[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.55.Spring and All, in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, ed.A.Walton Litzand Christopher MacGowan, vol.1 (New York: New Directions, 1986), 203.56.Theodor Adorno, Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening, in TheEssential Frankfurt School Reader, ed.Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York:Continuum, 1982), 288. 425The Poetry of Langston Hughes57.Babette Deutsch wrote that the poems in Montage of a Dream Deferred suffered from a will to shock the reader, who is apt to respond coldly to such obvious devices ( Waste Land of Harlem, New York Times Book Review, 6 May 1951, 23). BONNI E COSTELLOMoore s AmericaA PLACE FOR THE GENUINEMarianne Moore is most familiar to readers as the poet of armored animals,creatures who defy our efforts to entail them.Moore is also a distinctive poetof places and they are similarly elusive.Writing in the midst of theProgressive era s rugged individualism, she offers a posture of humilitytoward the wilderness.Moore s sense of the frame and the flux emerges in AGrave (CP, 49), which describes a seascape in Maine.Like Stevens, sheknows her eccentricity and suspects a perspective that claims the center:Man looking into the sea,taking the view from those who have as much right to it asyou have to it yourself,it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,but you cannot stand in the middle of thisLandscape has an explicit political and moral implication for Moore, as wellas the aesthetic and ontological implication it has for Stevens.Ultimately, nohuman has a right to the view. Moore shows how unyielding nature isand how little it resembles us, except as a counterimage of our imperialstance. The firs stand in a procession, each with an emerald turkey-foot atFrom Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry.© 2003 by the Presidentand Fellows of Harvard College.427 428Bonnie Costellothe top, / reserved as their contours, saying nothing. The view we wouldtake will ultimately take us into its flux:the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.There are others besides you who have worn that lookwhose expression is no longer a protest; the fish nolonger investigate themfor their bones have not lasted.Landscape, that prospective gaze, in which man dominates over the scene,must submit to the reciprocal gaze of nature, and ultimately to theindifferent turning away of death.Yet within this sense of the frame and ofthe flux, Moore does create a landscape, one in which nature is compared toitself, and we to nature.For one does not, in Moore, know the thing in itself,the colorless primitive of Stevens anti-master man. A Grave (CP, 49)is another landscape with boat, but without the balcony view.The animalperspective is featured.Trees have turkey feet, birds swim through the air attop speed, emitting cat-calls, the blades of [our] oars / moving together likethe feet of water-spiders. This is a scene full of movement and transience,representing us in our mortal, not our imperial state.One cannot take aview, one can only give it, and give up the ghost.Anthropomorphism provesa figure of death itself:The wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanxbeautiful under networks of foam,and fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the seaweedMoore is famous for her menagerie, but her ideal of poetry puts theanimal in the middle of a landscape.In Frost, the American landscape isconverted to a version of the pastoral that reveals its fictional and fleetingcharacter.In Stevens, landscape is a meditative space in which the shapesmade by the imagination respond to the pressure of reality.Moore slandscapes celebrate the principle of the wild within the frame.Herlandscapes, like her poems, emerge from raw material both natural andcultural.Landscape provides Moore the medium for her fullest explorationof America, both its society and its geography.Far more than Frost orStevens, she draws on the patterns and images others have made, and createsa landscape of these.In particular, her imaginary gardens with real toads inthem stand in contrast to the hard and soft pastorals that have sometimesstood in for an American sense of place.In the first part of this chapter I 429Moore s Americadiscuss Moore s sense of the frame as it arises in her refusal to yield to thelure of the shallow image, the illusion that America is a toad-free,prelapsarian garden.In acknowledging the frame Moore shows humility about theimaginative appropriation of the object, and indicates a world that languagecannot capture.She reveals anxiety about her own and her culture s tendencyto become absorbed in the shorthand substitutes for experience, thereductions, simulations, and facile myths, the quick takes that convertexperience to commodity and distract us from the rigors of reality.The waragainst the facile constructions of reality must be fought on both sides, ofcourse, since the artist traffics in illusions.The way to salvation for thisdevout poet is through instruments arising from the fall.In The Jerboa (CP, 10 15), for instance, Moore s Depression-era poem of too much andthe revelation of abundance in adversity, we see this ambivalence playedout.The poem begins by enumerating the vain luxuries of ancient culture,then moves to praise a simple desert rat who thrives in poverty.What appearsat first to be a nature/culture binary turns into something more complex thanthe praise of animal abstemiousness over human wastefulness.Westerncivilization presents a contrast: Roman and Egyptian mimicry and distortion,on the one hand, and Hebrew redemption of illusion in the service of divinepurpose, on the other.Moore portrays a flawed imperialism that wouldvainly fix its image on the world with a resourceful mimicry that would drawthe landscape into a higher purpose than itself.Pharaoh is ultimately at themercy of the flooding landscape, over which he ostensibly stands master,whereas exiled Jacob, in the inhospitable desert, makes a pillow of the stones.The colossal imitation of a pine-cone in front of the Vatican may be contrived, distorting the scale of nature, but Jacob s theft of Esau sbirthright, through a trick of illusion ( cudgel staff / in claw-hand ) is in linewith nature s own work of camouflage.The jerboa honors the sand byassuming its color. And so the poet s images must serve creation s gracerather than plunder it.Similarly, in surveying the American landscape andculture, Moore will try to sort out serviceable illusions, pierced with innerlight, from those that skim reality for easy gratification and gain.As we willsee in later poems, Moore s meditation on modes of inhabiting landscapeentails a reflection as well on racial history.In this poem it enters through thelandscape of the African desert, arising as an aside, but establishing theconnection between race and place
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]