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thorough way in which she may be said to disinfect and purify
them so that once more they stand out fresh and angular. An
other modern poet, William Carlos Williams, in the Dial for
May, 1925, gives a good description of this faculty.
“Miss Moore gets great pleasure from wiping soiled words
or cutting them clean out, removing the aureoles that have been
pasted about them or taking them bodily from greasy contexts.
For the compositions which Miss Moore intends, each word
should first stand crystal clear with no attachments; not even
an aroma. ...
“With Miss Moore a word is a word most when it is sep
arated out by science, treated with acid to remove the smudges,
washed, dried, and placed right side up on a clean surface. Now
one may say that this is a word. Now it may be used, and how?
“It may be used not to smear it again with thinking (the
attachments of thought) but in such a way that it will remain
scrupulously itself, clean, perfect, unnicked beside other words
in parade. There must be edges.”
One is glad that Miss Moore does this, for we have been too
long tricked by the “suggestiveness” of poetry, which after all
should be of firmer stuff than a dream. Her careful use of words
blends imperceptibly into her rhythm—a peculiar and new
rhythm about which I agree with T. S. Eliot: it is her most
important contribution. As far as vers libre is concerned, she
has “gone the whole hog including the postage,” to use the trans
lation of a Russian colloquialism. That is, she gets along with
an utter minimum of rhymes, of assonance, alliteration, master
beats and other versifying devices. She goes out where the waves
are choppiest and the currents cross most dangerously and sharks
are said to be mouthing, and she swims superbly and safely.
Trusting solely to her own gift of metrical invention, she takes
all the dangers and emerges in calm triumph.
Her line runs long and free, or turns brief and swift, as she
wills it. Her strophes breathe quietly and enunciate well: they
uncoil with smooth friction out of each other, undulate as the
way of apprehending the subject undulates, and rise with finality
or settle in tranquility at the conclusion. They are “strict and
stately”, yet they are limber too like “essences of conversations”.
Williams again has said the essential thing about her rhythm.
“It does not interfere with her progress; it is the movement of
the animal, it does not put itself first and ask the other to follow.”
This “movement of the animal” is literally delightful. So
likewise are the bits of freightage carried so nimbly by her
strophes. To illustrate:
There is the lapidic aphorism worthy, had it been carved
then, of being preserved from antiquity. In view of earlier re-