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Marianne Moore“Miss Moore is one of the very few modern poets whom I can read on any day and in any mood….” W. H. Auden’s praise for the poetry of Marianne Moore (1887-1972) seems fitting. Both were intellectual poets who expounded philosophically on things; their poems read like little elegant essays. More coincidentally, both lived long, quirky lives and became iconic figures in New York, he the “furrow-faced poet,” she the lady in the tricorn hat.Since, by now, both poets have been crazy-glued into the canon, quibbling with their merits seems a waste of cyberspace. Still, has no once noticed the almost total lack of Eros in their work? I don’t just mean that they avoid sexual content but—especially in Miss Moore’s case—the physical and emotional life of the body altogether. Her poems seem to have been written by a woman amputated below the neck! Indeed, that oracular quality is probably what’s most admired by the people who admire these things. Personally, I prefer poems written by full human beings with 360 degrees of awareness, and not heads in jars, however strikingly hatted. Love in America— is not, alas, an atypical Moore poem; it’s shorter than most but still it’s expository and meandering and brain-drainingly cryptic. One wonders why she thought the Minotaur and Midas of Greek myth would be apt in a poem about love American style. One wonders where that “should” comes from in line 2. Is this not a poem about love in America, and not love as it should be in America? One wonders if the sentence beginning “From one with ability” could ever be diagrammed. One wonders why she switches to the hortatory in the penultimate strophe, and how a sophomoric phrase such as “overgrown/undergrown shallowness” ever got past the original editor who published this. Rather like Lena Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain, when the sound goes out of sync in a movie scene, one shakes one's head No, no, no, no at the last line’s Yes, yes, yes, yes. Love in America—Whatever it is, it’s a passion—a benign dementia that should be engulfing America, fed in a way the opposite of the way in which the Minotaur was fed. It’s a Midas of tenderness, from the heart; nothing else. From one with ability to bear being misunderstood— take the blame, with “nobility that is action,” identifying itself with pioneer unperfunctoriness without brazenness or bigness of overgrown undergrown shallowness whatever it is, let it be without affectation. Yes, yes, yes, yes. 
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