Marianne Moore’s “Abraham Lincoln and the Art of the Word”: Poetry, Celebrity, and Civil Religion

On April 16, 1959, Marianne Moore signed a contract with Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) to write an essay for a series of radio segments the company was presenting in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s 150th birthday.¹ Over the next few weeks, Moore read widely—in Lincoln’s speeches, in historical accounts, and in popular magazine articles—and she compiled over two hundred pages of research notes for what would eventually become a six-page essay entitled “Abraham Lincoln and the Art of the Word.”² The essay was broadcast in early 1960 on hundreds of stations,³ and published later that year in Lincoln for the Ages, a collection of seventy essays from the BMI series which includes contributions by Carl Sandburg, Mark Van Doren, Adlai Stevenson, Shelby Foote, and a host of biographers and historians. Moore’s essay has never received much scholarly attention, likely because its theme is not overtly poetic and because it comes from a period of Moore’s career that critics have tended to either disparage or overlook, but the essay is nevertheless essential for understanding Moore’s evolving artistic ideals in the fifties and sixties, and her efforts to manage her public persona. As Moore analyzes Lincoln’s “art of the word,” she praises the eloquence and artistry Lincoln is able to wring out of a language she had called, in a poem written almost forty years earlier, “plain American which cats and dogs can read.”⁴ In the final two decades of her life, Moore was much more famous than she ever had been in the high modernist years between the wars, and she was thus faced with the opportunity and the challenge of addressing a considerably larger audience than she had reached at any previous point in her career. In her essay on Lincoln, she recognizes a potential model: a writer for whom aesthetics and accessibility were not mutually exclusive.

The fifties were a key moment in the evolution of the public image of both Lincoln and Moore. Historian Merrill Peterson writes that “Lincoln’s fame rose to zenith in the three decades that culminated in the sesqui-centennial of his birth in 1959,”⁵ a year filled with exhibits, pilgrimages, and public speeches. Lincoln was repeatedly cited as American history’s greatest defender of freedom in discussions of both civil rights and the Cold War, and the breathless tone of the Lincoln sesquicentennial is exemplified by Library of Congress director Roy P. Basler, who wrote in 1959 that Lincoln is “a man once flesh and blood and brain, but long since become a symbol and a myth, a story in the annals of humanity which runs as an unfailing spring for whoever thirsts for truth.”⁶ Moore, obviously, was not as well known or widely praised as Lincoln, but her fame grew rapidly in this period, particularly after she cornered the market on major poetry prizes in 1951, when the Bollingen, the Pulitzer, and the National Book Award were all given to her Collected Poems. In the years that followed, she became one of the more unusual literary celebrities in American history.⁷ Indeed, if Lincoln was “a symbol and a myth” in this period, so, in a different register, was Moore. In magazine articles of the time, from Esquire to World Week to the New Yorker, Moore appears in her tricorne hat and cape, and is presented as a witty, eccentric spinster who loves baseball, zoos, and hard work. This media portrayal is perhaps a bit silly, but Moore’s decision to court wider recognition in these publications suggests a desire to become more publicly engaged in both her life and her work. Her poetry in these years was, without question, more civic-minded than at any other point in her career, as she wrote many occasional poems celebrating events such as the 350th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, Yul Brenner’s efforts to aid refugees, and the Brooklyn Dodgers’ victory in the 1955 World Series. Her public image, as John Slatin perceives, was that of “a...