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The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore

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"We dare not let ourselves be snared into hating hatefulness," wrote Marianne Moore in one of her essays. "To do so is to take our own lives."

What can be said about this Presbyterian sage in the tri-cornered hat, Brooklyn's Confucius (by way of Kirkwood, Missouri and Bryn Mawr)? She had one of the most enchanting minds in a century filled with enchanting minds. She had a knack for proverbs and distinctions. "Satisfaction is a lowly thing, how pure a thing is joy." And somewhat primly, she would insist on the difference between liberty and license. But she knew that "ethical sins are not poetic sins" and placed great importance -- rebuking herself slightly? -- on becoming "liberalized in your judgment."

She wrote on politics, finding it "impossible to reprehend" President Eisenhower. She wrote on fashion, producing the wonderful sentence, "A narrow sheath or pant (if I may use the word) does not set a hippomoid figure off to advantage." And of course, she wrote on poetry and literature in a tone of resolute positiveness that was not blind to faults but merciful to them. One thinks that a "bad" review from Miss Moore would be more thoughtful, and therefore worth more, than a good review from any number of her contemporaries. About the now-largely-forgotten figure Maxwell Bodenheim (or was it Vachel Lindsay?), she wrote that one "must deplore his lack of esthetic rigor." She placed great importance on "governance of the emotions," yet knew that poetry "is not a thing of tunes, but of heightened consciousness."

She was the supreme mistress of litotes, using double negatives to make a tentative positive. "Not unaware" instead of "aware" -- and she humbly poked fun at herself for this tendency, quoting George Orwell against herself: "the not ungreen grass." But she would take the tendency of double, or multiple, negatives to a comic extreme, as when she wrote of Cummings and Williams that they "do not balk at anything like unprudishness."

She was the furthest thing from a cynic that one could possibly find. "How discuss verity with cynics," she lamented once, "cynicism being a plant with no fruit or interesting seed?" Miss Moore gave us hundreds of these gentle incontrovertibilities.