Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

England with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral, with voices—one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept—the criterion of suitability and convenience: and Italy with its equal shores—contriving an epicureanism from which the grossness has been extracted: and Greece with its goats and its gourds, the nest of modified illusions: and France, the “chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly,” in whose products, mystery of construction diverts one from what was originally one’s object—substance at the core: and the East with its snails, its emotional shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its imperturbability, all of museum quality: and America where there is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars are smoked on the street in the north; where there are no proofreaders, no silkworms, no digressions; the wild man’s land; grass-less, links-less, language-less country in which letters are written not in Spanish not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand but in plain American which cats and dogs can read! the letter “a” in psalm and calm when pronounced with the sound of “a” in candle, is very noticeable but why should continents of misapprehension have to be accounted for by the fact? Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous? In the case of mettlesomeness which may be mistaken for appetite, of heat which may appear to be haste, no con- clusions may be drawn. To have misapprehended the matter, is to have confessed that one has not looked far enough. The sublimated wisdom of China, Egyptian discernment, the cataclysmic torrent of emotion compressed in the verbs of the Hebrew language, the books of the man who is able to say, “I envy nobody but him and him only, who catches more fish than I do,”—the flower and fruit of all that noted superi- ority—should one not have stumbled upon it in America, must one imagine that it is not there? It has never been confined to one locality. by Marianne Moore Poems responding to prejudice, ordinarily uttered by the oppressed, are variously angry, depressed, or revolutionary in sentiment. Only rarely are they humorous or ironic. Yet examples of poems resisting prejudice through wit and comedy turn up in such twentieth-century poets as Marianne Moore, D.H. Lawrence, and Allen Ginsberg. Comedy, for obvious reasons, is more available to writers not themselves among the most heavily oppressed; although they may belong to oppressed populations (women, the Welsh, homosexuals), they have usually become — through innate genius, childhood wealth, or admission to elite education — socially equal (or superior) to their earlier oppressors. Marianne Moore, for example, was born to the daughter of a well-off Presbyterian minister, but also to a psychotic father confined in an asylum. She and her mother were relatively impoverished after her grandfather’s death when she was seven. Yet she was educated at Bryn Mawr, and became after college a teacher “of English and business subjects” (at one of the now-infamous boarding schools for “Indians”), a librarian, and the editor of an avant-garde journal. She also had the luck of having her poems brought to the attention of T.S. Eliot in England through the influence of her poet-friend Hilda Doolittle (whose wealthy lover, Winifred Ellerman, paid for the original publication of Moore’s poems in England without Moore’s knowledge or consent).  Although Moore was trained in college to recognize social prejudice — she enthusiastically attended lectures by visiting feminists at Bryn Mawr and took an interest in the Suffragist movement — she was also, I think, brought up by her mother (who eventually took a lesbian lover) to feel indignant at the common private prejudice against those who, like herself later, resisted the usual social program of female life. (Emily Dickinson, even more eccentric than Moore, had implicitly described herself to Thomas Wentworth Higginson as of a different species from conventional women: “the only kangaroo among the beauty.”) When Moore visited England in 1911 with her mother, she was nettled by the persistent prejudice there against all things American; and in 1920, in a poem mischievously titled “England,” she could afford (because of her maternal family and her upper-class education) to