Poetry: Celebrated editor of the Dial and connoisseur of tricorn hats, consultant to the Ford Motor Company and baseball fanatic, recipient of Valentines from T.S. Eliot and single finest product of the Irish Presbyterian diaspora, Marianne Moore was a true original, writes David Wheatley.
When she died in 1972, aged 84, she left behind a recently published Complete Poems whose procession of masterpieces - 'Spenser's Ireland', 'The Pangolin', 'A Grave', 'The Steeple-Jack', 'Marriage' and 'The Jerboa', to name but six - places her among the tiny handful of modern poets deserving of that overworked honorific, "great".
"I shall not cavil at you for being perverse," she writes in the early poem, 'Polyphonic Craftsman, Coated Like a Zebra,/ Fleeing Like the Wild Ass, Mourning Like a Dove' (bizarre titles were always a Moore speciality); but even her staunchest admirers find it hard not to cavil when faced with Moore's editing of her work, which was nothing if not perverse.
Incredible though it seems, Complete Poems omits almost half the poems Moore had published during her lifetime.
"I, too, dislike it," she wrote in her anthology piece, 'Poetry'. "There are things that are important beyond all this fiddle." She obviously meant it too.
"The rest of it seemed mere padding," she told her editor at Viking, explaining her decision to shrink this famous poem from 29 lines to the three-line version most people know today. In his essay, 'Becoming Marianne Moore', James Fenton drew attention to the scandal of Moore's texts, and now, in a striking act of restitution,Grace Schulman has put them right, or tried to.
'The Steeple-Jack', the first poem in Complete Poems, does not appear here until page 183. Ezra Pound described a reprint of his juvenilia as so many "stale cream puffs," but what is remarkable in Moore's case is the quality of the work she chose to suppress. To encounter poems such as 'Walking-Sticks and Paper Weights and Water Marks', 'Melanchthon' and 'Old Tiger' (not all of them juvenilia, it should be said) is to be overwhelmed again by the symphonic prosody, uncanny inventiveness and scalpel-sharp precision of Moore at her best. Looking at a piece of Waterford crystal, she stops short of reducing it to its constituent atoms, but only just, admiring its "look of tempered sword-/ steel; of three ore'd/ fishscale-burnished antimony-/ lead-and-tin smoky water-drop type-metal/ smoothness emery-armored/ against rust". Her signature uneven lines veer and cavort along the page like a crazy game of hopscotch played out in the mind of God across the surface of language itself.
So why did she suppress so many fine poems? Any case as involved as Moore's inevitably raises complex editorial questions. Are writers entitled to write off tracts of their back-catalogues? And what gives us the right to assume we know better when we put them back on the record?
There seems to me only one solution to the problem. All poets are entitled to the Collected Poems they want, whatever the revisionist whims and disasters they inflict on us. But readers have a right to see the full record too and, in cases such as Moore's, nothing but a dual edition will serve.
The suggestion that a single Collected Poems isn't enough may exasperate those still smarting from the cost of the recent collected poems of Lowell and Hughes. How much of these people do we need anyway? Rating her much higher than that pair, as I do, I would happily shell out for yet another collected Moore any time Faber feels like producing one, whereas any more Lowell and Hughes they can keep.
There are serious reasons, too, for why this need not be a definitive volume: faced with multiple texts, Schulman has based her choices on no more scientific grounds than "conscientious inconsistency". The full variorum treatment obviously beckons.
There are only so many ways of kicking a bad poem, and only so many ways of finding modest pleasure in the successful minor one. But the major poem is inexhaustible, and these are inexhaustible poems.
Attention is the prayer of the soul, observed the French thinker, Simone Weil, and if poetic attention has a patron saint it is surely Marianne Moore. Few books in recent years have been worth closer attention than The Poems of Marianne Moore.
David Wheatley is a poet and critic.
The Poems of Marianne Moore. Edited by Grace Schulman, Faber & Faber, 449pp. £30.