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 choose satire rather than resentment as her initial weapon against hostile English judgments of things American. In between a scanty overture on England and a coda on America, Moore recites common stereotypes of Italy, Greece, France, and “the East” before coming to a defiant conclusion which not only counters English prejudice against America, but also confesses to her own previously unconscious use of superficial stereotypes.
Moore’s chief precursors in asserting America’s right to contest the Old World’s supposed excellence were Whitman and Dickinson. In 1871, by invitation, Whitman recited “Song of the Exposition” at the fortieth National Industrial Exposition in New York City, sponsored to display the newest products of agriculture and machinery. In the poem, he blithely disdained the assumed superiority of the European classics, flippantly declaring to the Muse that she has exhausted the literary materials of the past. Urging her to join him in the New World, he is irresistibly persuasive:
Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia,
Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,
That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath, and Aeneas’,
Odysseus’ wanderings,
Placard “Removed” and “To Let” on the rocks of your
snowy Parnassus, . . .
For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried
domain awaits, demands you.
Predicting the Muse’s smiling response to his call, he announces to his fellow citizens her choice of location for her new American shrine:
Bluff’d not a bit by drain-pipe, gasometers, artificial
fertilizers,
Smiling and pleas’d with palpable intent to stay,
She’s here, install’d amid the kitchen ware!