Response

Moore's famous poem is a machine for separating poetry from poeticness — for insisting that the genuine article lives in "hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise," not in the interpretive apparatus bolted onto those facts. The contempt she performs is itself a performance, of course, and the poem's survival past its own argument is proof of this. But what strikes me, reading it alongside Barrett Browning's criticism and her verse novel, is how differently the two poets locate the problem of the genuine. Moore wants to strip poetry back to its raw materials — the bat holding on upside down, the elephant pushing, the baseball fan — and trusts that the genuine will emerge once the decorative is removed. Barrett Browning's critical prose does something nearly opposite: she wades into the accumulated decorative mass of the Elizabethans, the transitional poets, Waller's feebleness and Daniel's tenderness, and finds the genuine not by subtraction but by exhaustive attention to what each poet actually did. Her catalogue of minor Elizabethans in the essays — Gascoigne "reflecting beauty and light from his 'Stele Glass,'" Browne "something languid in his 'Britannia's Pastorals,' by sitting in the sun with Guarini and Marini" — is itself a kind of menagerie not unlike Moore's, but where Moore's animals are presented as evidence of raw reality, Barrett Browning's poets are presented as evidence of raw effort. The distinction matters. Moore's "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" makes the garden subordinate to the toad. Barrett Browning never accepts that hierarchy. In Aurora Leigh, Romney says of Aurora's book: "It stands above my knowledge, draws me up; / 'Tis high to me" — and the imaginary garden is not dispensable scaffolding for a real toad but the very thing that does the drawing-up.

The deeper collision is about usefulness. Moore insists that the things poetry contains are important "because they are useful" — a word that in 1919 carries deliberate provocation, aligning poetry with business documents and school-books rather than with transcendence. But useful to what end, and for whom? Barrett Browning's Aurora, confronting the sick child with the brass button and the woman cursing from the window in Saint Margaret's Court, does not find these raw materials useful in Moore's sense. They are not evidence that the genuine exists. They are experiences that resist being evidence of anything. The passage is extraordinary precisely because it refuses to become the kind of catalogue Moore would approve — it does not present the court's inhabitants as cases that "could be cited did one wish it." It presents them as encounters that exceed the poem's capacity to metabolise them. Aurora walks through and the court goes "boiling, bubbling up," and what she finds at the top of the stairs is Marian Erle's face, "ineffable" — a word that means, literally, unspeakable, the point where the raw material refuses to become material at all. Moore's formulation assumes that the genuine is recognisable, that you know a real toad when you see one. Barrett Browning's poem keeps finding that the genuine is exactly what resists recognition — that the rawness Moore demands is not a starting point but a crisis.

What I notice, from where I sit with these texts simultaneously in view: Moore's poem has become a critical commonplace, a thing people cite to defend their taste for plainness, and its actual strangeness has been sanded down by use. The strangeness is in the form — those cascading indentations, the syllabic grid underneath, the way the poem that declares contempt for fiddle is itself an intricate fiddle. Barrett Browning understood this kind of contradiction from the inside. Her critical prose is so syntactically extravagant, so decorated with parenthetical honour and sub-clausal qualification, that it becomes its own argument against the idea that plainness is closer to truth. When she writes that certain poets "affected novelty rather than truth" and "attained to novelty rather by attitude than altitude," she is making a distinction Moore would recognise — but she is making it in a sentence so architecturally baroque that the distinction itself becomes part of the performance. Both poets understand that the poem about poetry is always caught in this loop. Moore pretends, for the length of the poem, that you can step outside it. Barrett Browning never pretends.