Wallace Stevens Journal

________

[End Page 42]

The first of the essay's three sections is prefaced by three sentences that tersely identify Stevens's purpose—"to bring together one of Miss Moore's poems and a paper, 'On Poetic Truth'"—and where the poem and paper may be found: in an anthology of Partisan Review's first decade, The Partisan Reader, and the July 1946 issue of the British Institute of Philosophy's journal. One may imagine that Stevens received a contributor's copy of the hardcover anthology shortly after its publication in September 1946. Alongside two of his own poems, "The Dwarf" and "The Woman That Had More Babies Than That," he would have found one by Moore, "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron,'" in its original form: eleven syllabically regulated nonce stanzas of eight lines each, arranged as Shoptaw describes in "alternately unrhymed and rhymed couplets" (402–403), the latter tabulated to draw optical attention to the rhyming that might otherwise go unheard by ears trained on accentual meters and unaccustomed to such pairings as All and external or this and edifice, to cite two from "The Fish" that Stevens defends in "A Poet That Matters" (CPP 774).² Stevens had demonstrated in that review of Moore's Selected Poems that he recognized her prosodic innovations and quirks as well as any professional critic of his day. He recognizes as "intricate" (CPP 774) her stanzas' patterns of syllabically determined line lengths and the phonetic chiming that often comes where one does not expect it. Moore anticipated William Carlos Williams's definition of a poem as "a machine made of words" (54), substituting "animal" for "machine" and recognizing that some of the working parts or organs of an animal function in ways that super-abound mere mechanism—those involved in physical attraction and thus the species' endurance, for example. Stevens writes that her "stanzas are mechanisms" and that, despite that, "instead of producing a mechanical effect, they produce an effect of ease" (CPP 775). Impressively, he writes this a year before her publication of "The Pangolin" with its "not un- / chainlike, machine- / like form and / frictionless creep of a thing / made graceful by adversities, con- // versities" (Moore, New Collected Poems [NCP] 142). Stevens himself scrupulously distinguishes her "scrupulous spirit" from a "merely fastidious spirit" that might be perceived as too self-conscious, a distinction that informs the central conceit of her "Critics and Connoisseurs," included in the Selected Poems. Leggett is right to argue that he freights the review with a theoretical agenda; Stevens's approval of Moore's poetics amounts to his needing her verse to exemplify a species of romanticism as he understands his own poetry to exemplify it. By the review's concluding paragraph, with his mind on "In the Days of Prismatic Color," he settles for the truth, however: "Instead of being one of the most original and contemporary or modern poets, she is merely one of the most truthful. People with a passion for the truth are always original" (CPP 780).

Stevens's second essay on Moore does not aim to appreciate her verse's formal and phonemic intricacies; it follows from the review's concluding [End Page 43] emphasis of truth. Part 1 draws alternately from Moore and from Lewis to make the case that, as Lewis claims, "poetry has to do with reality in its most individual aspect" (CPP 699; qtd. from Lewis 147). What matters in poetry is the presentation of an "individual reality" (CPP 703; qtd. from Lewis 156)—a reality that acknowledges the interests of a perspective on it. As my citations of language that Stevens has taken verbatim from Lewis without marking the quotations acknowledge, the philosopher's perspective on this issue is sufficiently important to Stevens to present directly. If Lewis's claims to having the final or most quote-worthy say in this matter were as significant within, or secure throughout, the essay as a whole as the relative length of Part 1 suggests, and as Leggett's discussion of the essay suggests, then its title would be misleading. It should then have been called "About Lewis's Theory of 'Individual Reality' and 'Poetic Truth,'" and Moore's poem would have been little more than a convenient supply of illustrative examples.

Within Part 1, Stevens gives Moore's poem a lot of attention, however. If its 88-line length suggests the keys of a piano, he sounds well over half of its notes, excerpting quotations that at least touch upon 51 lines. Having juxtaposed her second stanza's description of the male ostrich's "maternal concentration" in protecting its young with an Encyclopaedia Britannica's account of the same, he distinguishes from the latter's "isolated fact" her "aesthetic integration" of an "individual reality" (CPP 700) and notes how her "finical phraseology" affords access to perspectival "irony" and "delighted observation" that the encyclopedic entry lacks. Stevens appreciates the curiosity-arousing care with which she delays naming her poem's focal object an "ostrich," identifying it initially instead as "the camel-sparrow … / Xenophon saw," by contrasting it with the extinct "aepyornis / or roc … and / the moa" (NCP 151), and by figuring it as "the best of the unflying / pegasi" (152; qtd. in CPP 700). I presume that Stevens already owned or in his preparations acquired Moore's 1941 collection, What Are Years, in the back pages of which she provides notes on her sources and such suggestive clues as "Sparrow-camel: στρουφοκάμέλος," this Greek compound noun being what Xenophon might have called what he saw. The first of these notes would have helped Stevens toward being able to supply his introduction to Moore's poem following Part 1's initial six sentences about, or quoted directly from, Lewis:

There is in reality an aspect of individuality at which every form of rational explanation stops short. Now, in his Euphues, Lyly repeats the following bit of folk lore:

Let them both remember that the Estridgedigesteth harde yron to preserve his health.

(CPP 699) [End Page 44]

Moore's note begins the quotation at "the" and does not capitalize "estrich," which she has Lyly spelling differently (NCP 317), so Stevens has evidently found himself a copy of the late-sixteenth-century Anatomy of Wit or another source for the quip that includes additional language acknowledging that Euphues was counseling hypothetical fathers and their recalcitrant offspring on the value of "rigorous" instruction (Lyly 112). I write "evidently," but the difference between the essay's first block quotation and Moore's endnote would have been evident to her alone. It operates as an appreciative wink, communicating privately to Moore: I have received your rigorous instruction and brushed off my Lyly.

Stevens eventually identifies "the gist of the poem" as "that the camel-sparrow has escaped the greed that has led to the extinction of other birds linked to it in size, by its solicitude for its own welfare and that of its chicks" (CPP 703). He borrows from Moore's opening rhyme (extinct–linked), only the first end-word of which has appeared among his quoted excerpts, and from her final stanza's ostentatiously quirky noun "unsolicitude," which is also not quoted in the essay (NCP 151, 153). He thus pays homage by appreciating the poet in her own language but in a way that only especially informed or devoted readers, including Moore herself, may see and appreciate as homage.

________

But let us now shift our focus from big birds to the elephant in the room. For while it is perfectly legitimate for Stevens to use the word "linked" or "solicitude" without explicitly crediting Moore, Stevens's failure to credit Lewis for the specific wording of his philosophic paper as well as the ideas attributed to it is not. If "About One of Marianne Moore's Poems" were a lecture, he might defensibly opt not to voice the quotations (or to hold up two curling fingers as one does), but in an essay written to be read optically, the eschewal of quotation marks is arguably dishonest. And the amount of unacknowledged quotation is extensive.³ Moore prefaces her endnotes in What Are Years with "A Note on the Notes" that articulates why a poet might wish to omit the marks of another writer's ownership and why she nevertheless gives the owner-authors their due:

some readers suggest that quotation marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. But since in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, … acknowledgments seem only honest.

(NCP 295) [End Page 45]

Why does Stevens suppress or at least not properly mark his verbatim quotation of nearly everything he attributes to Lewis?

Scholars as committed to engaging Stevens's essay as Leggett have not thought to ask because what makes the borrowing akin to theft is its surreptitiousness. Stevens's objective does not seem to be concealment; he clearly seeks to share Lewis's insights, which he endorses without qualification. But he consistently employs the syntax of indirect or reported discourse: "Mr. Lewis begins by saying that …" (CPP 699), "Mr. Lewis says that …" (CPP 700, 701), "He says that …" (CPP 703). Usually when a writer or narrator introduces another's ideas with the subordinating conjunction that, what follows is indirect discourse—that is, language that may be quite close to a verbatim quotation but altered subtly to account for perspectival shifts of tenses, pronouns, and other deictics—or so-called reported discourse, which ordinarily differs more substantially from quotation. Stevens's seemingly unprofessional presentation of direct quotation in the syntactical clothing of indirect or reported discourse and thus without proper acknowledgment is especially odd because, near the end of Part 1, he sets off a sentence from Lewis's "On Poetic Truth" (italicized in The Necessary Angel, left roman in CPP) to signal exact quotation, thereby implying by contrast that what has not been set off thus is at least indirect and possibly reported. But nearly all of what he includes to represent Lewis's ideas is exactly quoted, albeit sometimes with (again unmarked) elisions. And one may not credibly claim that Stevens was simply inattentive to such niceties. In his correspondence with a Knopf editor about The Necessary Angel, he questions apparent formatting inconsistencies:

I realize that when language is quoted within a sentence it is correct to use the type of the text, unless, perhaps, the language is something French or otherwise foreign. Why should the language of Plato [at the beginning of "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"] be in the type of text and the quoted language to The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet be in italics?

(L 723–24)

Surely it is strange, or significant, that in the collection's one essay that was written to be taken in with the eye, not the ear, he leaves invisible what might so readily have been made visible with conventional punctuation.

Schulze recognizes that Stevens "clips and transplants relevant phrases verbatim into the body of his own discussion" yet is apparently unfazed; focused on relating Part 2's Lewis-free "travelogue" (174) to Stevens's postwar poetry, she expresses no qualms beyond that this "cut-and-paste technique often condenses Lewis's argument beyond recognition" (175). Leggett, as I say, seems not to have been aware of the tacit quotations. He [End Page 46] writes that "'About One of Marianne Moore's Poems' is of very minor interest as an account of Moore's verse, and it contains surprisingly little of Stevens himself, since he is present, as he says, only to bring together the poem and the paper" (79). While it turns out that the essay contains even less of Stevens than initially appears because he presents as his own phrasing what is not, I will argue that Stevens discloses more of himself (and of his appreciation of Moore) than he makes fully visible to all.

My own first thought upon discovering the extent of the unmarked quotations was that I might substantially lower an undergraduate paper's grade for such and that the essay corroborates William Burns's and Ben Philipps's claims in this issue regarding Stevens's amateur lack of professionalism. I then suddenly feared that other of Stevens's essays were similarly misleading. Perhaps I regularly had been reading as Stevens's voice his self-ventriloquized parroting of others. But this seems not to be the case. Moreover, a trigger-happy outburst of moral censure—"Mature poets steal" shouldn't apply to prose—was swiftly dampened by the thought that if Stevens had sought to take undeserved credit for Lewis's words, he certainly would not have acknowledged Lewis as forthrightly as he does.

What if, not wishing to think of Stevens as either thievish or inadvertent, and guided by Moore's pointed epigraph in The Complete Poems, we grant that the "Omissions" of quotation marks "are not accidents" (vii) and are thus to be recognized, collectively, as a cue or clue? Moore's four-word admonition effectively confirms what generous readers of her earlier books had come on their own to understand: that she holds much in reserve, relying upon them to presume that an artist so subtle as she must also be emotionally complex. Such readers learned to sense and appreciate the sinews of restraint candidly tensing just below her verse's regulated integument. If Stevens's omission of proper punctuation may be read as implicative—and I admit that my argument here ventures into hopeful speculation—the logic of implication operates similarly, with the same interpretive risks. Surely it is significant that the poem of Moore's that he selected for focus is so clearly one of her quotation poems. Most of its title is a marked quotation! By omitting most marks of his quotations from Lewis's philosophy, he points up his many marked and inset quotations of Moore. He thereby, as if with the one hand, pays homage to Moore's characteristic quoting and credited alluding throughout her poetic corpus while gesturing, with the other hand, to what "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron'" more specifically offers as a thematic concern with optics. For when the focal poem comes around to revealing what Stevens calls its "gist" (perhaps as a nod to "Digesteth" although the two roots are not cognate), it describes a scene of conspicuous consumption to "dramatize a / meaning always missed / by the externalist" then spells out that meaning thus: [End Page 47]

The power of the visibleis the invisible; as even where        no tree of freedom grows,        so-called brute courage knows.Heroism is exhausting, yetit contradicts a greed that        did not wisely spare        the harmless solitaire

or great auk in its grandeur;unsolicitude having swallowed up        all giant birds but an        alert gargantuanlittle-winged, magnificentlyspeedy running-bird.

(NCP 152–53)

This "speedy running-bird" is, of course, the ostrich, sole survivor among the giant birds—all the rest, including the great auk and the "large flightless bird (Pezophaps solitarius) formerly existing in the island of Rodriguez" known as the "solitaire" ("Solitaire," def. 5a), having gone extinct. Playing on the saliency of two instances of soli-, Moore makes the agent of extinction the birds' own "unsolicitude," their insufficient care. Ostriches as a species have not been similarly "swallowed up" by time's predation because, as she has illustrated earlier in the poem, they were not only anxious to defend their "eggs and young" but also humble enough not to rely on their heft alone for defense. They have expressed a largehearted "courage" in countering other animals' and especially humans' "greed" for their eggs, their chicks, and their plumes by, for example, "feign[ing] flight," not in the sense of elevation but by seeming to flee, so as to distract pursuers from their brood. That the ostrich "feigns …, decoying / his decoyers" (NCP 152), is evidence that it "knows" about danger though a "so-called brute." (Note Moore's pun on call and a homophone of bruit, such punning being a matter of getting sound to make meaningful connections below vision's radar.) I read Moore's claim that "so-called brute courage knows" the sense of the eight-word proverb with which the block-quoted passage opens to mean that even beasts, allegedly lacking the cognitive capacity to attribute such ideal abstractions as "freedom" to physical particulars like trees, comprehend that the power of the visible is the invisible by virtue of their "courage" or heart, the instinctive animal analogue to the intellectual human mind. One may well wonder whether Stevens's choice of a poem that celebrates solicitous deception and endows invisibility with agency can be unrelated to his suppression, only in this one essay, of certain quotation marks.⁴ [End Page 48]

________

His appreciation of the power of the invisible is, it would seem, what prompts Stevens to take the apparent side trip of Part 2. Part 1 concludes with his argument that, when it comes to achieving Lewis's explicitly quoted criterion—"the essence of art is insight of a special kind into reality" (emphasis added)—the "potency" of Moore's poem matters more than its "meaning." And "potency"—or "poignancy and penetration" to adopt the uncredited diction of Lewis—"forces something upon our consciousness" (CPP 703; Lewis 162, 165). The vector of such power opposes the "violence from within that protects us from a violence without," "the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality," of which Stevens spoke with such poignancy and penetration at the end of his "Noble Rider" lecture (CPP 665). This is reality's pressure impressing and penetrating the would-be safe space within. Stevens then concludes Part 1 by acknowledging that "Lewis concludes" by addressing "the affinity of art and religion," "both [of which] have to mediate for us a reality not ourselves." Recognition of this alien reality, what Stevens in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" had memorably identified as the source "From [which] the poem springs" (CPP 332), prompts humility, which is "the supreme virtue … for the humble are they that move about the world with the lure of the real in their hearts" (CPP 703; Lewis 166). Stevens opens Part 2 by humbling verbal artists such as himself and visual artists alike, reminding each that such a seeming maker neither makes nor "reveals reality"—life does. By definition such revelation entails the invisible becoming or making itself visible.

Stevens's account of his September 1946 visit to "the old Zeller house in the Tulpehocken" (CPP 703) and other nearby Pennsylvanian sites colors this otherwise barren, abstract revelation with particulars. Stepping away from poetry and philosophy per se, he describes the early-eighteenth-century Huguenots ("religious refugees") who had settled there as hardworking but content: "Their reality consisted of both the visible and the invisible" (CPP 704). They labor visibly, facing "the hills that were part of the frame of their valley"; they live "happy in the faith" of an invisible presence that they face only on the inside, framed by their habits of conscience and respect. Stevens's example of the "stout old Lutheran" juxtaposes such visible particulars as a brood of ducklings that emerge from a church basement's stove and the everyday faith that invisibly warms those who abide in the community.

The second of Part 2's two paragraphs is a tonal contrast to the first. The wall of a church's old graveyard is seen as "weather-beaten, barren, bald" (CPP 704). Visibly it is destitute. Even the eye-like windows to the soul of the adjacent manse's edifice are empty: each one "white with the half-drawn blind, the lower part black with the vacantness of the place" (CPP [End Page 49] 705). Stevens reengages the diction of Part 2's opening sentence to assert that "there could not be any effective diversion from the reality that time and experience had created there" (CPP 705; cf. "Life, not the artist, creates or reveals reality: time and experience in the poet, in the painter" [CPP 703]; emphases added). He clearly wishes to show the truth of that opening sentence: life creates reality, time and experience create reality. Even the artists, the makers, among us do not so create. And for this reason one churchyard may seem impregnated with grace while in another even the green apogee of grass is seen as "bleached and silvery" (CPP 704–705). Stevens further illustrates his vulnerability to reality's revelations by recalling how the illustrations at the American Institute of Graphic Arts show at New York City's Morgan Library colored and revivified "the barren reality that [he] had just experienced" west of Reading (CPP 705).

________

Because Stevens timestamps his visit as having occurred "During this last September" (CPP 703), we can say with some certainty that "About One of Marianne Moore's Poems" was completed before September 1947 but probably not long before then. In April of that year, Stevens's dear friend Henry Church suddenly passed away and Stevens's only child, Holly, gave birth to his first (and only) grandchild. As a soi-disant "Giant" (e.g., L 160, CPP 5), Stevens could hardly have written about Moore's giant bird's "solicitude for its own welfare and that of its chicks" (CPP 703) without casting himself in the role of the solicitous ostrich. One could even speculate that the sense of precarity following so hard upon the sense of success attending his delivery of "Three Academic Pieces" at Harvard and the publication of Transport to Summer secured for him his choice of poem and approach. Perhaps. I think, however, that what most motivates Stevens as he plans and then drafts the essay on "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron'" is a desire to return to Moore a recognizable reflection of what she had done for him in her review of Stevens's first book for The Dial, "Well Moused, Lion." And I do not mean (merely) that she therewith wrote the best, unalloyed defense of Harmonium's aesthetic of any early reviewer. She had praised not only his poetry but also him in the most generous, generously informed fashion with the most acute insight.

Quoting the very end of Moore's review will suffice to offer an apt basis for comparison with Stevens's conclusion. The review is humanely copious, citing and often illustratively excerpting no fewer than eighteen Harmonium poems and four (Moore thinks regrettably omitted) others that she had come across in literary journals. The opening lines of "Comme Dieu Dispense de Graces," one of the sections in "Lettres d'un Soldat" as it appeared in a 1918 number of Poetry but then remained out of circulation [End Page 50] until Opus Posthumous, immediately precede the review's concluding sentences:

However, in this collection one has eloquence. "The author's violence is for aggrandizement and not for stupor"; one consents therefore, to the suggestion that when the book of moonlight is written, we leave room for Crispin. In the event of moonlight and a veil to be made gory, he would, one feels, be appropriate in this legitimately sensational act of a ferocious jungle animal.

(Moore, Complete Prose 98)

Moore presents her improperly punctuated quotation from "The Comedian as the Letter C" (cf. CPP 25), whose "riot of gorgeousness" she has already illustrated with several excerpts, to exemplify the collection's "eloquence," a thematic return to the review's opening, where she had praised the poet's "love of magnificence and the effect of it in these sharp, solemn, rhapsodic elegant pieces of eloquence" (92). But Moore has also noted "a deliberate bearishness" in certain poems, and by citing Crispin's "violence" she quietly introduces the complex image with which she wishes to leave us: of Stevens as, instead, a certain kind of lion. Quoting from the account of Crispin then allows her to introduce explicitly "the book of moonlight," which I quote without nested inverted commas because Moore does not quote this, the opening phrase of canto iii. Moonlight then gets her back to her titular allusion to Act 5 of A Midsummer Night's Dream and the enactment by "rude mechanicals" (3.2.9) of Pyramus and Thisbe.

Mid-review Moore introduces the comedy in the context of praising Stevens as no less "properly courageous" than Shakespeare in expressing his "Instinct for words … by the nature of the liberties taken with them" (Complete Prose 94). One may presume that she has been put in mind of A Midsummer Night's Dream by Harmonium's "Peter Quince at the Clavier," a poem that she does not excerpt and mentions only in passing as having "a selfsufficing, willowy, firmly contrived cadence" (96).⁵ The drama-directing carpenter operates in the review as a wall-chink through which Moore winks silently at Stevens, her review's most informed, most interested reader, invisible to her except through his poetry. The title of his Susanna poem assures her that she may speak to Stevens through this petrous wall. Before cataloguing several examples of Stevens's leonine "immunity to fear," she sets as her gold standard "Shakespeare arresting one continually with nutritious permutations as when he apostrophizes the lion in A Midsummer Night's Dream—'Well moused, lion'" (94). Theseus thus commends Snug the joiner (as Lion) because he has effectively scared Thisbe offstage with his roar despite his earlier acknowledgment that his disposition runs opposite. He has risen to the occasion without implying that he is truly violent. With the final sentence of her review, Moore calls upon Crispin's bookish moonlight to recall Shakespeare's [End Page 51] Starveling's Moonshine and with it to conjure again Thisbe's gory veil, the lion-mouthed mantel. Moore is saying that she recognizes that Stevens's uncouth maximalism, his "never inadvertently crude" and yet often crude "deliberate bearishness," is performative and may even run counter to his disposition. His courage as a poet is akin not only to Shakespeare's but to that of humble, solicitous Snug. Modern parlance supplies a phrase for what Stevens must have enjoyed upon making sense of the review's thickly layered title: "feeling seen."

________

The short final section of "About One of Marianne Moore's Poems," Part 3, is similarly generous in its expressions of acute insight. Although it comprises a single paragraph, that paragraph is cleaved by an italicized statement in French inset as a short block quotation, and it will be convenient to analyze this concluding Part 3 in three parts. The first of these is swiftly dispatched. In it, Stevens is concerned with two matters. He effectively bids adieu to Lewis while emphasizing the philosopher's notion of "a reality adequate to the profound necessities of life today" (CPP 705). While the phrase describing this object of contemplation is not yet another unacknowledged quotation, Lewis does address "the need to infuse into the ages of enlightenment an awareness of reality adequate to their achievements and such as will not be attenuated by them" (165; emphasis added). The phrase is identified immediately as something Lewis "contemplates" then repeated two sentences later as importantly found within some poetry.

Somewhat more slyly, among the same few early sentences of Part 3, Stevens also repeats a word never used by Lewis: the word "scale." It makes sense that Stevens concerns himself with scale because he knows that Moore's poem is so-concerned. After all, there is little reason to single out and fixate upon the ostrich other than its conspicuous size. Most birds that big have gone extinct. Its plumes have adorned scenes of justice just because they are long enough to show. Stevens's condensed argument here is that Moore's humility means she is not beguiled by size: "she is not a proud spirit" of the type that would "love only the lion or the elephant" for either's destructive might (CPP 705). And we know that she is not proud in this way because she does not imagine that a lyric poem can do more than it can do. Moore's poem, Stevens writes as he prepares to lay down his French, "is an instance of method and is not an example beyond the scale intended by her" (CPP 705). When in his preface to the essay Stevens acknowledges his "purpose" as the juxtaposition of "one of Miss Moore's poems and a paper, 'On Poetic Truth'" (CPP 699), he never says that the former's particularity is modest or narrow with respect to the [End Page 52] broad, abstract latter topic. But it is clear from his use of not only the term "scale" but also "as great as" that he has their relative sizes, their hefts, in mind. Like Moore's earlier poem "The Jerboa," which contrasted the "Abundance" of the desert rat's bounding rear legs and leavening spirit against the self-aggrandizing "Too Much" of ancient Egypt and Rome, "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron'" makes its point with illustrations of scale and self-importance. Ostriches have not gone the way of the aepyornis and moa—to extinction—because they were humble enough not to rely on their heft alone for endurance. That was roughly Moore's point regarding Shakespeare's lion. Snug the joiner deserves Theseus's praise because he addressed himself fully and with competence to a small part, scaring off mousy Thisbe with a roar then moistening her abandoned mantel with gore. Analogously, Moore implies, Stevens devotes his leonine bravura to small matters to great effect. Stevens, in turn, indicates that although Moore has taken a poetic interest in large birds and "Elephants" (Nevertheless, 1944), she is humble. She understands that any given poem can only ever be exemplary, an instance. She does not seek to bully anyone with an ostrich-sized conceit. If Stevens is a mousing lion, Moore is a sparrow-like camel, a camel-like sparrow, or even a hen:

She may well say:

Que ce n'est pas grand merveille de voir que l'Ostruche digére le fer, veu que les poulles n'en font pas moins.

(CPP 705)

The editors of the Library of America edition of Stevens's Collected Poetry and Prose supply a translation of the French: "It is no great marvel to see that the Ostrich digests iron, since hens do no less" (CPP 1011). Unsurprisingly neither Frank Kermode nor Joan Richardson could provide a source for the italicized clause. Two years prior to their edition's first publication in 1997, Gregory de Rocher published an alternative translation: "That it is not so astonishing to see an ostrich digest iron since hens are able to do the same" (Joubert 142). But he was translating a proverb by the sixteenth-century French physician Laurent Joubert for The Second Part of the Popular Errors, so Kermode and Richardson may be excused for not having noticed.

I relied on search engines to trace the French clause's origin and found Joubert by way of a more recent English aggregator of proverbs. The several volumes of Lean's Collectanea, compiled by Vincent Stuckey Lean and published in England in the early years of the twentieth century, provided in a world of print a crude anticipation of what command-F could do within a documentary database by the final decades of that century and what Google has done for us in the twenty-first. Peter Brazeau learned from Samuel French Morse that Stevens collected such volumes: "he had book after book of proverbs in languages many of which he couldn't read, obviously, [End Page 53] [such as] Armenian" (Brazeau 156; square brackets in original).⁶ The very title, Collectanea, would have attracted the author of "Pecksniffiana" and, later, "A Collect of Philosophy."

Moore's notes in What Are Years indicate that she relied upon such documents as George Jennison's Animals for Show and Pleasure in Ancient Rome and Berthold Laufer's illustrated pamphlet Ostrich Egg-shell Cups from Mesopotamia for her poetic research. One may imagine that Stevens, either as he sought to negotiate "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron'" or, more likely, as he sought to honor Moore's collecting and repurposing of quotations by supplementing the ostrich-adjacent facts and sayings listed in her notes, leaned into his Lean's, turning first to Volume IV's index, and looked up "Ostrich." That sent him to "ii., 617" (Lean 4.441).⁷ Volume II, Part II features ten entries ranging in length from an epigrammatic clause—"An ostrege is greatest of all byrdis, and dygesteth yron," from William Horman's Vulgaria (1519)—to seven open iambic-pentameter couplets from Thomas Scot's Philomythie, or, Philomythologie wherin outlandish birds, beasts, and fishes, are taught to speake true English plainely (1616). The epigram from Lyly's Euphues that supplied Moore's title is listed just after Jack Cade's threatening of Alexander Iden from Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI—"But I'll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and swallow / my sword like a great pin, ere thou and I part" (4.10.27)—and a 1550 edition of Chaucer's Parliament of Byrdes. The penultimate item, preceding seventeen lines of John Skelton's "Philip Sparrow," matches the French quotation in Stevens's essay exactly and is attributed to "Jo., II. 189" (see fig. 1). Who knows whether Stevens then referred to Volume IV where the listed "Abbreviations of Names of Authorities" direct one to "Joubert," and "List of Authorities" finally discloses the source as Laurent Joubert's two-volume octavo edition La première et seconde partie des erreurs populaires, published in Rouen in 1600? Stevens could have found in the French proverb something that served his purposes and stopped, without hunting down the author's name. For that matter, he may have found it in an edition of Joubert's Erreurs Populaires itself and never cracked or even discovered Lean's, though the latter's index with an "Ostrich" entry makes it the most convenient and therefore probable source. I like to think of Stevens thinking that Moore might be the American poet most likely (other than himself) to own or regularly consult either compendium.

I allow my description of the archival procedure to run to some length not only because a shared delight in such scholarship is clearly an adhesive feature of Moore and Stevens's "web of friendship" (L 771) but also mainly because it corresponds in its carefully sustained attentions to Moore's stage-managing of the imagined Lion, Wallace Stevens, mouthing gauze in the moonlight. Stevens sets the French proverb at the heart of the short final part of his essay, knowing that Moore, when she comes to it, will know that she had not supplied it, discern that even Stevens cannot have had a ready inventory of ostrich-related quips that superabounds [End Page 54]

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Fig 1.

Detail of the last two of ten entries under "Ostrich," from p. 618 of Lean's Collectanea, Vol. II, Part II. The book's subtitle is Collections by Vincent Stuckey Lean of Proverbs (English & Foreign), Folk Lore, and Superstitions, also Compilations towards Dictionaries of Proverbial Phrases and Words, old and disused.

her own store, and thus see, probingly, down the temporal rabbit hole of what must have been Stevens's process of hunting up the exquisitely apt quotation. Surely she would recognize that he has done what he imagines she would do, taking pains, solicitously. And the deflationary French proverb secures Stevens's claim in Part 3 that Moore humbly matches her ambitions to her method; a quirky lyric is not going to encompass poetic truth … but it may exemplify a reality sufficiently vivid to retain its individuality against the homogenizing forces of modern life. She is not vaunting as a would-be camel-sparrow or ostrich, he implies; a hen may do the same. For Stevens, Moore "may well say," I write my poems as a hen, humbly. Then, having acknowledged a dozen years earlier in "A Poet That Matters" that her poems feature many animals—"There are in The Steeple-Jack the following creatures: eight stranded whales, a fish, sea-gulls, [a] peacock, a guinea, a twenty-five pound lobster, an exotic serpent (by allusion), a ring-lizard, a snake (also by allusion), a crocodile, cats, cobras, rats, the diffident little newt and a spider" (CPP 776)—Stevens relates Moore's lack of leonine or elephantine pride to her evident love of "all animals, fierce or mild, ancient or modern" (CPP 705). [End Page 55]

Moore expresses this love, he writes, through observation, understood broadly to include not just visual perception but also such poetic activity as empathic description: "When she observes them she is transported into the presence of a recognizable reality" (CPP 706), that outcome being the opposite of a scenario he introduced early in Part 1: "To confront fact in its total bleakness is for any poet a completely baffling experience" (CPP 700). Observing animals, Moore is not baffled as she would be by the utter alienation of the utterly inhuman but, on the contrary, actively engaged because the alienation is partial, challenging, informing. A "recognizable reality" is a reality that one has already taken in and made one's own, cognized and thus re-cognizable.

________

Stevens saves his highest praise of Moore for his essay's end. Guided by witty Euphues's verb digesteth (or should we call it Lyly's? or, for Stevens, maybe Moore's?), which, for Stevens, Moore has made her own at any rate and which Stevens sees as describing well the transformation of settled forms, he attributes Moore's loving recognition of her own individual reality in animals to "the faculty of digesting the 'harde yron' of appearance" (CPP 706).⁸ His pairing of a physical—indeed, visceral—process (digestion) with an abstract, insubstantial object or quality (appearance) is likely to disconcert some readers. But a poet who elsewhere has urged them to "Let be be finale of seem" (CPP 50) may treat appearances—seemings—as less certainly insubstantial and abstract than most people do. And even if we do not go so far as to conflate seeming with substantial being, any changes in appearance must result either from changes in the things that appear or from changes of perception and figuration for which digestion is itself an apt figure. Despite these provisos, it is surprising to find Stevens treating something so questionably substantial as if it were a paradigm of material durability. There are many ways that appearances do not resemble iron, but their very lack of obvious materiality can make them nigh impossible—"harde" in the sense of "difficult"—to resist, dispel, or escape. Ludwig Wittgenstein writes of a picture holding us captive: "and we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably" (53e). The so-called substance of appearance is not material; it is linguistic. Early in his essay on "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron,'" Stevens cautions that "Reality is not the thing but the aspect of the thing" (CPP 700). To alter or individuate reality, then, requires no muscular manipulation but only the deft conjury of a new perspective or focus, which in poetry is brought about by arranging words after refusing to stomach, as it were, conventionally phrased ways of looking. [End Page 56]

Robin Schulze writes that, after completing "Credences of Summer," "Stevens spent the summer of 1946 making Moore the subject of his verse"; he alludes, she says, to Moore's "A Carriage from Sweden" when writing of "Marianna's Swedish cart" in "The Prejudice Against the Past" (165). While that poem's "Aquiline pedants" are "Confined by what they see" and thus "treat the cart … / As one of the relics of the heart," Stevens understands Moore and himself to be childlike in the relative freedom of their perception, which the poem allies with "day" as a mode of "perpetual time"—a cyclically enduring opportunity for appearances—and contrasts with the recalcitrant, hardened past of "relics," "souvenirs … , lost time, // Adieux, shapes, images." Like the poem's "children," Moore and Stevens poetically "make" new, individual realities "Of day"—of the digested substance of old appearances, that is—while the acculturated pedants prejudicially "take for," fitting appearances into expected conceptual categories and thus making nothing of such a rich resource—"No, not of day, but [only] of themselves" (CPP 319). As Stevens had written in "A Postcard from the Volcano," appearance or "The look of things" is "left" to the young by past generations through the language because concepts condition perception (CPP 128).⁹ To free ourselves from the past's captivating pictures that prompt us to prejudge what we see by fitting perception into inherited frames, we must either be or rely upon poets—like Moore, like Stevens—who can digest appearances by breaking down their defining membranes and composing new conceptual frames through which perception occurs. To digest appearance is to avail oneself of the invisible power of the visible.

In Part 2, Stevens has shown himself in the act of digesting appearances. Not surprisingly, he does so by orienting himself not to animals but to places (though he mentions both ducklings and sheep in those places). Scholars and other readers may have been confused by that portion of the essay because it does not share the results of successful metabolism—an extraction of the invisible power from the visible—as Part 1's appreciative engagement with excerpts of Moore's poem does and as Stevens's statements of poetic theory elsewhere in The Necessary Angel seek to do. Especially when he acknowledges how halftone his reality became at the old graveyard and the Wizard-of-Oz-like resumption of color that occurs among the graphic art exhibit's illustrations, he is humbly sharing evidence of undigested appearance—the effects of being ambushed by appearance, of swallowing appearance whole. Lewis says (and I quote), "the humble are they that move about the world with the lure of the real in their hearts" (166). Stevens there humbly shows himself lured.

But to metabolize appearances requires that they first be realized as substantial tokens of reality. Perhaps that is what proverbs, aphorisms, adages, and other quotable quotations are: a means to secure, at least temporarily, the boundaries of what would otherwise be, in the words of Moore's "A Jellyfish," "Visible, invisible, / a fluctuating charm" (NCP [End Page 57] 211). The poem was not included in a book until after Stevens's death, and he is unlikely to have encountered the catchy, common-meter jingle with a Negative Capability conceit when it was first published as "A Jelly-Fish" in Bryn Mawr's alumnae annual, The Lantern, during Moore's senior year there in 1909. And yet, long before settling upon "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron'" (like a male ostrich on his nest of eggs), he had had many occasions to become aware of Moore's care for the animating flux or play between invisible souls and ostentatious bodies. Moreover, although the term "quotation poems" may not have gained currency by the early postwar years of the 1940s, Stevens certainly understood that she had her own brand of quotation- and allusion-laden modernist collage. His awareness and appreciation of her magpie sampling is evident when he writes, in a passage where Lewis is clearly ancillary to Moore, that "To the extent that Miss Moore finds only allusion tolerable she shares [Plato's] asceticism" (CPP 701). According to Lewis, "Plato's asceticism" amounted to his belief that we should "draw ourselves away as much as possible from the unsubstantial, fluctuating facts of the world about us and establish some communion with the abiding or 'eternal' objects which are apprehended by thought and not sense" (149). Stevens repeats everything quoted in the previous sentence except "abiding or 'eternal'" (CPP 700–701). What he then calls allusion with reference to Moore must be those elements of her poetry whose "chief interest is borrowed" (NCP 295) and ought therefore to be annotated. But quotations, respected as such, are fixed and, as quotations, amount to what Stevens discounts, with respect to poetry, as "isolated fact" (CPP 699, 700). Like Plato's ideal forms, they do not fluctuate unsubstantially as what our senses and minds make of them, our perspectives on them and impressions of them, do. Regarding Plato's (and possibly Moore's) asceticism, Stevens continues: "While she shares it she does so only as it may be necessary for her to do so in order to establish a particular reality or, better, a reality of her own particulars" (CPP 701). Again, regarding a respected quotation as Platonic and ascetic in this sense, this suggests that Stevens thinks of Moore as scrupulous about quotation and citation in order to more readily differentiate her poetic doings from the inert absolutism of Platonic ideals in favor of "a reality of her own particulars"—"an individual reality" (CPP 703; Lewis 156). That is, she quotes not because she wants to be a Platonic ascetic but so as to bring salient language back into circulation. One has first to recognize that although appearance may be merely qualitative and insubstantial, its staying power is profound. One needs to treat appearance as one would "harde yron," seeking to digest it, to avail oneself—and as a poet to avail one's readers—of the invisible power it holds.¹⁰ [End Page 58]