Perhaps I should admit right off that although I certainly like Moore, I don't like her work as much as that of Stevens or Williams, and for a long time, despite my liking, didn't really understand the way her poems were put together. A poem by Moore is to an uncommon degree a collection of things that appear unrelated and often unusual, even bizarre. There are few general statements to glue it all together, and they seem buried in the accumulation of things. But all the same, as Stevens once said in a poem of his own, "invisible currents clearly circulate."

The frequent revisions of "Poetry" seem to indicate that Moore did not like her poem. (She frequently revised other poems too.) Perhaps the reason is that for her, it is uncommonly doctrinal. The last lines of the 1924 version state that "the poets among us" are frequently inadequate because they fail to be "literalists of the imagination" and will not be successful until they can present the famous "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." You may or may not agree with this. I wonder what Moore would think of "Mutability" by Shelley, which may be found here:

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(There is more than one poem by Shelley with this title, but the above is what I intend.) "Mutability" is almost entirely made of abstractions, and its images are entirely conventional, but its value is undeniable.

Moore began as an imagist. Her attachment to "real toads" and "the raw material of poetry in all its rawness" is only to be expected. I suggest that toward the end of her life, she came to feel that "Poetry" in its original form was setting forth too narrow a program. Even if you are an imagist, "real toads" (or anything else real) do not make a poem by themselves. The word "genuine" in the 1967 version is crucial because after that point, the original version is an expansion on its meaning, followed by a reassertion of its importance. What is genuine? Moore was faced with the alternative of either providing a near-total restatement or else leaving out what she had come to feel was not quite right.

It's often hard to understand the unity that ties a poem by Moore together, although it's perceptible all the same. One poem I like very much is "The Steeple-Jack". The star on the church steeple (being gilded by the steeple-jack) "stands for hope" and connects the people of the town and their risky living as fishermen. There is a review of Moore's Selected Poems of 1935 by Wallace Stevens (reprinted in his Opus Posthumous) which deals with "The Steeple-Jack" at some length, especially in connection with her romantic feeling that certain "genuine" things are crucial. He quotes a book by A.E. Powell, The Romantic Theory of Poetry, stating that the romantic poet "...seeks to reproduce for us the feeling as it lives within himself; and for the sake of a feeling which he thinks interesting or important he will insert passages which contribute nothing to the effect of the work as a whole." Clearly this visceral feeling about genuineness is very important. I found Stevens' review illuminating.

Bottomfish, as I see it, the Imagists were concerned with "real toads"; the Romantics were concerned with "imaginary gardens." Moore wants both.

To paraphrase something that critic Bonnie Costello said, Moore seeks a poem that tries to create for its readers a toad who is a prince. The effect will not last, but we readers can enjoy it while it does.

As a reader of poetry, not a writer of poetry, I especially appreciate this Poem About Poetry that focuses as much on the reader as on the poet.

Like Bottomfish, I do feel more attached to more poems by W.C. Williams and Wallace Stevens than Moore-- and Bottomfish, since I too particularly admire "The Steeplejack" I wonder if that is a poem that attracts such readers? As it attracted Stevens to write about it.

But the older I get (the older I get, the more I begin sentences this way!), the more I appreciate Moore's unique sensibility. As with Thomas Hardy, the peculiarities or eccentricities seem to become virtues, with time: shorter poems like "What Are Years," "Roosters," "Silence" have become kind of essential for me, and I am willing to wander the strange mansion of "Marriage," interestingly lost in it.

These autobiographical musings are justified, I hope, because they suggest another kind of labyrinth to wander: Paul Breslin proposes, in the thread above this one, that Moore does well to challenge the idea that poems must exist in only one version, or only in the version last approved by the author (which here the author evades doing, in a way), or in the version approved by a textual scholar.

The possibly Escher-like staircases and chutes and tunnels and multiple gravitations of a poem that has no one supreme incarnation resembles-- back to my idea of "fluidity" as disruption or irritable attention-- the way a poem like "Marriage" proceeds.

Thank you for this history of “Poetry" - I was particularly delighted to read it since I like to begin poetry classes with this poem. My students trust Moore because she announces right on the first day of the semester that she knows why people might dislike poetry, including her own - because of what thwarts our understanding, is unclear, overstated, irritating. Toads are a fabulous example of a possible opposite of what can turn a person off of poems. They're “real,” tangible, warty, something we can (although who’d want to?) grasp. Of course, the toads in Moore’s poem are a kind of prank or ambush themselves because even though they’re evidence of what we might like in poems, they’re of course as imaginary as the garden or poem they inhabit. I think the poem uses its toads to ask a question about what Mary Ann wisely identifies as Moore’s desire to have it both ways. That question is about what, in the world of words, can be called “genuine.” The answer has to live in that middle place Robert mentions, where complexity meets clarity and opposites cease to be simple or easy to identify/define. There, words might be as genuine as toads or behaviors or gardens, maybe because the ways we express what we see in the world are as complicated and clear as what we see: objects, animals, our own experiences. It’s a point Moore makes with humor and nuance, one that calls for the kind of on-going, internal conversation her revisions create.

"Imaginary gardens with real toads in them" has always seemed an almost perfect formulation of what I seek in poetry. I suspect it's a matter of temperament. Those who prefer real gardens with real toads (Objectivists?), imaginary gardens with imaginary toads, and even real gardens with imaginary toads probably have their place too, although perhaps the latter is more the realm of children's literarature (Wind in the Willows?).

I can understand how Moore equates "imaginary gardens with real toads" with "literalists of the imagination," but I think Yeats meant something different by "literalists" when he used the term to criticize Blake. Blake, especially in his prophetic books, often does seem to take his imaginary worlds ("vales of Har") all too literally (instead of real toads, in Blake's imaginary garden we have to keep track of "Ahania, the emanation from Urizen" and a thousand other imaginary figures).

I'd say "imaginary gardens with real toads" is a much better description of Keats, the very real hawthorn and musk rose in the nightingale's "forest dim." If Blake sometimes errs on the side of imaginary gardens with imaginary toads (or orcs), I'd say Moore's own weakness in some of her poems is to err on the side of real gardens with real toads, her exquisitely precise descriptions that sometimes don't seem to go beyond their own precision. But of course her best poems do.

It’s a pleasure to read all this talk of pranks and toads, as when Moore adopts her most lecturing tone, she appears (temporarily) to be exactly the sort of bossy, inflexible governess who deserves a toad in the desk drawer or under her chair. That she plants her own toad and is her own prankster is both endearing and infuriating. I find it hard to resist someone who laughingly sabotages her own fine ideas. On the other hand, what’s left for a reader to do when the poet has advanced an argument, critiqued that argument and even supplied an edited version of all the arguments and critiques? I’m left with the feeling that the “it” of the first stanza is not so much the beautiful contradiction of “imaginary gardens with real toads,” but this thwarted, restless feeling of wrestling with unsolvable puzzles.

I might have thought that rather than:

I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.

Moore would have chosen these lines as her re-write:

If you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

They certainly “sum up” neatly; maybe a bit too neatly.

I can guess at two reasons not to do that. One: the version I suggest seems youthfully Manichaean, and follows along with the Blake reference – her later version seems to mature beyond the division of the genuine with the …material…in all its rawness (a dichotomy which Blake, bless him, embraced all the more tightly with age.) Two: my suggested version is not a poem, by any stretch.

Thank you, Robert, for such an invigorating post & poem for discussion. Like some others here in “The Fray,” I find it enjoyable to talk about a poem whose discussion is also poetry (and a poem that takes multiple, non-traditional forms, to boot).

While I very much like MaryAnn’s reading of the ephemeral “toad-prince,” from the line about “real toads” and “imaginary gardens”; and while I'm on board with Rachel Dewoskin's argument about the joy of occupying that middle realm, I feel more as Kirun Kapur does, insofar as I am delightfully frustrated by Moore’s having it both ways---isn't this really a kind of cop-out? How can we let her get away with it?

I, too, like my poetry to be real and imaginary—I’ll take my Stevens with my Frost, thank you very much; but I’m reminded of what Heather McHugh’s poet says in “What He Thought,” the poet who responds glibly to the question “what is poetry? Is it the fruits and vegetables and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori / or that statue there”—with her answer “‘it was both, the answer is both!’ I blurted out”…but “that was easy to say, that was easiest to say…/ What followed taught me something of difficulty.” (Excuse the inaccuracies…I’m writing from heart.)

We could rephrase the same question thus: “Is poetry the real toad or the imaginary gardens?” “Ah, it’s both!” Moore replies, along with her dizzy reader.

We could spin the question further by asking “Is Moore’s ‘real’ poem about poetry the short version or the long?” Once again, “it’s both!” seems too easy an answer.

After all, if “poetry is what he thought but did not say,” (McHugh again), then we have to wrestle with at least three official versions of this poem, not two--1) what Moore thought but did not say—2) what she thought and then said—and 3) what she thought, said, and then retracted...or chose not say all over again.

But maybe even that’s too easy to say…(though it did take some effort to get that last sentence to make sense!).

I’m a poet, not a critic, so I wont go so far as to say I'm interested in “what she thought” about “what she had thought.” But the poet joins the editor-in-me to cry out for conclusion, for a choice to be made. I’m left with one too many options here—or two too many, depending on how you look at it.

I want to decide. If not about what poetry is, then at least about which poem about poetry is "best" (or in someone else's phrase in "The Fray," which of these poems might be considered "great").

Perhaps more to the point, I want for Moore to have decided for me—not her editors and not the reader in my head—which version is ultimately “Poetry.”

-FS

(My thanks also to Paul Breslin for his post above, for pointing out the differences between poet/author and editor--well said, and a good thread.)

Fred, those lines from McHugh's splendid "What He Thought" are a wonderful way to consider the limits of facile resolutions-- "both, it's both!"-- etc. Another way Moore brings Stevens to mind in this poem is that wrinkle-adding, further-irresolution-suggestin­g element?

(I'll confess-- if Moore were my poet-friend and asked me which I preferred, Falcon's excerpt or hers, I'd tell her Falcon's. But as I guess I've made clear it's the "full" version that means the most to me.)

Such an excellent discussion: I have always found "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" to be one of the most useful ways of describing an orientation towards both writing and reading poems. It's the thing I am usually trying to teach my students, at any level, and also what I am constantly trying to remind myself.

To me, one of the really amazing things about the poem is that its definitive version -- i.e. The Complete Poems -- as Robert pointed out is actually both versions, one in the main text and one in the Notes, as "Longer Version," which is hilarious.

This to me makes this poem, so fittingly titled, as much about the interaction between the two versions as what is said either of them. Sort of like the metaphor Breton uses in the 2nd Surrealist Manifesto, that the power of an image consists in the electrical charge between two disparate objects (the sewing machine on the dissecting table, etc.). Already in its original version it was a very powerful, if imperfect poem. But the two versions together make it even more interesting than either of them alone, especially the revision.

I also think that I can imagine Moore being frustrated with the second half of that first line --
"there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle." It seems not only sort of a careless use of language, uncharacteristic for Moore, but also kind of lazy in its thinking. My guess is she liked the transition from the first thought ("I, too, dislike it") to the next ("Reading it, however, ...").That cut makes a lot of sense to me, and maybe she just got to feeling a little contrary for reasons Robert and others have pointed out. But she also couldn't let the longer version go in the end, which is of course very telling.

One other thing that is amazing to me about the original version is that it is full of didactic, latinate, phraseology -- i.e., "all these phenomena are important," etc. -- that for a long time was very alien to American poetry, but which has now returned. This makes the longer version of the poem seem, to my ears, very contemporary.

Thanks for this great discussion, I really like this poem so much and was glad to spend some time thinking about it and reading all the great things everyone has to say.

Your discussion here - plus Jennifer C's in another thread somewhere - combine to represent the sentiments I most associate with in my own reading of this poem. I don't have the problem some seem to have with "imaginary gardens with real toads" as being trying to have it both ways. To me, in keeping with your comments here, all poems have gardens and toads; it's the quality and nature of each that I hear her addressing in seeking the gardens to be imaginary (and this evokes for me the G.B. Shaw statement almost contemporaneous with this poem - 1921 - in which he famously said, in Back to Methuselah, "You see things; and you say, "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"). That to me is the sense in which she is seeking that poems "dream big" - attend to imaginary gardens - even while building those gardens on the 'stepstones' if you will of very 'real frogs' ... helping us imagine transformations, new landscapes but ones that are 'grounded' by that which is familiar. (This does seem to stand at odds, however, with the perspective I also like of Proust's when he says ""The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

I have not seen anyone in these threads yet mention something that to me frames this entire poem, both in the short and long versions: To me Moore wants for this poem to read as a dialogue, part of an ongoing conversation (very pre-Rorty of her), a rebuttal and also consciously beginning defensively. The poem assumes that the reader fills in a background of pre-existing conversation all invoked by her words "I, too, dislike it." And, in exemplary rhetorical strategery, she positions herself first on the side of those with whom she takes up the conversation - she concurs with their objections and dismissivenesses (notably all in the realm of affect - she dislikes)... only to then undertake a bit of sleight of hand in refining the talk toward what she likes as well as dislikes ... and ultimately toward her ideal (imaginary gardens, real frogs) that would realize the best that poetry might offer, in her view.

Thus the shorter version in 1967 pursues that dialogue already set up in the original, now a step more ironic or self-mocking or such by also paring her own message down to a nub that deletes all of the ostensible 'poetry' of the poem and leaves something more akin to what she referred to as "school books" in the original - very expository stuff.

Speaking of the timing of the initial poem (1919 being the first writing of it), it seems relevant to think of the poetry of the day that exhibited qualities - as well as the critical discussion of the day - that she would have been taking up as the ongoing conversation. I see in the newest (3rd ed.) Norton anthology footnote on the poem, that she addressed herself directly to Tolstoy in these years and that his view of a harsh (and simplistic) line drawn between poetry and prose (as verse and not-verse) did not sit well with her. (The quoted phrase of "business documents and school books" seems to be taken directly from Tolstoy.) It would seem to suggest that would plausibly be part of the background she draws on in taking up her opening "I too...." Her 1967 version would seem to go all the further toward defying what Tolstoy's view would have represented by paring hers down to something he would presumably have called 'prose' - her own defiance.

I also think the word "genuine" has not gotten sufficient consideration yet (although I haven't read every post) ... She uses the word at the outset and the end and, putting the two uses together, I have to think that, by 'genuine' she does not mean 'authentic' (as I would usually expect it to mean) because she contrasts it with "raw material in its rawness" (which sounds pretty much 'authentic') but rather - drawing on her use of genuine in the first stanza too - I think she uses "genuine" to mean something of worth, something non-trivial, something that touches the heart by making a genuine connection - ideally to an 'imaginary garden' where real frogs take on 'genuine' perspective and meaning and contribute to both beauty and significance.

Or something like that.

Zinya, briefly, wow. I love your distinction between "genuine" and "authentic." That seems to be related intimately to a word I feel is crucial in poetry, but one with which I struggle in my own mind: "truth." "Genuine" seems to relate as much to an impulse that can be perceived or felt by the reader, on the part of the poet/speaker, that what is being said is meaningful, important, as you say "something of worth," though I am saddened by how difficult it is to talk about these concepts in anything but monetary terms. Oh well. Anyway I just wanted to say how impressed I am with your thoughts on this poem.

OK, here’s a question I think we’ve been circling, and a response to remarks all over several threads: Is the 1967 version a poem at all, or just an epigram? It’s all well to say for example God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world, but the poetry is in telling why you might think that. Otherwise the reader just agrees or disagrees and that’s that.

Mentioning the poems that have been written about poetry brings up: Yeats may work from an image to an insight, Moore proceed intellectually, Blake engage in Primitive Neurology, but whether I’m reading Issa’s haiku or Joyce’s novels, I want to see a mind at work.

That’s why I wasn’t crazy about her rewrite. It seemed like cheating. It is better than my suggestion above, though, because her rewrite really represents not a condensation but a change in her thinking.

Anyway, how about this: I think Moore’s epigram is not a rewrite of the whole poem. She’s just reached a different conclusion, which she presents knowing you have access to what leads to it. Her thoughts leading to her outlook have not changed, so she needn’t repeat them. The new poem presents her revised outlook on the same line of thought.

Zinya, I agree with Matthew about what you say here. The genuine distinguished from the authentic is terrific. I will remember it.

To criticize Moore's diction in choosing a word like "fiddle" misunderstands her method.
You could almost say that every word in Marianne Moore's poems is in quotes.
Her vocabulary focuses on juxtaposing words highly charged with a diverse
range of dictions, tones, registers, social & technical provenances --
"fiddle", "high-sounding,", "phenomena," "literalists." These plural registers,
tones, provenances evoke specific, different social attitudes and values.
Juxtaposing a diverse range of these implied contexts and evaluations allows Moore to
interogate her subject from a variety of angles. She is not intent on
creating the illusion ("persona") of a coherent speaking voice that seems to emerge from a specific
social and historical situation. She is, truly, a Modernist. She works by collage, and usually circles
an unstated subject rather thay staying overtly on topic throughout as in
"Poetry."