Marianne Moore: No Feet

In the chapter devoted to Marianne Moore in Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, Donald Hall examines the structure of Moore's verse, which basically comes in two forms: syllabic verse and free verse. Her syllabic lines have no meter, no feet, only particular syllable counts. Indeed, it seems that she was effectively tone deaf when it came to meter, simply not hearing it – an extraordinary thing in a poet of her accomplishment. In her memoir of Moore, 'Efforts of Affection', which Hall quotes, Elizabeth Bishop 'recalls with astonishment that Moore was baffled by conventional English prosody.' 'Why not believe,' Bishop concludes,' that the old English meters that still seem natural to most of us ... were not natural to her at all?' There is plenty of evidence, and Hall cites an essay by Moore, 'Feeling and Precision', in which 'she spoke of "Dr Johnson's objection to rigmarole, in his takeoff on the ballad: 'I put my hat upon my head, And went into the Strand, And there I saw another man,…