CRITICAL APPROACHES
PREDILECTIONS, by ,Marianne_ Moore; Faber and Faber, English price 18/-. THE METAPHYSICALS AND by E. M. W. Tillyard; Chatto and Windus, English price 10/6. HE keynote of Marianne Moore’s work in verse or prose is precision. Her book must surely be the only book
ever printed by Faber and Faber to be prefaced by precisely 20 "changes from the printed text." Just as her poems are inspired sampler work, so in these critical appreciations of poets, essayists, a novelist and a ballet dancer, one has the impression of a botanist with a magnifying glass, to whom each and every detail of plant or weed is of equal significance. It never occurs to her to doubt a poem’s credentials. To Wallace Stevens, that mandarin of American letters who, by subtlety and urbanity, has conquered a thousand critical strongholds with poems essentially dull and trivial, she pays special homage. Her own genuine humility is a stumblingblock. She herself has a gift for the pungent phrase, as when she writes of Ezra Pound-"To cite passages is to pull one quill from a porcupine." Auden she understands; Eliot she loves for nis purity of diction-but what shall we say of this note on E. E. Cummings? — ". . for poetry is a flowering, and its truth is ‘a cry of a whole of a soul,’ not dogma; it is a positivism that is joy, that we have in bird songs and should have in ourselves. . ." Putting off her armour of precision, she invites us to share an emotional mud-bath quite foreign to mature. criticism. Dr Tillyard suggests that Milton "is more like Jonson and Marvell than he is like Donne or Crashaw." He also opines that "Milton is more reflective than Shelley," that he "believed human life on earth was sinful," and
that he "was very much a person." Dr Tillyard has written another of those comparative essays in literary criticism, developed from lectures, which leave the mind stale and the imagination dulled. In comparison with Dr Tillyard, Marianne Moore is very much a critic.
James K.
Baxter
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 945, 20 September 1957, Page 16
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344CRITICAL APPROACHES New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 945, 20 September 1957, Page 16
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