Apprenticed To a Master

If you place their bodies of work end to end chronologically, Marianne Moore and Grace Schulman together created more than a century’s worth of American poetry. Moore’s first published poems appeared in Poetry in 1915; the 84-year-old Schulman’s most recent collection is Without a Claim (2013), although she’s published poems and a memoir since, and this year edited Mourning Songs, a compilation of poems about death and grief. Both women were poetry editors at major magazines, Moore during the latter years of Dial and Schulman at the Nation from 1971 to 2006. That tenure overlapped with a dozen years—1973 to 1985—during which Schulman helmed the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y. She has also taught at Baruch College for decades, extending her knowledge and influence, and perhaps a bit of Moore’s influence by proxy, to generations of young poets.

Schulman has been candid about her connection to Moore, whom she met in 1949. Schulman was 14 at the time. “They said she was a great poet,” Schulman writes in her memoir, Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage (2018). “I was struck by the combination of her humility and gorgeous vocabulary. I liked her humor, ranging from deadpan to high comedy.” Afterward, she sent poems to Moore, the first she’d ever written. “[Moore] wrote back, ‘The flawless typing shows the work to its best advantage and is in itself a great pleasure,’” Schulman recalled decades later. “It was my introduction to her way of dodging a negative response. She spoke truth tactfully and with a positive spin.”

Schulman couldn’t have known in 1949 that Moore was on the cusp of a long-overdue milestone. In 1951, she won the Bollingen Prize; the following year, she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her Collected Poems (1951). Her stature among contemporary poets was secure, but in the final 20 years of her life, Moore’s star was ascendant in the culture more broadly. She appeared on the Tonight Show. She threw out the first pitch before a game at Yankee Stadium. Ford Motor Company asked her to name a line of new cars (Ford rejected her suggestions). But it wasn’t these improbable achievements that cemented Schulman’s sense of Moore as a model for her own career. Schulman writes that Moore “was a steady light” for her as a young poet, though her influence reached even further at times. Ten years after they met, Moore attended Schulman’s wedding to the scientist Jerome Schulman. In Strange Paradise, Schulman writes that “Marianne Moore, who had never been married, was, ironically, the wedding guest in 1959 who brought me back from a state of panic.”

Moore encouraged Schulman and urged her to prioritize writing poetry above all other professional commitments. When Schulman opted to pursue a PhD at New York University, Moore was skeptical. “Well, I don’t know, Grace. I never got a PhD,” Schulman recalls Moore saying. “And T.S. Eliot never had a PhD. And Ezra Pound never had one, either. And yet you persist.” Despite her misgivings, Moore offered Schulman whatever help she could. All along, though, she retained a hierarchy, a sense of priorities, about the best use of the young poet’s talent. “Often, in the course of my project,” Schulman recalls, “she would say, as well as write, ‘How is your work?’ meaning, I knew, my own poems.”

A favorite Schulman anecdote—it appears throughout her prose and in the poem “The Country of Urgency”—finds Moore bedbound, perhaps ill. Wishing to cheer her up, Schulman brings Moore a postcard featuring a leopard, which calls to mind Moore’s poem “Old Tiger.” Moore rouses, examines the card, and concludes, “Those are cheetahs, Grace!” She then lies back down, diminished physically but ever rigorous in her standards of exactitude.

As an object lesson, the encounter clearly touched Schulman. “Though my work never emulated her style,” Schulman writes in Strange Paradise, “I learned about writing from her. Urgency, economy, observation, curiosity. And most of all, joy. They were her watchwords. I was apprenticed to a master.”

***

Burn Down the Icons (1976), Schulman’s first book, appeared four years after Moore’s death. By then, Jerome Schulman had joined the chorus encouraging his wife to focus on poetry. Whenever magazines sent her letters, he opened them to intercept the sting of potential rejection, and when good news finally came, he “proudly announced my first acceptance,” Schulman recalls in Strange Paradise. (Like Moore, Schulman first published in Poetry.) Her own success didn’t dampen her interest in Moore’s work. Her Moore-focused dissertation later became a book-length study, titled Marianne Moore: The Poetry of Engagement (1986). Schulman wrote essays about Moore that appeared in First Loves and Other Adventures (2010). Perhaps most notably, in 2003, she edited an edition of Moore’s collected poems that was the first to broaden the established Moore canon.

The latter volume is key to assessing Schulman’s ties to Moore. The book appeared long after two other major editions of Moore’s collected poems had solidified opinion of her work’s range and significance. Schulman sought to expand that view and to supplement the breadth of Moore’s work then available. Her editorial process combines an exhaustive knowledge of Moore’s work, both published and unpublished, with a granular understanding of Moore’s own editorial practices. Schulman offers, as perhaps no other editor could, a touch of art and the dedication of a writer honoring her mentor. Yet she hesitated, as she notes in the book’s introduction: “I couldn’t imagine doing it. I was torn between wanting to follow my friend’s last editorial wishes and the driving need to represent her work.” In the end, Schulman’s need to represent Moore’s work won out over her friend’s last editorial wishes. She included many of Moore’s early poems, but in choosing between published versions, Schulman let her own aesthetic principles guide her.

An example of Schulman’s editorial judgment occurs with “Poetry,” Moore’s beloved and much-analyzed poem that has appeared in various incarnations over the years. As Schulman recalls, Moore wanted to cut the poem to only three lines, which read like a riddle:

Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important
beyond all this fiddle.

Schulman’s version offers a fuller flavor of the original by pairing the first, startling lines with a line taken from near the end, which qualifies Moore’s dislike: “I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important / beyond all this fiddle. / Reading, it, however, with a perfect contempt for it / one discovers that there is in / it after all, a place for the genuine.”

As justification for truncating the poem, Schulman recalls Moore’s judgment that “the rest seemed padding.” Moore makes a sound argument on those grounds, at least with the long version. Moore’s three-line “Poetry” is beguiling. The first two lines are a clever feint—imagine a poet of Moore’s caliber denouncing poetry—that sets up a long, nuanced third line in which Moore establishes the types of poetry she dislikes.

The longer version of “Poetry” makes a similar turn and reinforces Moore’s judgment, and offers memorable lines while doing so. The poet Robert Pinsky, for instance, is partial to the phrase “‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’” and has gone beyond mere admiration to wondering at the origins of the phrase, which Moore places in quotes. However appealing the additional lines are, they also confirm Moore’s sense that three lines represent the poem’s core.

Schulman’s iteration reflects Pinsky’s misgivings about Moore’s version from the 1967 collected poems, that “this drastic compression seems designed to frustrate the poem’s admirers (perhaps especially the critics and scholars who had commented on the poem), taking back the exquisitely twisty epigrams and images that readers had enjoyed, analyzed, quoted.” Her record of Moore’s pithy editorial summation gives readers access to an alternative version of the poem, to the inner workings of Moore’s revisions, and to Schulman’s implicit contention that even the greats are sometimes mistaken. Her work on the volume wasn’t exactly Max Brod saving Kafka’s manuscripts from flames, but it was a major step toward expanding readers’ understanding of a major American poet.

Schulman’s edition won initial acclaim. In the winter 2004 edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Cristanne Miller classed it as part of “a new era for studies of Moore.” However, when another new edition of Moore’s Collected Poems appeared in 2017 (this one edited by Heather Cass White), a review by Stephanie Burt (then writing as Stephen Burt) appeared in the New York Times under the title “Marianne Moore’s Poetry, the Way She Intended It.” In the New York Review of Books, Nick Laird hailed the new collection as “the first edition of Moore’s work that actually is what it says it is.” The characterization moved Schulman to respond. She declared herself “distressed” and argued that her own edition was the first to restore many Moore poems to their rightful prominence. She writes that the editor’s note by White claiming that “the situation since 1981 has been this: Moore’s readers have had available to them approximately half of what she actually published” led to Laird’s mistaken impression. The jacket copy echoed that claim, as did an endorsement from professor David Bromwich. “These statements are obviously untrue,” Schulman wrote. She defended her edition further, noting, “It contains some 256 poems while White’s so-called ‘definitive edition’ has only 188. It restores major poems and early poems that Moore excluded, which amount to nearly half her work.” Laird later acknowledged the oversight, in print. Considering Schulman’s own stature and her profound connection to Moore, it’s a significant document for its revelations on the editorial processes of two major American poets.

In her edition of the collected poems, Schulman affords greater latitude to Moore than Moore asked for herself. This is done sometimes out of fondness (Schulman includes a Christmas poem of Moore’s from 1895, along with a drawing made when Moore was eight years old) and at other times because some of Moore’s poems were inexplicably omitted from previous editions. Schulman singles out “Old Tiger” and “Roses Only” as major reclamations. Both poems hail from what Schulman refers to as Moore’s “early ‘metaphysical’ style.” Schulman invokes Marvell, Donne, Herbert, and Vaughn as forebears of Moore’s approach but concludes that “while the earlier poet would display an ordered arrangement of thoughts, Marianne Moore presents a complex human being in the process of interpreting feeling. So, while the old tiger of the former poem would seem to hold pride of place, Moore’s eye roams, taking in the chimpanzee’s ‘exemplary hind leg hanging like a plummet at the end of a / string,’ ‘the American rattler,/ his eyes on a level with the crown of his head,’ and “the dozing / magisterial hauteur of the camel.” The resulting impression, Schulman writes in her essay “A Characteristic American,” is that Moore “creates a sense of wonder about the animals that are, ironically, ‘nothing’ to the tiger, and does the same for the tiger by describing him only indirectly.”

Moore takes a similar tack in “Roses Only.” The poem begins with Moore seeming to speak directly to the rose: “You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather than / An asset.” After further critique, she adds, “But rose, if you are brilliant, it / Is not because your petals are the without-which-nothing of pre-eminence.” The thorns define the rose, Moore insists, for although “they are not proof against a worm, the elements, or mildew,” they do fend off “the predatory hand.” Moore then makes a seamless shift that recasts the poem in a metaphorical light without belaboring the metaphor. “Guarding the / Infinitesimal pieces of your mind,” she writes, “compelling audience to The remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be remembered too violently, / Your thorns are the best part of you.”

The poem exemplifies the complexity of Moore’s poetry, with its “subtle dialectic between freedom and repression,” as Schulman calls it. The rose’s vaunted beauty promises so much but guarantees nothing. The duality brings to mind an observation by Moore’s biographer Linda Leavell in Holding on Upside Down (2013): “[Moore’s] many poems about obscure, and often armored, animals are both studies in the art of survival and acts of survival themselves.”

Moore’s close ties to her mother, Mary, served as ballast for her work. The two lived together in Brooklyn for many years, until Mary’s death in 1947. Moore avoided romantic entanglements, which has been understood as the catalyst of the aforementioned dialectic between freedom and repression in her work. Several men in Moore’s life found the arrangement bewildering and at times infuriating. “Pathological” was how William Carlos Williams described the bond between mother and daughter. Yet Moore couldn’t escape her mother’s judgment. In 1915, when Moore placed poems in The Egoist and Others, she boasted, “I could publish a book anytime.” Her mother advised against it. She suggested Moore “chang[e] her style” and called much of what Moore valued in her work “ephemeral.” As Leavell observes, “it is a prime example of Mary ‘saying yes by a thousand no’s.’” Their communication, built on nuance and apparent misdirection, seems almost certain to have shaped Moore’s sensibility as a writer. Leavell notes that Mary was a valuable assistant in her daughter’s career, particularly in regard to Moore’s monthly comment pieces in Dial. “In the final stage,” Leavell writes, “[Moore] would engage Mary’s assistance with the dictionary ‘to get just the right and ticklish word.’”

Schulman’s own poems, by contrast, reflect a different kind of relationship at the core of her life. Schulman lived with, and then married, a man who filled essential roles, albeit not without turmoil. “Despite the silences, we grew closer,” she writes in Strange Paradise. “My poems came pouring out. ... When discouraged, I turned to him for assurance.” But the silences gave way to another kind of estrangement. Jerome began seeing a woman outside the marriage. Schulman has written of her anger and hurt at his insistence that they live apart and that he see other women. The breakdown of their marriage enabled Schulman to direct her energies in ways she might not have otherwise. Gone were the financial resentments she felt as a student, living on her husband’s income. Gone were the expectations that she keep a home to suit the two of them or remain faithful to him. What she kept—and it’s a remarkable tribute to both of them that this was possible—was trust in his standards as far as her work was concerned, admiration for his contributions as a scientist, and respect for his taste. Like Moore’s, the particulars of Schulman’s domestic life were unconventional, but they didn’t hinder her work as a poet.

Moore is practically sui generis on the page among her contemporaries in the United States. She never courted imitation or angled for disciples. In “Letter to a Young Poet,” collected in First Loves and Other Adventures, Schulman writes,

When I was still in my teens, I grew close to a family friend some forty years my senior. In succeeding years, she made it clear that our friendship could grow only if I addressed her as a colleague. Often she would ask for my sense of a particular line or image in her latest poem. Once she discouraged my callow adulation, wanting me to see her only as she was, and in her reluctance I knew that if I gave her a gilded mask, I would lose the face beneath. After an inward struggle I accepted her terms, and our conversations deepened. In that reciprocal bond I gained from her insights, she from mine.

The family friend goes unnamed, but she’s unmistakably Moore.

In his essay on Moore’s Observations, “Less is Moore,” the poet James Longenbach notes that Moore saw no sense in comparing herself to other poets. “To praise her at the expense of Eliot or Pound is to descend to a kind of argument that Moore herself found witheringly distasteful,” he writes. Nor did she betray any lack of humility when talking about her own work. Think of her comments in an “Art of Poetry” interview with Donald Hall for the Paris Review in 1961: “I have a passion for rhythm and accent, so blundered into versifying.”

Among the connections Schulman cites in her writing about Moore, perhaps one that she notes most appreciatively is Moore’s “predilection for change.” It’s evident in Schulman’s own work as well. That hasn’t meant drastically altered versions of her published poems over the years but rather an alertness to anything that perks up her antennae or anything she’s forced to confront. Most recently, that’s meant facing a great, irreversible change: the death of Jerome in 2016. She had already written “Death,” nearly a decade before his passing, turning her gaze to him in the aching final stanza:

The summer day when, poised to dive from rocks
into the sea, you reached out arms that still
wrap mine in sleep. The Etruscan king and queen
on a sarcophagus, under a shroud.
Under our sheet. Years of our days.

In an essay about her mother, “Dreams of Her Real Self,” the Australian writer Helen Garner says, “Her ghost is in my body” as she catalogs their complex bond. Though Moore and Schulman aren’t blood relations, they’re surely kin within the family of poets. They share a conviction in the enduring value of poetry, even amid a fragmented culture, and a sense that they, as poets, are part of a great, scattered community. In “Tattoo,” Schulman begins, “‘When writing, let the object convey feeling,’ a poet said.” It’s a quiet reference to the 11th-century Chinese poet Wei Tai and a subtle thread connecting her to a millennium of poetic practice. It’s a long, lustrous thread, one we might trace back further still, at least as far back as the psalms. But however far we trace Schulman’s roots as a poet, first among her forebears is Marianne Moore.