“The complete prose of Marianne Moore” (Publication, 1986)

Moore, Marianne. The Lost Flute of the Book of Franz Toussaint. In : The Dial ; no 77 (Sept. 1924). [Review].
The Lost Flute of the Book of Franz Toussaint, translated by Gertrude Joerissen (Brentano). In this collection of Chinese lyrics, early and modern, the decoratively perfect poetic properties of the East are like the titles of the poems, themselves, dazzling. The subject matter of a number of the poems seems insufficient or unworthy, but there are certain masterpieces, and since the labor of translation has been undertaken with delight, the reader deplores an ingratitude which permits him to confiscate the meaning of words with which he quarrels.

Moore, Marianne. "Literature the noblest of the arts". In : The Dial ; no 79 (Oct. 1925). [Review of The collected essays and papers of George Saintsbury, 1875-1920.]
"The contributor who is not allowed to contribute", says Mr. Saintsbury, "is fierce as a matter of course ; but not less fierce is the contributor who thinks himself too much edited, and the contributor who imperatively insists that his article on Chinese metaphysics shall go in at once, and the contributor who, being an excellent hand at the currency, wants to be allowed to write on dancing : and, in short, as the Shepherd says, all contributors."

Moore, Marianne. "New" poetry since 1912. In : Anthology of magazine verse for 1926. Ed. by William Stanley Braithwaite. (Boston : B.J. Brimmer, 1926).
The "new" poetry seemed to justify itself as a more robust form of Japanese poetry – that is perhaps to say, of Chinese poetry – although a specific and more lasting interest in Chinese poetry came later.

Moore, Marianne. Roving through southern China. In : The Dial ; no. 81 (July 1926). [Review of Roving through southern China, by Harry A. Franck (Century)]. [ID D3164].
In this 'plain' account of people, of places, and of methods of travel in southern China – with many photographs – a seemingly experiences elasticity of judgment is, in matters not topical nor topographical, multifariously contradicted. The religious philosopher, the political scientist, the student of civilization would, in certain opinions diverge from this author : the 'littérateur' would not accompany him. Mr. Franck is scientific as a wanderer if not as a thinker or as a writer. His itinerary is impressive and he is, if one may have in one's feet a science which one has not in one's head, an accomplished traveler.

Moore, Marianne. Academic feeling. In : The Dial ; no 82 (May 1927).
One cannot be dead to the sagacity inherent in some specimens of sharkskin, camellia-leaf, orange-peer, semi-eggshell, or sang-de-boeuf glaze ; nor be blind to the glamour of certain 'giant', 'massive', 'magnificent' objects in pork-fat or spinach-green jade as shown last winter in the collection of Mr. Lee Van Ching at the Anderson Galleries.
[Betr. Chinese carved jades & objects of art : a collection formed by Lee Van Ching, Shanghai : rare antiques in crystal, agate, jade, rose quartz & malachite, statuettes, snuff bottles, porcelains & enamels, old Chinese pottery, Anderson Galleries, New York, Jan. 1927.]

Moore, Marianne. To accept congratulations. In : The Dial ; no 84 (March 1928).
We confessed to admiring instinctiveness, concentration, and tentativeness ; to realizing that gusto is not incompatible with learning, and to favoring opulence in asceticism. It is apparent also in lines by Sung Lien that such liking is not recent.
"In the dormitory I had two meals a day, but nothing fresh, fat, or of any good taste. All other schoolmates were dressed up in fine silk and with embroidery ; their hats were decorated with jewels ; their girdles made of white jade. Every one bore a sword on his left, and perfume at his right. They looks as shining and dignified as angels. While living among them I wore my cotton robe and tattered clothes, but had not the slightest desire to be like them, for I had my enjoyment focused upon something different, knowing not that my bodily wants were not as well supplied as those of others." Translated from the Chinese by Kwei Chen. Literary Magazine of the University of Wisconsin. December, 1927.
[Betr. Song, Lian. Farwell to my young friend.]

Moore, Marianne. Thomas Heriot. In : The Dial ; no 85 (Aug. 1928). [Review of The divine origin of the craft of the herbalist by Sir E.A. Wallis Budge].
Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Assyrian herbals are her shown to be the foundation of Greek herbals – disseminated also, by way of Arabic, through Asia, Turkestan, and China…

Moore, Marianne. Guide-posts to Chinese painting. In : The Dial ; no 84 (April 1928). [Review of Guide-posts to Chinese painting, by Louise Wallace Hackney, edited by Dr. Paul Pelliot (Houghton Mifflin)]. [ID D30326].
That a delighted consideration of art should be less than delightful ; that as writing and as thinking it should be occidentally 'promt' is in this survey compensated for by illustrations such as 'Winter Landscape', 'Narcissus', a 'Ming Ancestral Portrait' ; and one is as attentive as the author could wish one to be, to the 'ideals and methods' of Chinese painting, to 'influences and beliefs reflected in it', and the influence exerted by it. Any lover of beauty may well be grateful to a book which commemorated the blade of grass as model for the study of the straight line, the skill of calligraphers, with 'hog's hair on finely woven silk', 'methods of treating mountain wrinkles', 'tones of ink to give color', 'the thought of genii, winged tigers, and Emperor crossing' 'weak waters' on a 'bridge made of turtles', 'or a theme so romantic as that of Yang Kuei-fei' [Yang Guifei] going, 'lily pale, between tall avenues of spears to die'.

Moore, Marianne. The cantos. In : Poetry ; no 39 (Oct. 1931). [Review of A draft of XXX cantos, by Ezra Pound].
These Cantos are the epic of the farings of a literary mind… In Canto III we have an ideograph for the Far East, consisting of two parts : Green veins in the turquoise, Or, the gray steps lead up under the cedars… Mr. Pound took two thousand and more pages to say it in prose, and he sings it in a hundred-forty-two. The book is concerned with beauty. You must read it yourself ; it has a power that is mind and is music ; it comes with the impact of centuries and with the impact of yesterday. Amid the swarming madness of excellence, there is the chirping of 'the young phoenix broods', the Chinese music, the slender bird-note that gives one no peace…
In Canto XIII, in the symbolic discussion of the art of poetics, what is said is illustrated by the manner of saying :
And Tseu-lou said, "I would put the defences in order",
And Khieu said, "If I were lord of a province
I would put it in better order than this is".
And Tchi said, "I would prefer a small mountain temple,
"With order in the observances,
with a suitable performance of the ritual"…
And Kung said, "They have all answered correctly,
"That is to say, each in his nature"…
And Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves:
If a man have not order within him He can not spread order about him; …
And if a man have not order within him ;…
"Anyone can run to excesses,
"It is easy to shoot past the mark,
It is hard to stand firm in the middle.

Moore, Marianne. If a man die. In : Hound and horn ; no 5 (Jan.-March 1932). [Review of The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones and Preludes for Memnon,by Conrad Aiken (Charles Scribner's Sons).]
If a man die shall he live again ? and what Buddha and Confucius and Christ have said about this, and what would make morality's instinct for continuance valid and everlasting ?...

Moore, Marianne. Emily Dickinson. In : Poetry ; no 41 (Jan. 1933). [Review of Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd (Harper & Brothers)].
An element of the Chinese taste was part of this choiceness, in its daring associations of the prismatically true ; the gamboge and pink and cochineal of the poems ; the oleander blossom tied with black rib bon ; the dandelion with scarlet ; the rowan spray with white.

Moore, Marianne. Perspicuous opacity. In : The Nation ; no 143 (24 Oct. 1936). [Review of The Geographical History of America, or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, by Gertrude Stein, with an introduction by Thornton Wilder (Random House).]
To like reading and writing is to like words. The root meaning, as contrasted with the meaning in use, is like the triple painting on projecting lamellae, which – according as one stands in front, at the right, or at the left – shows a different picture. "In China china is not china it is an earthen ware. In China there is no need of China because in china china is china."

Moore, Marianne. Courage, right and wrong. In : The Nation ; no 143 (5 Dec. 1936). [Review of New Directions in Prose and Poetry, edited by James Laughlin IV (New Directions).
Marsden Hartley, chivalrous and shrewd – a painter writing about painters – has in two reminiscences given us what one hopes is part of a book. He speaks of the hands of Charles Demuth, "Chinese in character", that seemed "to be living a life of their own" ; of his paintings, "harmonious, possibly to excess" but reflecting "a master of the comic insinuation".

Moore, Marianne. Ichor of imagination. In : The Nation ; no 144 (6 Febr. 1937). [Review of The Infernal Machine, by Jean Cocteau, in the English version by Carl Wildman (Oxford University Press).
One sees it in Le Grand Ecart, in the Narcissus passage, where the river "cares nothing about the nymphs or the trees it reflects – longing only for the sea" ; and in the Sphinx's self-characterization : "A judge is not so unalterable, and insect so voracious, a bird so carnivorous, the egg so nocturnal, a Chinese executioner so ingenious…"

Moore, Marianne. Who seeks shall find. In : The Nation ; no 155 (17 Oct. 1942). [Review of Have Come, Am Here, by José Garcia Villa (The Viking Press).
The delicacy with force of such writing reminds one of the colors of black ink from a hogs'-hair brush in the hand of a Chinese master.

Moore, Marianne. "We will walk like the tapir". In : The Nation ; no 156 (19 June 1943).
"Be gentle and you can be bold" is an ancient Chinese saying ; "be frugal and you can be liberal ; if you are a leader, you have learned self-restraint."

Moore, Marianne. Feeling and precision. In : Sewanee review ; no 52 (Autumn 1944).
Instinctively we employ antithesis as an aid to precision, and in Arthur Waley's translation from the Chinese one notices the many paired meanings - "left and right" ; "walking and sleeping" ; "one embroiders with silk, an inch a day ; of plain sewing one can do more than five feet."

Moore, Marianne. High thinking in Boston. In : The Saturday review of literature ; no 31 (6 Nov. 1948). [Review of Miss Gifford's, by Kathrine Jones (Exposition Press)].
At Miss Gifford's, a boarding-house in the South End of Boston, such subjects were discussed as Chinese poetry, the title-page of a Dutch Bible, Seurat's "La Grande Jatte", Thoreau, and fear of daisies.

Moore, Marianne. E. McKnight Kauffer. [In the American British Art Gallery's Drawing for the Ballet and the Original Illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe by E. McKnight Kauffer. New York : The Gallery, Batsford House, 1949.]
E. McKnight Kauffer is a very great artist… Shadows are as arresting as objects ; numerals and letters are so rare in themselves that opposing angles, contrasting sizes, and basic parallels, are of consummate elegance – the only kind of eloquence not intrusive. This language of blacks and grays is color in the sense that Chinese brush masterpieces are color.

Moore, Marianne. Impact, moral and technical. In : Harvard Summer School Conference on the Defense of Poetry. (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University, 1951).
There is no room for furious virtuosity. A master axiom for all writing, I feel, is that of Confucius : "When you have done justice to the meaning, stop". That implies restraint, that discipline is essential.