Marianne Moore on the There Elements of Persuasive Writing

Several years ago, rummaging through the archives of the Academy of American Poets, I came upon a box labeled “Ballots 1950” — the record of the secret vote by the chancellors the year the Academy’s prestigious fellowship was awarded to E.E. Cummings, catapulting him into renown. The voting process is a black box — no one outside the Academy ever finds out who else is in the running and by how much the winner wins.

Leafing through the ballots, one other name appeared over and over, so much so that I was impelled to count.

Marianne Moore had lost by one vote, never knowing how close she had come. It would be many more years until, at 77, she was finally awarded the fellowship.

Long before that, before she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award (sharing a table with Rachel Carson at the ceremony), Moore had set down her views on writing in a series of essays later collected in the out-of-print gem Predilections (public library). Pulsating through them is a reckoning with the impossible task of the writer — to weave tapestries of truth and meaning from the tenuous thread of words on the ramshackle loom of language.

Marianne Moore (Photograph: George Platt Lynes)

In an essay titled “Feeling and Precision,” Moore writes:

Feeling at its deepest — as we all have reason to know — tends to be inarticulable. If it does manage to be articulate, it is likely to seem overcondensed, so that the author is resisted as being enigmatic or disobliging or arrogant.

How we name what we feel is not so much a matter of our writing style as of our style of being, because in order to articulate something we must first apprehend it and we apprehend every smallest thing with the whole person — with the frame of reference that is our entire life, the sum of our experience and memory. When “one of New York’s more painstaking magazines” asked Moore to distill her poetic style into a formula, she fought back the “dictatorial” reflex to quip:

You don’t devise a rhythm, the rhythm is the person, and the sentence but a radiograph of the personality.

And yet a personality can write with more or less persuasion — that is, write more or less well — depending on what the person brings to the writing. In another essay from the collection, Moore identifies the three psychological elements necessary for persuasive writing: “humility, concentration, and gusto.” A generation after Mark Twain assured his friend Helen Keller when she was accused of plagiarism that “substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources,” she writes:

Humility… is armor, for it realizes that it is impossible to be original, in the sense of doing something that has never been thought of before. Originality is in any case a by-product of sincerity; that is to say, of feeling that is honest and accordingly rejects anything that might cloud the impression.

Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses

By “concentration” Moore means a kind of discipline — annealing the essence of the sentiment by cutting away all superfluous explanations, elaborations, and distractions of stylistic posturing, being maximally truthfully in the most minimal way possible. Observing that there is always a “helpless sincerity which precipitates a poem” and that a good poem is always “a concentrate,” she writes:

Concentration — indispensable to persuasion — may feel to itself crystal clear, yet be through its very compression the opposite… I myself would rather be told too little than too much.

Long before we had the language of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, of finite and infinite games, Moore uses a lovely word, now dusty, for that peculiar private zeal propelling all creative work with its twin dynamos of discipline and deliverance: “gusto.” Echoing Rachel Carson’s abiding advice on writing — “If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in,” she had counseled a young writer, “the chances are very high that you will interest other people as well.” — Moore offers:

Gusto thrives on freedom, and freedom in art, as in life, is the result of a discipline imposed by ourselves. Moreover, any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.

She maps the fundamental relationship between the three:

Humility is an indispensable teacher, enabling concentration to heighten gusto.

When creating in integrity with these three values, it ceases to matter how the work is received because the process of locating and articulating the truth as you feel it, the world as you see it, is its own reward. In what may be the best advice I have encountered on how to orient to your own work, Moore writes:

There are always objecters, but we must not be sensitive about not being liked or not being printed… The thing is to see the vision and not deny it; or care and admit that we do.

Complement with Walt Whitman on how to keep criticism from sinking your soul and Mary Oliver’s advice on writing, then savor the moving story of how Marianne Moore saved a rare tree with a poem.

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