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Article: Anatomy of a crush. (writers James Baldwin and Marianne Moore)
- Article from:
- Interview
- Article date:
- February 1, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Ruminating over my intellectual crush on James Baldwin, whose Early Novels and Stories and Collected Essays have just been issued in a new Library of America version edited by his friend Toni Morrison, drew me by extension to one of Baldwin's own crushes, on the writer Marianne Moore. I was interested to learn recently from a friend of his how he admired Moore and often quoted her poem "Nevertheless" from memory.
Much of the younger writer's attraction to Moore, I suspect, was aesthetic. In her powerful poems - "Marriage," "Elephants," "A Grave" - we have a near-Japanese sense of beauty pervading a distinctly mystical sense of form: so feng shui before the fact. And ...