Robert Wrubel wrote:
>
> "B." <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote: Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> "All literature, even very wonderful literature, even
> in class society, does not involve suffering but
> rather celebrates merely being alive."
>
> I didn't quite get this poem, Carrol. It's supposedly written by Marriane Moore, and it sounds like Moore, but you say that she only wrote the part in quotes? I didnt want to comment at the time (I was way over my allotment on this thread already), but much of the punch of the poem, on first reading, comes from the contrast of natural beauty in the first part with mechanical violence in the second.
> What's the scoop?
Andie said that about quotes -- that she only wrote that part _not_ in quotes. Andie was (I think) being facetious. Quotes in a poem are by the writer who quotes, not by the writer quoted. So she wrote the whole poem.
Moore is, I think, the only 20th c. writer equal to Pound in control of the cadences of the poem. She and Pound both illustrate Eliot's observation that no _vers_ is _libre_ for the poet who tries to do a good job of work. (Paraphrased from memory.) Part of that metrical power is exhibited in her quotes -- her capacity to pick out phrases that will fit the cadences of her poem.
The metrical unit in Moore seems to be the paragraph rather than the line. That was Milton's preference too.
Carrol