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MARIANNE MOORE'S DIAL ESSAYS: 'COMMENT' AS 'AESTHETIC EQUIVALENT' / Taffy Martin Or one will think a little of primitive masonry, the units unglued and as in the early constructions unstandardized. William Carlos Williams, "Marianne Moore," The Dial, 78 (May 1925), 400. In the history of twentieth-century American Modernism, first established by the New Critics and now being rewritten by a generation of post-modern critical theorists, Marianne Moore remains an enigma. Her deliberately opaque poetry has elicited responses which range from polite dismissal or reverent appreciation to unqualified praise for its ability to "break through all preconceptions of poetic form and mood and pace."1 Agreeing with such contemporaries as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, TS. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein, all of whom praised Moore as a leading intellectual force, William Carlos Williams went on to predict that her.poetry would "antagonize many" and would be "dangerous to the mass of mediocrity." Nevertheless, these subversive qualities seem not to exist for Moore's later critics who admire her work but treat it almost solely as the product of a talented and occasionally "fussy" technician. At the hands of this second generation of critics, Moore all but becomes, as Donald Hall puts it, a "national pet." In the midst of these contradictory interpretations of her poetry, Moore's editorship of The Dial, the 1920s' most influential international magazine of criticism, literature, and art, has been almost completely ignored. At best, critics treat her editorship as a puzzling, if not unfortunate hiatus in her poetic career. However, examining that undertaking makes possible an entirely new perception of Moore the person and of her work. As editor of The Dial, Moore altered the patrician and classicaUy modernist tradition which she had inherited from the magazine's owner and original editor, Scofield Thayer. In approaching the editorship, Moore undoubtedly agreed with TS. Eliot's 1922 proclamation, which appeared originally in The Dial as a book review, that the central challenge for an artist in the twentieth century was one "of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." But the issues which Moore put together show that her interpretation of the task differs from Eliot's in its very essence. Rather than a pessimistic struggle engaged in defensively, Moore's editing becomes an optimistic attempt to enact that pervasive anarchy in each issue. Her editorial decisions and the "Comment" she wrote each The Missouri Review ยท 213 month combine to create what Kenneth Burke might have called the "aesthetic equivalents" of the decade. Those issues show that behind Moore's quaint facade there exists a most atypically modern sensibility. Moore emerges as an avant-garde proponent of the very same discontinuity and contradiction which her more traditional contemporaries found so troublesome. In order to understand the degree to which Moore imposed her own optimistic irony upon The Dial, it is important to examine the tradition she had inherited and the ways in which she both followed and altered it. Among the little magazines of the early twentieth century, The Dial stands out not only for its prestige and influence, but for its stately character as well. Unlike its more polemical contemporaries, Broom, Blast, and The Little Review, it sought not to shock, but to create an elegant showcase for what its editors considered to be the best poetry, criticism, fiction, and art available. Thayer's dream had been "to turn out each month a flawless journal, ... to mold every disparate element in American culture into one organic community where men of art were also men of power."2 But that proved, for Thayer at least, to be an impossible dream. Without doubt, The Dial was a flawless journal, beautifully designed, handsomely illustrated, and meticulously edited. It was also remarkably inclusive, presenting established patriarchs side by side with newly recognized or previously unpublished writers. And The Dial paid its contributors generously. But in wishing not only to be democratic but at the same time to mold the various elements into a serene whole, Thayer found himself pessimistically, if ironically attempting "to discover what is wrong with the world."3 In fact, Thayer...

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