Poetry (Themes)

Themes

Nature

Nature was a popular subject for romantic poets who found in it their inspiration, energy, and, often, their reason for being. Modernist poets enlarged their conception of subject matter and of nature itself. Moore, even though she described the natural world with an almost scientific eye for detail, using decidedly unromantic language, nonetheless considered it a place of beauty and mystery. She underscores this attitude in the third stanza when she uses the odd behavior of animals as examples of what the human mind "cannot understand." But like poetry, these behaviors should be embraced rather than ignored, as they embody the very "raw material" of life itself, which cannot be reduced to mean this or that, as critics would have it.

Modernism

Modern poetry has often been criticized for its obscurity and elitism, with some writers claiming that it shows a deliberate attempt to alienate general readers. Moore addresses this in her opening line when she claims about poetry: "I, too, dislike it." What she implies here is that she dislikes the popular conception of modern poetry as writing that has nothing to do with the real world, and is often abstract. However, in the rest of her poem she utilizes explicitly modernist techniques, such as irony, allusion, paradox, quoting others, and incorporating footnotes — techniques that often invite the very accusation of elitism. In this way, she shows herself to be a true modernist, interested in process as much as product and embracing contradiction and abstraction while appearing to endorse unequivocal statements about the real world.

Imagination

Poets have paid homage to the idea of the imagination ever since romantics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth championed its powers, naming it as a crucial part in the poetic process. Coleridge, for example, distinguished between imagination and "fancy," terms that previously had been used synonymously, by giving imagination a more important role. Whereas fancy merely reassembles sense impressions, the imagination synthesizes disparate impressions, ideas, etc. into a unified whole, a whole greater than its parts. Moore's "Poetry" endorses this view as well, although she claims the imagination can only be effective if applied to stuff of the real world, that is, the "genuine." This is one reason why Moore attacks critics, as they are champions of "understanding" more interested in analyzing than reseeing the world and accepting its contradictions and mysteries, which are indicative of the reality and of poetry itself.

Poetry

Categorizing writing into genres such as poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, and the like is often a vexing matter not only for bookstores and marketers but for poets and critics as well. Moore was particularly notorious for her ambivalence about labeling what she did, noting once that her writing is called poetry only because no one else knew what to call it. "Poetry" is ironic partly because of its name and the fact that its argument about poetry's definition is never resolved. Moore's writing resembles poetry the most in its physical appearance, as she makes innovative use of line breaks and indentation. However, her choppy rhythms, use of multi-claused sentences, quotations, and footnotes all give her writing the appearance of prose. Partly, this approach to poetry stems from Moore's affinity with the Imagist movement, members of which argued that, to rejuvenate poetry, meter should be replaced by the rhythms of colloquial speech and conventionally poetic diction should be replaced by contemporary language and phrasing.

Topics For Further Study

• Work in pairs: One person play the role of Moore and the other person play the role of a critic interviewing Moore about the meaning of her poem. Write up a transcript of the interview and exchange this with other students, comparing the variety of ways Moore is presented.
• Write Moore's poem in paragraphs instead of lines. Does this change the meaning or the effect of the poem? What is lost and what is gained in the new version, and what does this have to say about the nature of poetry itself? Report your findings to your class.
• Write a poem about a term that many people disagree on. In the poem, try to define this term. Then, read the poem to your class and discuss your responses.
• Research the behavior of the animals that Moore describes. Is this behavior, in fact, unexplainable? Do you agree with her statement that "we do not admire what / we cannot understand?" Why or why not? Discuss your responses in groups.
• If Moore were writing today, what examples would she use to describe behavior than cannot be explained? Work in groups and then list your ideas on the board.
• Moore makes a number of claims for the idea of the "genuine." As a class, brainstorm definitions of this term and then work to come up with one on which the entire class can agree.
• Work in groups: Make two lists and compare what Moore suggests about critics in "Poetry" with what she suggests about them in her poem "Critics and Connoisseurs." Discuss the lists as a class.
• Compare the 1919 version of "Poetry" to the 1967 version, in which Moore cut the poem down to three lines. Which is more effective and why? Would including the earliest version in the footnotes for the final edition provide a helpful context for reading the poem? Discuss as a class whether or not footnotes alienate or inform a reader, and whether or not imagist poets might prefer an intertextual reading of Moore's poem versus a reading of the final three-line version as it stands.