Marianne Moore in 1948  [photo by Carl Van Vechten]
England

With its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral,
    with voices—one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept—the
criterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy with its equal
    shores—contriving an epicureanism from which the grossness has been

extracted: and Greece with its goat and its gourds, the nest of modified illusions:
    and France, the "chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly," in
whose products, mystery of construction diverts one from what was originally one's
    object—substance at the core: and the East with its snails, its emotional

shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its imperturbability,
    all of museum quality: and America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars are smoked on the 
    street in the north; where there are no proofreaders, no silk-worms, no digressions;

the wild man's land; grassless, linksless, languageless country in which letters are written 
    not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,
but in plain American which cats and dogs can read! The letter a in psalm and calm, when 
    pronounced with the sound of a in candle, is very noticeable,

but why should continents of misapprehension have to be accounted for by the 
    fact? Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools
which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous? Of mettlesomeness which may be 
    mistaken for appetite, of heat which may appear to be haste, no con-

clusions may be drawn. To have misapprehended the matter is to have confessed 
    that one has not loooked far enough. The sublimated wisdom
of China, Egyptian discernment, the cataclysmic torrent of emotion compressed 
    in the verbs of the Hebrew language, the books of the man who is able

to say, "I envy nobody but him, and him only, who catches more fish than 
    I do"—the flower and fruit of all that noted superi-
ority—should one not have stumbled upon it in America, must one imagine 
    that it is not there? It has never been confined to one locality.


[fromMarianne Moore's Poems (London: Egoist Press, 1921); first published in Dial 68 (April 1920)]


* * *