MARIANNE MOORE: A PRESBYTERIAN POET?

“She expresses and celebrates some of the best qualities of the attitudes toward life which churches of the Reformed type should foster. If we cherished these qualities as we should, we might have been quicker to appreciate Marianne Moore.” HRISTIAN literary critics, who are usually Anglicans or Roman Catholics, often observe that the Reformed churches C fail to produce many creative artists. It might be nearer the truth to say that they do produce them but are not much interested in their work, and the artists leave. What is significant about Marianne Moore is that she did not leave. All her long life she was a faithful Presbyterian whose poetry reflected her faith. Robert Browning was an active Congregationalist but Donald Davie has argued that his best poetry did not reflect his faith, and that when Browning touched on religious themes related to his own church tradition, he was at his worst. I This could not be said of Marianne Moore. She was very close to the other members of her very Presbyterian family. After her father’s death, she shared a home for many years with her mother, who was a minister’s daughter and herself a deeply committed church member. Her brother, a graduate of Princeton Seminary, was also a minister, and she wrote to him daily when he was a naval chaplain. In her notes on her poems, she makes several references to the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn. She is reported to have read Calvin’s Institutes. Her poetry, as I will argue, exemplified “the Presbyterian virtues.” Although she was, perhaps, the most widely honored American poet of her time, no Presbyterian seminary was among the sixteen institutions who gave her honorary degrees, and no study of her poetry has been made by a Reformed theologian. The only partial exception I know of is Gabriel Vahanian’s perceptive short review of Laurence Stapleton’