Some time ago I attempted to read Marianne Moore's poems as clues to local history. I noted that Moore (1887-1972) spent her formative years in Carlisle, Pennsylvania: From 1896 to 1918, that is, from ages nine to thirty-one, she lived, studied, and taught in Carlisle. For much of four years (1905-1909) she was in college at Bryn Mawr, for three months after college she worked in New York for Melvil Dewey (of decimal system fame), but otherwise, Moore was in Carlisle. From 1912 to 1916, she taught English at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where one of her students was an Olympic athlete, Jim Thorpe. Moore and her family were active in Carlisle's Second Presbyterian Church, an imposing red brick edifice then on South Hanover Street, in which several of the great families of the town worshipped. The coincidence was suggestive: Moore's earliest poems grew from her youth amongst the burghers of Carlisle. When studying a local poet, and in her own way, Moore was as regional as her contemporaries Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg, the poems cannot be divorced from the locality.
Since throughout her life Moore often revised and re-wrote her poems, Helen Vendler has said that students of Moore's poems could not understand them or Moore without reading the early poems in their original editions. P. J. Kavanagh warned readers that Moore "is also frequently obscure, but you sit there, listening to her allusive conversation utterly convinced of her 'unfreckled integrity'." Enigmatic revisions and obscure allusions tempt literary critics, and so Moore herself seduces. In her footnotes to her Complete Poems (1958), she cited a citizen of Carlisle, E. H. Kellogg, pastor of her church, as well as C. M Andrews, a professor at Bryn Mawr. Her poem, "Rigorists," mentions Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian missionary to Alaska and brother-in-law to George Norcross, another pastor of Carlisle's Second Presbyterian. Yet, puzzling over hints in Moore's poems deters one from the plain statements of her prose, such as an essay from her early seventies.
In 1958, Moore wrote an essay for The Christian Science Monitor. In it she saw something of herself in Arnold Toynbee's "recital of his spiritual debts." Those debts included his mother and Edward Gibbon: one's influences are always near and remote. Moore referred to her "doggedly self-determined efforts to write," and she said that her own poems were "hazarded" while "under the spell of admiration and gratitude." Hence her vast range of footnotes, from Edmund Burke to National Geographic, Life magazine to Xenophon. Students of the art of writing may find Moore's comments illuminating, but for students of local history, another point captivates.
In this essay Moore cautioned her readers not to think that, "writing is exactly a pastime." She recalled reading H. T. Parker's music column in the Boston Evening Transcript, and she confessed to reading it with "an ecstasy of admiration." For her, to be under that spell, "to be writing in emulation, anything at all for a newspaper, was a pleasure. "She added, "no more at that time than woman's suffrage party notes, composed and contributed at intervals to the Carlisle Evening Sentinel." Here the antiquarian researcher steps from the boggy theory of literary criticism onto the solid ground of historical documentation.
This passing reference by Moore to her youthful, anonymous writing for a local newspaper gets one closer to her life in Carlisle than do her poems. In addition, there is a letter to corroborate it. In late September, 1915, Moore wrote to her brother, Warner, about her work for women's suffrage. She recounted to him her efforts with a friend to persuade farmers at "the fair," presumably the county fair. She said that she had developed her commitment to the suffrage movement while a student at Bryn Mawr. Thus, since Moore moved from Carlisle for good in 1918, her suffragist activity in Carlisle must fall within the terminal points of 1915 (or perhaps 1909) and 1918. While it would be tedious for researcher and reader to peer into reels of microfilm of three or nine years of The Evening Sentinel and cull or glean from them what just might be Moore's anonymous "woman's suffrage party notes," it is worthwhile considering the light their existence can shed on Moore of Carlisle. Her political views on suffrage relate to her social and cultural expectations for single women.
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