BOOK REVIEWS
Poems. By Marianne Moore. 12mo. 24 pages. The Egoist Press, London.
Marriage (Manikin Number 3). By Marianne Moore. 16mo. 20 pages. Monroe Wheeler. $0.25.
TWO years ago Miss Moore's book of Poems—so far as I know her only book—was published in London by The Egoist Press; and I then undertook to review it for The Dial. This promise, for one reason after another, I never fulfilled. Now another poem has appeared, Marriage, published by Manikin, printed apparently in Germany, and with a parenthetical introduction by Mr Glenway Wescott. Meanwhile I have read Miss Moore's poems a good many times, and always with exactly the same pleasure, and satisfaction in something quite definite and solid. Because of a promise which, because of the long delay, may be considered as having been broken, and because I can only, at the moment, think of five contemporary poets—English, Irish, American, French, and German—whose work excites me as much as, or more than, Miss Moore's, I find myself compelled to say something about them. Not that there is much that is usefully said about any new work of art—I do not rate criticism so highly; but one ought, in honesty, to publish one's beliefs.
Mr Wescott has, in fact, written a good introduction; I only think that his distinction between proletariat art and aristocratic art is an artificial and unimportant distinction with dangerous consequences. So far as a proletariat art is art at all, it is the same thing in essence as aristocratic art; but in general, and at the present time, the middle-class art (which is what I believe Mr Wescott to have in mind when he speaks of proletariat art (the proletariat is middle class in America) is much more artificial than anything else;
