It is often thought that Moore hid her Presby side. I can't understand this because it seems to be overtly present in every poem she writes. Maybe her readers believe that she must be a secularist like them, since they are not used to poets that aren't secular militants. I admit that her poetry is rarely as overtly Protestant as in her poem, Melchior Vulpius, which appears on p. 302 of The Poems of Marianne Moore. Vulpius, for those who don't know, was a Lutheran hymn writer who lived from 1560-1615. He wrote EXCLUSIVELY Lutheran hymns -- about 400 of them, and composed the music for them. I've never heard a single one, at least so far as I know (unless one of them is in the Lutheran green hymnal, and I've sung it without my knowledge!).
Melchior Vulpius
c. 1560-1615
a contrapuntalist
composer of chorales
and wedding-hymns to Latin words
but best of all an anthem:
"God be praised for conquering faith
which feareth neither pain nor death."
We have to trust this art --
this mastery which none
can understand. Yet someone has
acquired it and is able to
direct it. Mouse-skin-bellows'-breath
expanding into rapture saith
'Hallelujah.' Almost
utmost absolutist
and fugue-ist, Amen; slowly building
from miniature thunder,
crescendos antidoting death --
love's signature cementing faith.
I think the poem is quite clear. Moore's poems are generally affirmations. (She lived at a time when the adage, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything," was still prominent -- it was a world before the ugliness of dissing someone became the dominant paradigm, especially in musical circles such as Rap. Moore would have found it unpleasant, as would Melchior Vulpius. There's a funny anecdote in the biography in which she met a person she didn't like too well, and afterwords was asked how she liked the person. "Well, he had shined his shoes very well," she said. She almost always affirmed. This poem is an affirmation of how well she likes Melchior Vulpius. She likes his anthem, which says that God should be praised for the faith that allows us to conquer death. The music apparently builds from crescendos "slowly building from miniature thunder."
Critics and theologians are beginning to see Moore as a Protestant poet. For the longest time the most ridiculous things were being written about how she was a socialist, and a feminist, hated marriage, and was a closet lesbian, and so on and so forth. The biography by Charles Molesworth put paid to most of that nonsense. She is a solid Presbyterian. She never wandered from her faith (most poets have a crazy period in their youth, but she didn't). She was always going to church, and always enjoyed it immensely.
There's a nice article about it here:
http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/apr1984/v41-1-article3.htm
Marianne Moore was not nasty, nor was she abstractly obtuse. She threw her pitches right through the center of the plate, and every one was a burning fastball. Some of them break and/or curve, but she never beans the batter. She's full of affirmations, and plain-spoken strength. To my mind she's quite Puritan, but she's not otherworldly. She's in this world, but not of it.
c. 1560-1615
a contrapuntalist
composer of chorales
and wedding-hymns to Latin words
but best of all an anthem:
"God be praised for conquering faith
which feareth neither pain nor death."
We have to trust this art --
this mastery which none
can understand. Yet someone has
acquired it and is able to
direct it. Mouse-skin-bellows'-breath
expanding into rapture saith
'Hallelujah.' Almost
utmost absolutist
and fugue-ist, Amen; slowly building
from miniature thunder,
crescendos antidoting death --
love's signature cementing faith.
I think the poem is quite clear. Moore's poems are generally affirmations. (She lived at a time when the adage, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything," was still prominent -- it was a world before the ugliness of dissing someone became the dominant paradigm, especially in musical circles such as Rap. Moore would have found it unpleasant, as would Melchior Vulpius. There's a funny anecdote in the biography in which she met a person she didn't like too well, and afterwords was asked how she liked the person. "Well, he had shined his shoes very well," she said. She almost always affirmed. This poem is an affirmation of how well she likes Melchior Vulpius. She likes his anthem, which says that God should be praised for the faith that allows us to conquer death. The music apparently builds from crescendos "slowly building from miniature thunder."
Critics and theologians are beginning to see Moore as a Protestant poet. For the longest time the most ridiculous things were being written about how she was a socialist, and a feminist, hated marriage, and was a closet lesbian, and so on and so forth. The biography by Charles Molesworth put paid to most of that nonsense. She is a solid Presbyterian. She never wandered from her faith (most poets have a crazy period in their youth, but she didn't). She was always going to church, and always enjoyed it immensely.
There's a nice article about it here:
http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/apr1984/v41-1-article3.htm
Marianne Moore was not nasty, nor was she abstractly obtuse. She threw her pitches right through the center of the plate, and every one was a burning fastball. Some of them break and/or curve, but she never beans the batter. She's full of affirmations, and plain-spoken strength. To my mind she's quite Puritan, but she's not otherworldly. She's in this world, but not of it.
28 comments:
she was a nun
that's all there is to it
she loved the word made flesh
and loved to hear the word sung
like a nun
go figure
she with a baseball
she liturgical
she singing poems in a minor key
like in church
i'm going to read some marianne moore tonite before i go to sleep
what's to be done about a common liturgy
it can't be television it can't be a sport spectacle it can't be a rock concert it can't be a political gathering it will have to be soemthing else
i don't know what
but the ritual is the thing
right now for instance i am hearing the sounds of horns and drums and voices from the huge concrete church at st johns abbey
worship is happening
people praising the lord
i would like to ask marriane moore to intercede with the almighty trinity and help the twins win the AL central
come on baby
marianne you have some heaven pull now
inspire the twins with poetry
here at the end of the season
teach them how to dance
and throw into double plays
yeah
amen
german catholics were singing the hymns of vulpius from the beginning they accepted him as a good composer
we sing a few of the hymns here
dour dark lovely german melodies
j
Moore was a big fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Her notebooks are filled with descriptions of games, who had a good catch, a good pitch, a leaping out at second.
The game was much more of a national phenomenon than it is now. They say that when the players became free agents it killed the loyalty people felt toward the team, as it emphasized the commercial aspect.
That's one thing we can't say for poetry: that it has a strong commercial aspect.
Thanks for this, and esp. for the note on Vulpius. So you've heard of him!
Moore did want a husband, but it's not clear whether there were ever any suitors. After her mother's death, she told the people making the stone that she wasn't sure how hers was going to end up. She was already in her fifties (I think), and yet still thought she might get married.
But I don't think she ever had a kiss.
She hung around a lot with W.H. Auden. They were very close friends. She also hung around with theologians.
We don't really know what was going through her mind on the mating front.
that's OK
it was perchance a passing thing
like a seasonal song of a bird
or a cloud disappearing
ah well
i never got to say goodbye with a tear
to old
marianne
love is like that sometimes
sniffffffle
j
Kirb:
There are different ways of appreciating a writer. There are, for instance, people who like to think of Updike as a "macho" persona--something which never occurred to me for 50 years, but which, I acknowledge, I might have understood, had I seen him talk or had the occasion actually to know him as a solid being, instead of a phantom behind his words.
Similarly, thinking of Moore as the expression of a certain body of religious knowledge might be useful to some people. There's really nothing wrong with anyone having those feelings and thoughts about any writer. Even a writer, say, as dully unimaginative as Eddie Guest, for instance.
But when we're talking about why this or that writer may be important in the chronological scheme of the progression of literary form, in time, we apply different criteria.
Moore is important in American literature, because of how she treated poetic form. Her ideas may or may not be dated, or innovative, but the criteria we use in deciding her importance to American literature is not, for instance, religious criteria. We wouldn't, for instance, carp about her not being "Catholic" enough, because we aren't really using that criteria to decide her literary fate.
You might see a connection between her evident success as a writer--of a certain kind--and her background, and the choices she made in life, but you must convince us of those connections, and not attempt to politicize them before they're clearly laid out.
In my view, what I appreciate in her has nothing to do with her religion, just as my appreciation of Donne, or Traherne, or Geoffrey Hill has nothing to do with religion as such.
I see a tendency in your blogging to want to make "points" as quickly and efficiencly as possible, without having any pure interest in things as themselves. This tendency towards unauthorized "use" seems to overwhelm your intellectual activity, as if every phenomena had to fit into a grand schema of good and evil, right and wrong, healthy and sick. There's a great danger in oversimplifying things just to suit an ephemeral purpose.
Blogging comes in many different disguises. Is your blog devoted to intellectual rigor, or religious and political propaganda?
I think it's a fair question, given the range of your interests.
I think Moore would be described as the sort of woman who was born to be an "old maid." Look at the pictures of her as a young woman: Very thin, red-hair, watery blue eyes. Rather like a nervous, quirky bird. Quick to note errors, slights.
I think she effectively sublimated her sexuality behind a huge edifice of intellectual rigor. You can see it in her verse, too. The energy she might have poured into the devotion and concern for another, gets directed to powerful syntax, and rigorous thought.
Rigor--the word keeps recurring in my thoughts about her.
If you read between the lines, as they say, you can hear the feminist.
But didn't L. Cohen tell her so long on your behalf?
Curtis, my blog holds open the notion that Lutheran values may still be a way for the avant-garde to proceed. And the notion that Jesus is the true avatar of the avant-garde, is intrinsic to this.
Moore, Eliot, Betjeman, Davies, Avison and other Christian poets -- have a strong lyrical content that is based to some degree on the beauty and strength of the NT and the OT.
I'm not saying that the Darwinians and the others do not have their beauty.
When you say, "we're" talking about what counts chronologically in literature that "we" do not take into account the content but only the form of an expression, I think to myself, who's this "we"?
Feminists for instance often look primarily to the gender of the poet to determine whether or not they're going to even begin to think about canonicity. Various ethnic critics would do the same wrt race.
Your concern is very New Critical, which is a concern that has largely passed from the stage. Very few would write criticism today that would place formal considerations very high as a set of criteria for canonicity.
Which is not to say that they are not valid concerns.
Aesthetic considerations in general have been sidelined next to political content.
But you're right that we do want a poet to be beautiful and innovative.
I think it's fun that you continue to focus on such merits.
I do, too, to some degree, but I am also interested in the philosophy of a writer, especially wrt how they understand scripture, how they understand nature, and so on.
Even in Pound's criteria in the ABC he does not utterly rule out intellectual content, though he subordinates it to the music and the imagery.
But I think without thought I find it hard to get interested in a writer. In Moore, what intrigues me is the way that she smuggles into modernism a very flat-out Protestant presence, and has a dialogue going between the secularists and the religious people.
Hope is a big part of her work, as is respect for animals and plants.
As for feminism, I can see what you mean when you say that she's a sensitive person, but she is not a battle-ax in the war between the sexes. I see no evidence for such hysterics anywhere in her work.
If anything, like Stein, she puts the family unit above individual income. Feminists seem mostly concerned with how much money women make compared to men.
I never see any evidence for that kind of rivalrous emulation in Moore's poems. She's not concerned with glass ceilings, as Hillary is, (Hillary pouting over how Obama is going to "put us back fifty years" and weeping over it in the New England restaurant).
Moore isn't a whiner in that sense, and doesn't care about her gender more than she cares about children, families, and animals.
Her poetry doesn't advance the feminist rugby scrum, although it's often been conscripted to perform that labor.
did leonard cohen
recite poetry with marriane moore
i guess he could've
ooo la la
from what i can deduce from moore her rigorous hammering away at the power of syntax is displayed with a sort of deceptive ease and an almost conversational attitude every statement begging some sort of response or agreement from the reader or listener even if it's only visual or mental still the openended inquiry is going on
maybe she liked churches because hearing scripture read out loud with great oratorical ability is hearing poetry in a big room
maybe she was simply in love with the sound of human voices and the most precious one was the one she heard in her own mind...herself
yep a spinster lady
what sort of perfume do you suppose she wore
did she ever smoke a cigar
the world must be a safe place for such odd balls
where kirby is surreal the rest of the world is paying attention to CNN
does the lutheran church still have a role to play in governing the world
i think its time has come and gone
all the criticisms have been answered
all the experiements have been done
luther playing the lute sitting on the can howling in fits of constipation
that's all that's left
that's surreal
i could see how lutherans in urban churches would get entranced with Bach and return to worship just for the chance of hearing a fugue played well on the organ...i think that probably happened in a lot of rural lutheran churches in the midwest as well...bach wrote out counterpoint harmonies to many hymns of vulpius
doesn't marrianne moore have a poem that is basically a teachers response to a paper written by a student
i wonder if hillary cklinton ever read marianne moore
or ed baker
or this blog
yippee aye tai yeah
git along little dowggies
j
craig
i just came from the google search
and was a bit stunned to listen again to goodbye marianne which i had forgotten even existed hadn't listened to that song in over 35 yrs had just to sit there in renewed admiration for cohen
i think i will learn this song now
i am working on
the stranger
but this is one i want to sing too
what a day already
thanks
j
Kirby
It's sad to me that you get your news from a source that would make Goebels jealous:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFCBeKcd-Wk
Tom, they're all doing this. Obama has the entire media except Fox in his hand. He now even is trying to make the NEA dance to his tune by giving out grants to artists and art organizations willing to spout praise wrt his national health insurance programs (I read this on Althouse's blog).
I don't believe anything on CNN, but do watch the station, and also watch MSNBC (I even watch Doberman and Madcow).
I read the NYT the WSJ and the Oneonta Star, among other papers.
I rarely see Glenn Beck. I prefer O'Reilly and now, increasingly, Greta. Greta used to just do disappeared people. There was a whole year where she led off with Natalie Holloway.
I couldn't bear it.
It was always a missing person, and always a young woman, and it was always a nefarious male behind it. I thought she was so feminist!
Natalie Holloway did kiss those creeps willingly, and did so after midnight, and nothing good ever happens after midnight.
Curtis has an odd notion that literary history is the history of formal innovation. He takes this to some extent from XXth century art history, which shows such things to be so.
I think it's bogus.
There is only power in poetry. Homer and Shakespeare are still very much my contemporaries, as is Baudelaire.
They still hit me with tremendous power, as does Sophocles and C. Marlowe and Sappho.
If formal innovation coincides with power, or with new areas of interest, I find it works. Otherwise I'm not interested in it as a goal in itself.
Larry Eigner strikes me as having a capgun next to Shakespeare's forty cannons.
Billy Collins has even less pop.
Marianne Moore is hard to think about, because her virtues don't explode at you the way many male writers do.
It's something instead where she takes you in and quietly shows you something, something that expands you mind exponentially.
Camellia Sabina for instance opens my mind to the intricacies of a level of botany. Male writers that I know don't do this, and that interests me.
But I don't think it's the fuss-budgetry of MM that keeps me coming back to read her work, although it certainly amuses and amazes me.
It's the vastness and precision of her interests. I feel that it's beautiful how she opens up rapturous new areas for me to discover and to delight in.
Kirby,
You should recognize O'Reilly as entertainment, rather than news. No news source is free from bias, but some do strive to achieve some sense of impartiality in covering a variety of issues. Fox news seems to be specifically attacking Obama, which is odd for a major news source. Of course the mere selection of stories and the air time that they are given, occludes the possibility of presenting events in an impartial manner. I guess I don't find Fox informative, entertaining or funny; it fails on all three levels. I have caught CNN blatantly lying during the Russian-Georgian conflict of which I know fairly well. In fact, the difference between what was written vs. broadcasted was huge. That's one issue, small sample size of a huge amount of data. At least I can admit that they are very flawed. I find their website to be sensational, often including fat too many ‘human interest’ stories in the international section.
Glenn Beck is a monster that comes across in poor taste, leaving all decency behind. You don't really find Anderson Cooper acting Beckian. We can argue all day about the content of different news sources as it’s really impossible to objectively prove. I think it is abundantly clear though that Fox news is mean spirited and inappropriate a lot of the time. I’ve watched a few Beck clips recently and it’s disturbing; it would make Orwell’s skin crawl, I am sure. I'm happy to see Obama ignoring it and the centrists going on the offensive against Fox. I think they lower the tone of the debate down to the gutter level of a Rush Limbaugh type. I think it reflects poorly on any viewer that embraces the crass angry-white male vitriol that you find on that newscast.
Curtis has an odd notion that literary history is the history of formal innovation.
It's certainly an integral element in literary history. Also, the preoccupation that critics express differ from "writerly" issues. In 20 years the political preoccupation may be looked on as an unfortunate naive moment. Since there is a lot of careerism occurring, I find much of this dishonest on a certain level. I find formalist criticism far more valuable than much academic criticism. It's almost as if there are two parallel worlds of literature, writers and the critics of academia. I would take Alfred Kazin over Linda Hutcheon any day! You rarely find novelists writing academic criticism.
Fox is the only channel that's questioning Obama at any level. The others are cheerleading. Beck took out Van Jones, and helped a lot in the downing of the 8 billion dollar folderal of the federal funding of Acorn.
The other channels are really just Pravda.
Madcow and Doberman are far worse than O'Reilly and Hannity.
They never have anybody on from the other side. O'Reilly and Hannity, on the other hand, do.
CNN pretends to be neutral, but they're not neutral.
In many European countries the papers are openly partisan and it's at least honest.
National Public Radio is violently on the side of the Democrats. They never allow anybody from the other side on the radio.
You just perceive bias because the viewpoint is different from yours.
The rest of us see bias everywhere else but in Fox. They're the only news station that tells it like it is, and has a wide range of contributors.
They were the only station that ever allowed Bush to speak. The others snubbed him and mocked him relentlessly.
O'Reilly gave Obama very respectful interviews, and would do it more, but Obama needs not only an interview, he needs lines of can-canning cheerleaders, with whipped topping.
Get real.
Pelosi is so stupid she didn't even realize that the guy who shot Harvey Milk was a Democrat. She just never gets anything remotely correct. And she's the leader of the whole group. It's a gang of bumbling twits who should be in day care, instead they're ruining the country. They can't get anything right and yet they want to take over one industry after another.
Marianne Moore would have been dead set against this pack of clods.
On the other hand, I don't blame the voters for going for Obama. When he's scripted, he sounds ok, and he can at least dress, and his delivery isn't too awful compared to Kerry's.
I think McCain was a blunderbuss on wheels, and Palin was just a cute moron from nowhere.
I can't understand why the Republicans didn't run Giuliani, Jeb Bush, or Romney, and it seems they went out of their way to diss Huckabee, who had an enormous following, and would have won, and I think he would have been sensible.
McCain may have bats in his belfry. His choice of Palin was bizarre. Had he vetted her some he would have figured that out. The only good that would have come out of that is that the left would have screamed bloody murder for four more years.
I would have enjoyed that, but not the wars in Georgia and other little no-stakes light opera countries.
Maybe all we're going to have from now on is jerks from either side of the aisle. It's like the time in Rome when all they got was Caligula, Nero, Heliogabalus and so on.
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, and here I am, stuck in the middle with the commenters of this board.
I would think that Hillary would have been far more sensible than Obama.
No one wants to look right now, but I think it will eventually come out that ACORN somehow tilted this election both at the primary and the national level.
Kirby:
I agree with you, as I'm also appalled at the choices made by both parties. Nevertheless, as Nellie the narrator tells Lockwood in "Wuthering Heights" (a
repellent but very clever novel in the narrative framing), "then you'll understand, or you'll THINK you do," (emphasis mine) as does the empty suit that is President Obama "seem" to "know." I only hope that the majority of voters will recognise this pathetic, corrupt, loser for what he is.
j
I think the song was written around the time that Moore died. Cohen was already famous as a novelist for Beautiful Losers and as a poet with half a dozen chap books written before the folk scene turned him into Canada's Dylan. I can't imagine that Moore wasn't a major influence on him or that the song wasn't his tribute to her. Jews can be more appreciative of Christian culture than Christians. They see it more clearly because they are surrounded and often oppressed by it.
As I've said before, it's not that FOX News doesn't have liberal commentators or guests, it's that several of their commentators (again . . . ahem!) ASK QUESTIONS THE ALPHABET BROADCAST TV NEWS (that's the craven, boot-licking Obama minions on CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS) WON'T DARE OR DEIGN TO ASK.
Sidewalk psychoanalyses of Marianne Moore (on the basis of any other poet or thinker are, in the wake of an abundance of evidence, are pretty silly--better work on the post-structuralists and post-humanists instead. . . .
Ira Nadel's 1996 bio of Cohen says he slept in the family library growing up. The poets on his shelf were Moore, Stevens, Auden, Arnold, Whitman, Stevenson and Dante.
There is now the desperate attempts of the MSM to paint anyone who isn't part of the universal healthcare bandwagon as a racist.
Bill Clinton was on last night to debunk this notion.
He said the same people who are against having to pay for universal healthcare now, were against it then, when I was president.
Then they went back on MSNBC to say, well, that's what he says, but we say that it's racist! Racist, I tell you!
Even Condoleeza Rice is a racist against her own race! As is Michael Steele! As is Thomas Sowell! All racists!
The level of thought of the MSM has reached a new low.
Craig, you may be right about Leonard Cohen and Moore, I wouldn't know. I did once listen to a Leonard Cohen song, I think.
It was pretty good.
But I don't know anything else about him. Isn't he Canada's Bob Dylan?
Leonard Cohen is pretty good - maybe not quite as playful as you might like, Kirby, but he ain't bad, and his major themes line up a bit with your own...
I just wish he'd find himself a producer! The production on his stuff over the last 20 or 30 years has been annoyin' - dinky keyboards and melodramatic female backups.
Kirb:
You propose an eternal "present" in which all literature is somehow contemporaneous, and measurable on an equal flat-line.
Does it occur to you that Dante was a Catholic, and derived his world-view and argument of The Divine Comedy directly from church doctrine? Is Dante better, or worse, as a consequence of his being under the influence of religion?
Ultimately, do we care about the religious and political issues which preoccupied writers during their lives, or about the works they wrote? Are the two separable?
I am not a follower of the New Critics. The New Critics believed that the works of the past contained everything that could be known about literature, that later "versions" were simply variations upon timeless themes, which just needed to be periodically reconfirmed. There was nothing new under the sun.
As a critical dogma in which literature can only be validly "appreciated" through a minute analysis of its particulars, the New Criticism is an evident failure, because "most people" don't require this of literature--they read it for pleasure and instruction, not as a demonstration of craft.
My point isn't that all ideas in literature are irrelevant, only that starting from the opposite end of the process--in effect, beginning with an external requirement or curiosity--and trying to see it confirmed or thwarted by literature, is not helpful.
It doesn't matter whether Moore is Protestant or Catholic or Muslim. Her mind, and her feeling for language, are impressive: She would be an elegant writer in any language, under any regime or condition. It is this translucency which is most admirable about her, which transcends class, fashion, sex, and all the other ephemeral or capricious limitations which life and fate impose.
Ultimately, the hope of the world rests on our ability to see virtues (such as Moore's) in others, despite the differences of approach or background which characterize us as individuals or groups. If you insist that all writers in history (and in the future) adhere to a specific line of thought or dogma, you are a propagandist, and not a critic. Marxist, or Feminist critics aren't really critics at all, because they don't see any work for itself, but as a means to a pre-ordained end. Marxists see every work in terms of the class struggle. It's true, and not true, but ultimately of no value in judging the importance or meaning of an individual work. All novels which have female characters do in fact measure and portray the place and function of women within a given societal context, but having said (or confirmed) that, what good has one achieved? One wants to say "Yes, but...."
Kirby, you condemn Marxist and Feminist critical thinking as bankrupt and wrong-headed, because it has a strict agenda which it attempts to impose. But isn't "Lutheranism" just another instance of an attempt to suit a pre-ordained program, too? In what sense is your approach different than theirs? Is it because you think your "ideas" are better than theirs? If this is the battle of the ideas, then what has it to do with literature and art?
Again, we don't read Shakespeare "for his ideas" but because of his considerable skill as a writer, his ability to see profoundly into human motive and interaction. Do we see the world primarily in terms of royalty and the divine right of kings? No. Does that mean that Shakespeare is somehow "compromised" because he writes mostly about royalty? No. Those are conventions of the dramatic traditions within which he worked. We must believe that Shakespeare would have been a great writer in any time, and under any condition. If he were "alive" today, might he be writing epic novels, or fine lyric poems? Who knows? But one thing's certain, his talent would be evident and undeniable whatever his persuasion, whatever form he used. He wouldn't be "good" simply on the basis of what his politics or religion were.
Actually, Moore is a terrible poet and a wrong-headed thinker.
Why?
Because she was a Dodgers fan!
No Dodger fan can be intelligent and fair-minded and virtuous, because the Dodgers are BUMS!
The Giants, however, are courageous and honorable and have their hearts in the right place (i.e., in San Francisco).
Curtis,
People do care about the commitments of writers.
I proposed LUTHERAN surrealism originally as a joke, and as a competitor to MARXIST preoccupations with literature.
Since then of course it became a more serious fascination.
There is the technical side of writing, or any fine art.
But I do think there is content, too.
Agit-prop would tell us that the content is the message, and many do read literature the way somebody might go to an opera who's deaf and just read the libretto, and think they have gotten the whole opera.
(I stole this argument from someone -- maybe from Auden.)
Of course there's more to Moore than her Protestantism, but her Protestantism helps us to understand the subtlety of her thinking.
Writing isn't all technique. Subtlety of content is fairly intriguing, too.
Especially when it's Protestant!
veilleicht thou dost protest too much
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