Divagations
PREDILECTIONS. By Marianne Moore. (Faber, 180
THOSE who cannot make much of Miss Marianne Moore's verse. and feel they have perhaps not missed much either, will find the prose pieces of hers equally unsatisfactory. On SainisburY. Pavlova, on the character of Henry James—whenever, in fact, she keeps off creative writing—she displays clarity and force. OW where these qualities are submerged in fads. The first of these! frequent in American works on literature, consists in giving The debatable names to very uncertainly demarcated entities. .1.11,5 second fad, by no means an exclusively American one, consise hi in toiling through that unedifying region that lies between Int frontiers of philosophy, psychology and criticism—the pre habitation, and the potential tomb, of Mr. Auden. Miss Moore's comments on Wallace Stevens, like those on Mr Eliot and Mr. Pound, are marked by highly fanciful content: His repercussive harmonics, set off by the small composting the poem, 'prove' mathematically, and suggest a linguist Crea several languages within a single language, and highly poetical style: hate- Upon the general marine volume of statement is set a parac „d spinnaker of verbiage which looms out like half a cantelouPe gives the body of the theme the air of a fabled argosy advancing' But perhaps this a salad of actual Stevens phrases. Other pieces seem no more than connected—or rather seri}111-e-d jottings from Miss Moore's reading, so that in an essay ent,:t.afti 'Feeling and Precision' the roll-call includes Hopkins, W,h'ish, Byrd, the Book of Daniel, Picasso, Plato, Voltaire, Ogden 171305, William Rose Benet, Henryson, T. S. Eliot, Bacon, Long1,11.„, Kenneth Burke (of course), Johnson, Dryden, E. E. CurnrinnyTh Rembrandt, Wyndham Lewis, Campion and Bach, together `. lof more than twenty other personages, in nine pages. A On% perverse charm, an instinct for the surprising quotation. eve t is tortured shrewdness are far from lacking in these essays. Whaos
lacking is any sense of relevance or direction. KINGsLO A
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