Morals, Manners, and "Marriage": Marianne Moore's Art of Conversation

One implication of this story is that Moore's reader knows when to insert quotation marks. Thus Moore can be sure that her intellectual and moral bearings will be read correctly; in this case, that she is someone who has read and remembered Cowper's poem, not someone who would ordinarily use a slang, and therefore slightly disrespectful, word in reference to her mother. It also implies that a word can be rendered usable by deft recontextualization; if Moore uses rump in the knowledge that her mother will catch the allusion, then rump is a permissible word, and it is the context of mutually understanding conversation as much as Cowper's precedent that has made the difference.

Moore's story about the word rump and the conversational context that makes it possible to use nicely illustrates the bridging of private and public usage that conversation effects for Moore. It allows her to reinvent rules of propriety to accommodate her natural sauciness, so that she gets to refer to her mother's rump at the same time that she shows her understanding of convention: "ordinarily," she would never use the word. A similar process is at work when Moore negotiates the demands of private glee and public accountability with respect to her poetic style by calling it conversational. Moore values the competing imperatives in her work--to be confident in her innovations no matter how strange they might seem, and to remain comprehensible to a reading public--differently over the course of her career. The reader can trace her changing evaluations of which responsibility is the most pressing in the evolution of her stylistic inventions. One of her most commanding solutions may be read in "Marriage," a po em that concerns itself with the possibility of making poetry conversational.

"Marriage," Moore's longest and perhaps most difficult poem, represents the high point of her work in free verse. [7] During the years from 1921 to 1925, when she was publishing primarily in the Dial, Moore's poems turn from eccentric syllable grids and elaborate rhyme schemes to free verse in which quotation plays a newly important role. "Marriage" is the most formally self-reflective of these poems. Read as an experiment in pushing certain of her stylistic innovations to their limits, it has much to say about the skepticism with which Moore regarded her fascination with unsociably complicated forms. [8] From its opening lines onward, "Marriage" poses its subject as a problem, a set of alternatives to be tested and explored, whether by disputation or conversation, as the case may turn out. Part of the difficulty of "Marriage" lies in its rapid, unmarked stylistic shifts. To the eye the poem is a long column of free verse, unpunctuated by stanzas, syllable grids, or rhymes. Within that uniformity, however, l ies a bewildering array of stylistic modes. As I will argue, a consideration of how these modes do and do not harmonize will show one way that Moore found to write in the complicated registers of conversation. [9] The first 15 lines introduce possibilities for thinking and talking about marriage that the rest of the poem will follow: