. Elmond mindent a
lieber Papanak, az egész kongresszusnak, ha ugyan már eddig is el
nem mondta Neipperg gróf.
Most vége mindennek, nem kapja meg olaszországi birtokait,
semmit sem kap és mehet vissza Napoleonhoz. Megborzongott a
gondolatra. A bizonytalanság érzése a leggyötrőbb volt rá nézve.
Lusta természete az egyforma, derűs nyugalmat szerette. A
császárság bukásakor iszonyúan szenvedett és most megint
megpróbáltatások várjanak rá? Nem, nem, soha!
Éjféltájban Montesquiou grófné kopogott ajtaján, Mária Lujza
bebocsájtotta, este ugyan megtiltotta, hogy bárki is zavarja, de
boldog volt, hogy végre megszegik tilalmát.
– Olyan szerencsétlen vagyok, grófné – nyögte panaszosan.
A grófné mosolyogva nézte:
– Felséged szerencsétlen, mikor egy egész ország lelkesedve
várja?
– Én nem akarok Párisba menni, nekem nem kell Franciaország,
nem kell, nem kell…
Úgy ismételgette, mint egy makacs gyermek.
– Felséged úgy fog cselekedni, amint jónak látja. De talán mégis
meg kellene gondolnunk, hogy mi lesz akkor, ha más kibúvó nem
maradna, mint visszatérnie a császárhoz.
Mária Lujza letörölte könnyeit és határozottan válaszolt:
– Visszavonhatatlanul, szentül elhatároztam, hogy sohasem
térek vissza a császárhoz.
A grófné mosolygott, biztos volt a dolgában, Neipperg gróf
elment, haragosan távozott, Mária Lujza az övék, csak gyorsan kell
cselekedniök.
Lefektette síró úrnőjét és mellette maradt, míg elaludt, szipogva
álmában, mint egy meggyötört, megkínzott kis gyerek. A grófné
hosszan nézte őt és haragosan gondolta el, hogy ez a szőke, puha,
illatos kis nő, mennyire nem érdemli meg a nagyot, a szépet, melyre
az élet kiszemelte.
De mit is várnak tőle, mit remélnek a franciák egy Habsburg-
főhercegnőtől? Ez a semmitmondó, üres kis teremtés legfeljebb
családjához tud ragaszkodni, nagy eszmék nem férnek meg
alacsony, széles homloka mögött és szétálló kék szemét Neipperg
grófért sírta vörösre, utána való szerelmes bánkódásában.
A grófné nem szerette, lenézte úrnőjét és egy pillanatig arra
gondolt, hogy talán jobb lenne itthagyni őt sírni, szipogni, sóhajtozni
és elvinni a kis Napoleont egyedül. De a császár érdeke mást
parancsol, a császár Lujzáját várja és ő el fogja vinni hozzá
mindenáron.
A grófné kisurrant a szobából.
– Nos, mit mondott? – kérdezte Franciska, aki izgatottan, dobogó
szívvel várt reá.
– Semmit, azaz nem is tudom, mindegy, Neipperg gróf nem áll
utunkban, Bécstől fél, holnap egész bizonyosan indulunk, legyen
nyugodt, gyermekem. Menjen, pihenjen keveset, nagy dolgok várnak
reánk.
– Jó éjszakát, grófné!
A grófné karjába zárta a leányt:
– Aludjék jól, Franciskám.
– Istenem, ki tud most aludni? – Franciska becsomagolta
utazótáskáját, legszükségesebb holmiját gyömöszölte csak bele és a
„Járj szerencsésen“ felírás szépen kitömve domborodott szobája
sarkában.
A hajnal útrakészen találta barna ruhájában, a bársonymellényke
alatt pedig ott rejtőzött a Napoleon képe, meg a vörös daru. Épen
úgy állt türelmetlenül szobája ablakában, mint néhány hónapja
alkonyatkor, mikor Jósikát várta, hogy elhagyja vele örökre otthonát.
Milyen nagy izgalom volt az akkor és milyen semmi ma már, mennyi
esemény választja el életét attól az alkonyattól. És mégis, ami eddig
történt, az mind csekély és semmitmondó. Mit jelent most már
csalódása a nagy világban, mit jelent szerelmi kalandja, mit a cár,
Metternich és Schönbrunn, mikor holnap indul, meglátni Napoleont?
Beszélni fog vele, hallani fogja hangját, egy köszönő kézszorítást is
kap talán, amiért segített visszavinni hozzá a feleségét és kis fiát.
Igen, ő a császár karjába vezeti Mária Lujzát, ha bele is pusztul az
önfeláldozásba.
– A világtörténelemnek vagyunk most segédei – mondta Anatole
– és azért meghalni is érdemes.
Ez tetszett Franciskának, boldognak érezte magát, hiszen csupa
élemény volt körülötte minden, merész tettek és nagy szavak.
Reggel Bécsbe ment Anatole-lal, hogy előkészítsen mindent az
útra. Szüksége volt rá mindenkinek, a grófné reszkető izgalmában
alig bírt cselekedni, Anatolenak vigyáznia kellett és Franciskára
bízott minden szót, minden rendelkezést. Déltájban tértek vissza.
Kopogtattak Montesquiou grófné ajtaján.
– Ki az? – kérdezte a grófné.
– Franciska, Anatole.
Óvatosan nyitott nekik ajtót a grófné:
– Isten hozott, gyerekek. Mi újság?
– Minden rendben van, anyám. Hát itt mi történt?
– Semmi, fiam. A császárné egész délelőtt egyedül volt. Nem
fogadott senkit. Kétségbe van esve, Neipperg gróf elhagyta,
Montebello hercegnő haragszik és a hercegnő kedélyhangulatának
mindig nagy befolyása volt a Mária Lujzáéra. Kétségbeesését kell
kihasználnunk, a kis Napoleont útrakészen visszük elébe és
választania kell fia és Bécs között. Az egész ház a pártunkon van, itt
nem állja utunkat senki sem, de ma okvetlen mennünk kell, míg
Bécs nem gyanakszik.
– Hátha máris gyanakszanak? – kérdezte ijedten Franciska. Ő a
legjobban félt, mert ő saját sorsáért küzdött. Elhitette ugyan
magával, hogy amit tesz, merő önfeláldozás, de tulajdonképen úgy
érezte, hogy minden csak érte történik.
A grófné türelmetlenül nézett fel írásairól, melyeket rendezgetett:
– Istenem, gyermekem, hogy kérdezhet ilyesmit? Az ember az
életben vagy nyer, vagy veszít, de a szerencsejátékhoz mindig azzal
a reménnyel ülünk le, hogy nyerni fogunk. Ezt jegyezze meg
magának, a sors is csak kockajáték, Franciska. Készen van az útra?
– Készen, grófné.
– Akkor jó! Most majd bezárjuk a hercegnő lakosztályát, a kulcs
nálam van, ő ma nem mozdul ki onnan, aztán megyek a
császárnéhoz. Legyen kéznél, Franciska, mert segítenie kell
csomagolni Őfelsége holmiját. Tehát szerencse fel, a kockát elvetjük
és…
– Nyerünk – mondta Anatole.
– Reménylem, fiam, mert tétünk nagyon magas.
– Az életünk, anyám.
Néma, aggódással teli percek, Anatole a Franciska kezét fogta,
úgy álltak egymás mellett szótlanul. Megkínozta őket már a sok
izgalom, az álmatlan éjjel. Kimerült testük, lelkük, csak nagy
reménységük élt bennük, az volt az erő, amely lábon tartotta, amely
élni, cselekedni késztette. A szemük égett, az ajkuk remegett és
mosolyogva fogadtak volna egy földrengést is.
A grófné lezárta a hercegnő lakosztályát, a kulcsot zsebébe
rejtette, aztán halkan nyitott be a császárné előszobájába. Egy-két
lépést tett előre, szétnézett, hogy nincs-e ott senki, aki bejelentse? A
szoba üres volt, a grófné a következő ajtó felé tartott és akkor halk
zizzenés riasztotta fel. Selyemsuhogás volt, de nem az ő ruhájának
hangja, rajta kívül még valakinek az uszálya játszott a padlón.
Körültekintett, az ablakfüggöny mozdult és Montebello hercegnő
állt előtte gúnyos nevetéssel:
– Bocsánat, grófné, Őfelsége senkit sem fogad.
– A kis Napoleon őfelségétől jövök – suttogta sápadtan a grófné.
– Szíveskedjék várni. Neipperg gróf van Őfelségénél, fontos
dologról tárgyalnak.
– Neipperg gróf?…
– Valóban ő. Miért csudálkozik úgy grófné, és miért van úgy
megrémülve? Várjon, hozatok egy pohár vizet. Üljön le addig is.
Montesquiou grófné megkínzott szegény szívére szorította kezét,
aztán büszkén, nyugodtan felelt:
– Köszönöm, nincs szükségem semmire. Egy fél óra mulva
visszatérek.
– Sajnálom, grófné, itt kell maradnia. Épen hivatni akartam.
Parancsom van, felsőbb parancsom.
– Akkor természetesen maradok.
A grófné egy székre roskadt, attól félt, hogy elájul. Szeme a
hercegnő ruhájának sárga selymére tapadt, melyen aranyosan
játszottak a téli nap sugarai. Minden, de minden elveszett.
Halántékán apró, hideg izzadságcseppek gyöngyöztek, a sárga
ruháról vörös karikák táncoltak feléje… most, most leesik a székről,
elterül a padlón és nem fog tudni többé semmiről. Hirtelen
összeszedte minden akaraterejét, szédülő fejét hátra hajtotta egy
pillanatra, néhányszor mély lélekzetet vett, aztán összefonva ölében
kezét, várta, hogy rászakadjon mindaz a szomorúság, amit a sors
még tartogat számára.
Neipperg gróf levelet diktált Mária Lujzának és a kisírt szemű
császárné engedelmesen írta úgy, amint a gróf kívánta:
„Drága jó atyám, ebben a pillanatban, amikor egy újabb
krízis fenyegeti Európa nyugalmát és mikor engem is újabb
csapás szorongat, amelynek felhői fenyegetőleg gyülekeznek
fejem felett, nem találhatok biztosabb menedéket és
jótékonyabb védelmet, mint azt, melyet magam és fiam
számára atyai gyengédségétől kérek. A legjobb apa karjába
menekülök azzal együtt, aki ezen a világon legközelebb áll
szívemhez. Az ön kezébe, az ön atyai védelmébe teszem le
sorsomat, nem helyezhetném magasztosabb vezetés alá,
tudom. Nem ismerek más akaratot, mint az önét. Legyen oly
kegyes és irányítsa a nehéz pillanatban gyengéd
gondoskodással lépteimet. Határtalan alázatosság legyen
első hódoló jele hálámnak és mély ragaszkodásomnak,
melyek után tisztelettel eltelve, maradok jó atyámnak
engedelmes leánya,
Mária Lujza.“
A császárné letette tollát és aggódó kék szemét a gróf arcára
szegezte.
– Ha felséged valamit változtatni óhajtana a levélen, úgy csak
kegyeskedjék nyugodtan eleget tenni óhajának – mondta a gróf
hidegen.
– Oh nem, köszönöm, nagyon szép levél. A lieber Papa meg lesz
elégedve, azt hiszem.
– Nagyon boldog vagyok, hogy felséged egyetért velem.
– Istenem, én… hogyne értenék egyet… Mondja, haragszik?
Halk, aggódó kérdés volt.
Neipperg gróf finoman elmosolyodott, tartásának ridegsége is
megenyhült kissé és mély, ellenállhatatlanul rezgő hangján mondta:
– Én? Hogy mernék én haragudni felségedre? Felségednek
alázatos, hű lovagja vagyok. Azt hiszem, az, hogy ma eljöttem ismét
felségedhez, végtelen ragaszkodásomnak, tiszteletemnek biztos
jele.
– Köszönöm – susogta Mária Lujza.
– Nincs mit köszönnie felségednek, amit felségedért teszek, azt
magamért teszem, mert a boldogságot jelenti számomra.
– Tegnap miért hagyott itt?
A gróf hódolattal csókolta meg a feléje nyújtott gödrös, fehér, kis
kezet, ez a csók válasz volt a duzzogó kérdésre, melyre nem
felelhetett, mert nem mondhatta meg úrnőjének, hogy távozásával
bánatot akart okozni neki és biztos megbánást.
– Annyit sírtam az éjjel, – csicseregte Mária Lujza – egész vörös
lett a szemem, még most is vörös és az orrom is vörös. De most már
minden jó. Montesquiou grófné bejött hozzám és…
Hirtelen elhallgatott, elpirult, eszébe jutott, hogy ha most elárulja
a grófnét, vesztét okozza neki.
– Milyen jó szíve van felségednek – jegyezte meg elismeréssel a
gróf. – De nem kell a grófnét féltenie, nem lesz semmi bántódása.
Azonban, azt hiszem, most már felségednek sem lesz az ellen
kifogása, ha az összes franciák elhagyják udvarát és a kis herceg
nevelését is másra bízzuk.
Mária Lujza elsápadt, maga is megijedt a grófné eltávolításától, a
grófné úgy szerette a Napoleon szőke kis fiát és határtalanul jó volt
hozzá:
– Szegény grófné, úgy sajnálom őt, – rebegte könnyes szemmel
– de legyen minden úgy, amint a lieber Papa jónak látja, amint ön
akarja.
A császár engedelmes leánya, egy odaadó szerelmes nő nézett
könnyes szemmel a grófra. Nyert ügyük volt!
– Úgy-e, sohasem hagy el engem? – kérdezte halkan,
gyengéden Mária Lujza.
– Soha, amíg felséged is úgy akarja.
A Napoleon felesége felállt, a gróf nyaka köré fonta karját, vállára
hajtotta ostoba, bodros, szőke fejecskéjét és szerelmesen suttogta:
– Nincs is nekem senkim e világon, csak ön egyedül.
– Felség!
Neipperg gróf magához szorította a szép, puha asszonyt és
megcsókolta forrón, hosszan.
Montesquiou grófné soká várt, de nem vette észre a percek
mulását, hely, idő és cselekmények összefolytak egy nagy, tompa
kétségbeesésbe.
Végre megjelent a küszöbön Neipperg gróf és meghajolt
Montebello hercegnő felé:
– Kérem, hercegnő, Őfelsége szeretne beszélni kegyeddel.
A sárga selyemruha eltűnt a szomszéd szobában és a gróf
áldozatához lépett:
– Grófné, néhány szavam volna kegyedhez! Vezessem
szobájába?
– Nem, köszönöm, meghallgathatom itt is.
– Félek, súlyosan fogja érinteni kegyedet, grófné.
– Engem már nem érinthet súlyosan semmi.
– Az sem, ha a fiáról van szó?
A grófné felállt, az arca még haloványabb lett, szinte eltorzult a
rémülettől:
– A fiam? Mit akarnak tenni a fiammal?
Szóval bűnösebb, mint hittem, gondolta a gróf, de arcán nem
látszott meg, hogy egyáltalán gondol valamit, nyugodt maradt,
hidegen és udvariasan szólt:
– Kedves fiának nem történik semmi bántódása. Amint
értesültem, ma engedélyt kért a rendőrségtől, hogy elhagyhassa
Bécset, nos, mi csak azt kívánjuk, hogy még ma csakugyan
távozzék, úgy amint maga is óhajtotta. Most pedig kérem, grófné,
kegyedhez is volna egy kérésem: Ferenc császár Őfelsége nagyon
óhajtaná látni kis unokáját, miután azonban Őfelségét makacs
náthája meggátolja abban, hogy kijöjjön Schönbrunnba, a kis Ferenc
herceget szeretném elvinni hozzá. Előreláthatólag a kis herceg
hosszabb ideig fog a Burgban tartózkodni, azért szíveskedjék
intézkedni, hogy erre való tekintettel csomagoljanak számára.
Kegyedet, grófné, nem fogjuk zaklatni, nem kell elkísérnie a
herceget, ha pedig esetleg honvágya volna Páris után, a császár
Őfelsége nem fog akadályt gördíteni az elé, hogy viszontláthassa
szeretett hazáját.
– Köszönöm Őfelsége határtalan kegyességét – felelte gúnyosan
a grófné, büszkeségének épségben maradt utolsó foszlányával. –
Engedelmével, gróf, most távozom, hogy eleget tegyek a császár
óhajának.
Bólintott és elhagyta a szobát, végtelen bánatával, amely ezek
között a halványzöld selyem falak között szakadt szegény,
meggyötört szívére. Elvették tőle a kis Napoleont, elvették tőle, az
apjától és Franciaországtól örökre.
XXIII. FEJEZET.
Megvan-e még a vörös daru?
Szabadságon járt otthon Erdélyben Jósika Bethlen Jánossal

együtt és mikor két hét mulva visszatértek Bécsbe, ezredüknek hült
helyét találták.
A fejedelmek megkötötték újból szövetségüket Napoleon ellen,
elhatározták, hogy fegyvert fognak a Bourbonok érdekében és
Ferenc császár útnak indította csapatait a francia határra.
A Colloredo Jeromos gyalogezred elsőnek hagyta el Bécset.
Jósikával levélben közölte ezredese a napot, melyen Linzben fognak
pihenni.
A kis kapitánynak sietnie kellett, lázasan csomagolt, másnap
hajnalban indulni készült.
Vidáman fütyörészve rakosgatta kincseit, nem búsúlt, hogy vége
a bécsi életnek, szerette a hadjárat izgalmait, örömmel álmodott hősi
kalandokról és játszott a halál gondolatával.
Kis szobáját feldúlta teljesen, szanaszét hevertek könyvei, ruhái,
száraz virágokon taposott, és kék selyemszalaggal átkötött hajfürt
kandikált ki egy szék lába alól.
Jósika Miklós báró háborúba készült, elpusztította, kiirtotta, holtra
gázolta a multat és új élmények számára készítette elő a jövőt.
Egy aranyos legyező került kezébe. Kié is volt? Már igazán nem
tudta. Leült egy pillanatra, legyezni kezdte magát és tündéri szép
bálokon kereste a könnyű kis jószág tulajdonosnőjét. Hiába, nem
találta meg, de az illatos szellő, melyet a legyező könnyű selyme
hozott feléje, nagyon kedves volt és azért gyors elhatározással
belegyömöszölte a legyezőt csomagjába, hogy mégis vigyen valami
emléket is magával Bécsből. Tábortűz mellett majd újra keresheti
ábrándozva szőke vagy barna tulajdonosnőjét és nyomában járva,
végig éli a sok elmult szép báli éjszakát.
A legény kopogott:
– Kapitány úr kérem.
– Mi kell már megint? – kérdezte Jósika.
– Egy hölgy keresi a kapitány urat.
– Egy hölgy?
Vajjon melyiküknek olyan nehéz az elválás? gondolta vidáman a
kis báró.
– Bocsásd be. Mondd, hogy csomagolok, hogy nagy a
rendetlenség, de azért csak jöjjön.
Egy türelmetlen hosszú perc, aztán nyílott az ajtó és a küszöbön
ott állt Müller Franciska, nagy sötét gallérjában, amint Jósika már
egyszer látta útrakészen. A rózsaszínű csokor épúgy volt megkötve
álla alatt és kezében jól ismert kis csomagját szorongatta: „Járj
szerencsével.“
– Jó estét, báró úr!
– Franciska!
A viszontlátás váratlan volt és csudálatos. Franciska is érezte
ebben a pillanatban. Míg elszökött Schönbrunnból, míg gyorsan
ment Bécs felé, míg a Grabenen bolyongott céltalanul, míg az Alser-
laktanyát kereste, míg megtalálta Jósikát, gyors elhatározás izgalma
űzte tovább, lépésről-lépésre. Sietett, a könnyelmű tettek mindig
sietésre késztetnek, mert minden pillanatnyi megállásban ott rejtőzik
a meggondolás és a megbánás.
Jósika közelebb lépett a leányhoz:
– Boldog vagyok, hogy újra látom. Jöjjön, üljön le Franciska
kisasszony és mondja el, mi hozta hozzám. No jöjjön, jöjjön.
Elvette utazótáskáját, kézenfogta, egy székhez vezette,
lesegítette válláról köpenyét, megoldotta álla alatt a nagy fekete
kalap szalagcsokrát, de Franciska nem szólt, annyit mondott csak:
– Istenem – aztán kezébe temette arcát és úgy maradt
mozdulatlanul.
Jósika meghatottan nézte. Most mit tegyen? Valami olyat akart
tenni, ami jó és kellemes. Végre mentőgondolata támadt, kihúzta
csomagjából az aranyos legyezőt és szótlanul legyezni kezdte vele
szép, néma vendégét.
Franciska felnézett, mosolygott:
– Köszönöm, nagyon kedves, jól is esik, olyan melegem lett a
futástól.
– Hát honnan szaladt, miért szaladt? Bántotta valaki? Jaj annak,
aki bántotta. Milyen édes, hogy hozzám menekült.
– Igazán önhöz menekültem.
– De hogy és miért? Mondjon el nekem mindent, Franciska. Mi
bántja? Nagyon szeretnék segíteni kegyeden.
Franciska bizalommal, kedvesen nézett Jósika szemébe:
– Nagyon bajos ám rajtam segíteni, azt hiszem, nem is lehet.
– Pedig én mindent megtennék, ami módomban áll, higyje el.
Nagyot vétettem kegyed ellen, nem lett volna szabad elvinnem
Óbudáról, tudom.
Franciska fejét rázta:
– Úgysem maradtam volna akkor már otthon.
– Lehet, de jobb lett volna, ha másra vár.
– Kire vártam volna?
– Hardeneggre, Hardenegg nagyon szerette kegyedet.
Franciska megvetően biggyesztette ajkát:
– Szeretett? Azt olyan könnyű mondani.
Jósika megfogta a leány kezét.
– Nem szabad róla így beszélnie, Franciska. A gróf nagyon
szenvedett, mert elvesztette kegyedet. Komolyan szenvedett. Azt
hiszem, sohasem szeretett még senkit és nem is fog talán.
Kerestette kegyedet Óbudán, a nagynénjéhez akarta hozni Bécsbe
és végtelenül szomorú volt, mert nem találta ott többé, még pedig az
én hibámból. Itt járt nálam, tőlem kérte számon és én nem tudtam
megmondani, merre jár, mert engem is elhagyott, kis hűtelen.
Franciskát meghatotta, amit most hallott, megbánás is ébredt
szívében és egy pillanatra megértette, hogy sok mindent elhibázott
szegény kis életében és talán el is rontott örökre. Legyen a
feleségem! – ezt egyedül Hardenegg mondta neki. Szeretem! azt
hallotta mástól is. Szomorúan bólíntott egynéhányszor, de nem
akarta, hogy Jósika észrevegye bánatát, a világért sem akarta és
látszólag egykedvűen válaszolt:
– Ami elmult, elmult.
– Igaza van, Franciska, de azért mi most mégis a multról fogunk
beszélni, sok mindennel kell beszámolnia. Kezdje el a gyónást. Hova
tűnt el a pesti bálról?
– Hagyjuk, az már nagyon régen volt. Később elmesélem azt is.
Most engedje, hogy a végén kezdjem. Schönbrunnban éltem azóta
nyugodtan, csendesen, egész addíg, míg Napoleon vissza nem tért,
aztán… aztán sok minden történt, a vége az volt, hogy ma reggel
Metternich herceg barátságosan megizente nekem, hogy hagyjam el
Schönbrunnt. Olyan csúnya volt, a kis Napoleont is elvitték, egyedül
hagytak, Montesquiou grófné bezárkózott a szobájába, nem is láttam
azóta. Ott hagytam minden holmimat, eljöttem, megszöktem, nem
bírtam maradni. Ma reggel a Grabenen megláttam önt messziről,
szerettem volna megszólítani, de elvesztettem szem elől. Hiába
kerestem, aztán olyan nehezen tudtam meg, hol lakik, és soká
bolyongtam, míg ide találtam. Nincs barátom, senkit sem ismerek,
mondja meg hát, merre menjek, mit tegyek?
– De édes Franciska, én holnap hajnalban elmegyek Bécsből,
messzire, a háborúba, Napoleon ellen, Linzben érem utól az
ezredemet.
– Istenem, hát velem mi lesz?
– Szegényke! – Jósika a leány kezét simogatta, aztán melegen
szólt hozzá: – Nézze, Franciska, menjen el a Hardenegg
nagynénjéhez, én elvezetem hozzá.
Franciska hevesen rázta a fejét:
– Nem, nem, azt nem.
– Miért nem?
– Mert nem lehet, nem szabad.
– Nem szereti Hardenegget?
– Nem tudom, hagyja, erről ne beszéljünk, kérem.
A hangja sírásba fúlt, izgatott volt, fájdalmas emlékek gyötörték
és a sok álmatlan éjszaka kimerítette, elgyengítette egészen.
Jósika nem mert ellenkezni vele:
– Nézze, Franciska, – mondta gyengéden – most fáradt, nagyon
fáradt, látom, jöjjön, feküdjék le szépen.
– Nem, nem.
– De igen, fogadjon szót. Ledől az ágyamra, kicsit alszik, aztán
nyugodtan elhatározzuk a többit. Legyen jó, drága Franciska.
Franciska pihenni vágyott, a kényeztető szavak legyőzték,
elgyengítették akaraterejét és megengedte, hogy Jósika kézenfogva,
a hálószobájába vezesse, egy nagy fehér vánkost tegyen feje alá,
megsimogassa homlokát és betakargassa könnyű paplanával.
Kábultan húnyta le szemét, Jósika lábujjhegyen osont ki, és
Franciska néhány perc múlva már mélyen aludt.
A kis báró benézett halkan, óvatosan, aztán leült szemben az
álmodó leánnyal és elhagyott sorsán gondolkozott. Mit tegyen vele,
mit tehet érte? Mit szólna Hardenegg, ha látná? Vajjon a Palatinus-
huszárok elmentek-e már? Azt kellene tudni. Gyors elhatározással
nyúlt sapkája után, felkötötte kardját és sietve hagyta el az Alser-
laktanyát.
Nem találta a lakásán Hardenegget, de a legénye azt mondta,
hogy bizonyosan a nagynénjénél van. Már neki is mindene be volt
csomagolva és Jósika sietett, szaladt, nehogy későn érkezzék.
Csakugyan Fini nénitől búcsúzott Hardenegg. Kedves, öreg,
loknis nagynénje álmodozva, szomorúan simogatta fiatal kedvence
szőke fejét.
– Szomorú vagyok, hogy elmész fiam, de talán most majd mégis
el fogod őt felejteni. Máriácska tegnap is nálam járt délután, olyan
kedves leány. Mondd, Rudi, még mindig csak azt a hűtlen Franciskát
szereted?
– Arany haja volt, Fini néni, könnyed járása, édesen remegő
szája, és én többé sohasem látom talán.
Fini néni nagyot sóhajtott:
– Mein lieber Gott, csak Mária Terézia élne még.
Ha bánata volt, mindig a császárnéját hívta segítségül, mert ő
volt a legbölcsebb, a legjobb.
Olyan csendes volt a búcsú az öreg házban, két némán
szenvedő ember sorsa lélegzett csak a régi falak között. De akkor
sarkantyúpengés verte fel a fehér lépcsők nyugalmát, hangosan jött
Jósika, kardját csörtetve, mint a követelő, betolakodó fiatalság maga.
Gyorsan, izgatottan beszélt, Fini néni fürtjei soha így még szét nem
zilálódtak és lihegve, kezét szívére szorítva, reszketve mondta:
– Hozd el őt hozzám, Rudi, azért csak hozd ide, ha megérdemli
még szerelmedet.
– Tudtam, hogy minden rendbe jön, – újjongott Jósika.
– Édes, jó Fini tanti – köszönte Hardenegg.
*
Franciska soká aludt, fáradtan nyitotta ki szemét, szétnézett,
mély álma után nehéz volt megbarátkoznia az ággyal, a szobával,
ahol a valóságra ébredt. Hirtelen elmult kábultsága, mert tágranyilt
tekintete egyszerre a Hardenegg arcára tapadt, aki mellette ülve,
szótlanul nézte őt. Franciska felugrott, kontyához kapott, arcába
hulló haját rendezgette, lesimította barna ruháját, aztán
gyámoltalanul esett le a keze, és nem mert többé mozdulni sem.
Hardenegg felállt:
– Milyen kedves, Franciska kisasszony, hogy ma is azt a ruhát
viseli, melyben először láttam.
– Miért jött ide, Istenem, miért jött ide? – kérdezte Franciska.
– Haragszik?
– Nem haragszom, csak…
– No csak?
– Szégyenlem magamat.
– Miért?
– Nem tudom.
A beszélgetés megakadt. Ott álltak egymás mellett, egy összetört
leány és egy reménykedő férfi, akinek arcáról lassan tűnt el az öröm.
– Ha nem akarja, hogy itt legyek, elmehetek ismét.
– Igen, azt hiszem, jobb lesz, ha elmegy – mondta Franciska,
aztán kezébe temetve arcát, várta, hogy Hardenegg Rudolf gróf még
egyszer és most már utoljára tűnjék el életéből.
Úgy állt, mint egy letört virág, összetépve, megkínozva.
Hardenegg csak a haját látta, kontyba fésült, különös, szép haját és
nem tudott elmenni. Arra az estére gondolt, mikor Óbudán, a
kapualjában a gyertya remegett kezében. Akkor el kellett hagynia,
most már nem hagyja el többé, megmenti, felemeli, megvigasztalja.
Ha az ő szerelmének nincs gyógyító ereje, akkor minek is volnának
nagy érzések a világon?
– Nem hagyom el, Franciska – mondta határozottan. – Nem
megyek el, még ha küldeni akar, akkor sem. Tudom, hogy
elhagyatott és szerencsétlen. A kegyed élete senkinek sem olyan
drága, mint énnekem, és nekem jogom van a kegyed életéhez. Én
gondoskodni fogok kegyedről, Franciska. Nekem van egy
nagynéném, Fini tant, úgy szólítom őt. Kedves, fehérhajú, öreg
hölgy. Azt mondta nekem, most, mikor idejöttem, hogy hozd el őt
hozzám, ha megérdemli a szerelmedet. Nekem holnap indulnom kell
a csapatommal, elviszem hát hozzá, ott marad nála, míg én
visszatérek. Ha pedig nem térnék vissza, akkor nála marad addig,
míg valaki jön, aki úgy szereti, mint én szerettem, édes Franciska.
Úgy-e eljön velem az én kedves, öreg tantimhoz?
– Én nem mehetek el önnel.
– Miért nem?
– Mert nem érdemlem meg a szerelmét.
Franciska elfordult, az ablakhoz lépett. Most mindennek vége,
gondolta és várta, hogy Hardenegg elmegy szó nélkül, megvetéssel
szívében és megszabadul gyötrő jóságától.
Hardenegg azonban nem ment, nem ment, mert nem hitt
Franciskának és nem is akart hinni, szerette őt igazán, jónak,
szépnek kívánta, de nem hagyta volna el semmiképen, mert
szerencsétlennek látta és elhagyottnak.
– Franciska, szeret valakit?
Olyan szomorúan kérdezte, hogy Franciskának felelnie kellett:
– Nem szeretem már, vagy talán igen, nem tudom.
– Szerette és rossz volt kegyedhez, úgy-e?
Franciska bólintott.
– Nagyon szerette? – féltékeny harag volt most a Hardenegg
hangjában.
Franciska feléje fordult, ránézett, de aztán lesütötte a szemét:
– Nem tudom… Miért kínoz, mit akar tőlem? Hagyjon el kérem.
Hardenegg megfogta a Franciska tehetetlenül lecsüngő kezét:
– Nem hagyom el, – mondta határozottan. – Nem hagyom el, míg
nem tudtam meg mindent, míg nem tudom, hogy miért akar
szabadulni tőlem. Feleljen kérem, Franciska, nem gyötröm sok
kérdéssel, de válasza az életet jelenti nekem. Tudom, akármi is
történt, a sorsot kell okolnom, nem kegyedet, mert kegyed jó, finom,
büszke és önérzetes. Mondja, miért nem érdemli meg a
szerelmemet?
Franciska keze ökölbe szorult, haragos lett, szenvedélyes, a
Hardenegg jósága kínozta, eltávolította tőle. Ha karjába kapta, ha
megcsókolta volna, ha megfogta volna kezét, hogy elvigye magával,
hogy szeresse kérdés nélkül, az jó lett volna és szép, így csak
makaccsá tette kitartó, finom gyengédsége.
– Mondtam már, hogy mást szerettem, találkoztam vele,
megcsókoltam és megcsókolt, megölelt ő is sokszor. A schönbrunni
parkban volt, éjjel, a romoknál találkoztunk.
Franciska nagyot lélegzett, elhallgatott.

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Twenty-First Century Marianne Moore:

Essays from a Critical Renaissance 1st

Epic Performances from the Middle Ages Into the Twenty-

Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to

Governing California in the Twenty-First Century

Commonwealth History in the Twenty-First Century 1st

Militant Aesthetics - Art Activism in the Twenty-First

Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century

History after Hobsbawm: Writing the Past for the

George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century 1st ed.

Edited by Elizabeth Gregory

More information about this series at

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951545

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover image: © Andy Trevaskis/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

This book is an outgrowth of the vitality and generosity of a ­committed

Part I Moore’s Methods

Marianne Moore’s Gustatory Imagination  15

“These Things”: Moore’s Habits of Adduction  33

Yellow Roses and Bulbuls: Marianne Moore’s Persian Effects  67

Part II Early Days/Poetic Roots

“Contrarieties Equally True”: Marianne Moore

“The Teacher Was Speaking of Unrhymed Verse”:

Part III Middle Period

Editorial Compression: Marianne Moore at The Dial

Marianne Moore and Modern Labor  149

Marianne Moore’s “Light Is Speech,” Decision Magazine,

“Mysteries Expound Mysteries”: Marianne Moore’s

Part IV Late Phase

“The First Grace of Style”: Marianne Moore

“Passion for the Particular”: Marianne Moore, Henry James,

Is Andy Warhol Marianne Moore? Celebrity, Celibacy

Part V Scholar/Activists: Looking Back on Forwarding

Archiving Marianne Moore  255

Finding Moore: No Search Engines, No Indexes,

Documenting Moore  265

Discovering Moore  269

Advertising Moore  273

Editing Moore  277

About the Editors

Elizabeth Gregory directs the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies

Victoria Bazin is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at

Fiona Green is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University

Adversity and Grace: Marianne Moore, 1936–1941. Edited by

“Contrarieties Equally True”: Marianne Moore and William Blake

“The Teacher Was Speaking of Unrhymed Verse”: Marianne Moore,

Editorial Compression: Marianne Moore at The Dial Magazine

“The First Grace of Style”: Marianne Moore and the Writing

Elizabeth Gregory and Stacy Carson Hubbard

Both poetically and personally avant-garde in her own day, Marianne

© The Author(s) 2018 1

received ideas, “pleas[ing] / no one but [her]self,” has become newly au

readers more familiar with alternative genderings. Though readers of

Drawing on new approaches and on Moore’s archive, the essays in

the hidden principles that bind them together, opening connections to

This book is an outgrowth of the vitality and generosity of a committed

Marianne Moore’s Gustatory Imagination 15

“These Things”: Moore’s Habits of Adduction 33

Yellow Roses and Bulbuls: Marianne Moore’s Persian Effects 67

Marianne Moore and Modern Labor 149

Archiving Marianne Moore 255

Documenting Moore 265

Discovering Moore 269

Advertising Moore 273

Editing Moore 277

5. In “Scrapping Modernism: Marianne Moore and the Making of the