ABSTRACT: Wallace Stevens's essay "About One of Marianne Moore's Poems" occupies a singular place in The Necessary Angel as his only sustained engagement with another poet's work and as a prose piece written for the eye rather than the lecture-attuned ear. Its unmarked quotations, digression, and inclusion of a previously unsourced French proverb constitute an homage to Moore's poetics. Stevens privileges optical reading, quotation, humility, and solicitude to honor Moore's "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron'" and respond to her reviews of his poetry. His suppression of quotation marks reflects Moore's thematic concern with the invisible power of appearances. Supplementing B. J. Leggett's focus on Part 1's apparent subordination of Moore to H. D. Lewis's philosophy and Robin Schulze's defense of Part 2's travelogue, this argument treats the neglected final section as the essay's interpretive core, revealing Stevens's deep appreciation of Moore's capacity to "digest … appearance" and thus avail her readers, as Stevens does, of powerfully new, individual realities.
Andrew Osborn (Sun,) studied this question.