What a Facsimile Edition Can and Cannot Do: Marianne Moore’s Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight

Facsimile editions based on social text principles can be powerful things. Focusing on the presentation of what Jerome McGann has termed the bibliographic codes of material production, such editions, like my own Becoming Marianne Moore, The Early Poems, 1907–1924 (2002), grant scholars access to at least some of the physical features that influenced the ways in which contemporary readers encountered texts at particular moments in time. The social text approach, however, has particular limitations, especially when it comes to printing poetry that, like Moore’s, stretched and defied conventions of the genre. Moore’s poetry often lacked the guideposts that recognizable poetic forms might supply. Confronted with Moore’s long syllabic lines and complicated indents, the venues that first published Moore’s poetry frequently misprinted her stanzas and made a hash of the careful forms of her poems. A social text edition, my Becoming Marianne Moore duplicates these errors, as well as the distracting wraps that editors needed to employ to fit her long lines onto narrow pages. Taking Moore’s poem Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight as an example, this essay confronts the limits of social text editing in the context of the problems such an approach can perpetuate. When I first began my life as an editor, I thought that the most important textual story of the modernist period lay in the ways that the loss of the material codes of modernism occluded a fully realized reading of the period and its poetry. I now think, however, that the most important story is one that emerges only in the context of what was often the gap between the material presentations that the modernists wanted and the limitations of the venues in which their works appeared.