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I IHH I
Undoing Discrimination with Discretion:
Muianne Mx:re's Use of Fast Asian Mxif in
''Nme Nectarines "
Mi-Jung Jang
(SeooI NatiooaJ Univer.;;ity)
Do you wanL La impro ve th e world?
Do not think it can be dOD e
This essay di scovers a unique use of Ea st Asian motif in Marianne Moo r e's poetry in the nineteen thirties, namely one poem titled. ~Nine Nectari nes." East Asian themes, motifs, and forms, were often taken up by many of her co ntemporary poets in the US. as they were in Britain, yet Moore 's use of one East Asian motif, a Chinese porcelain plate, in "Ni ne Nectarines" is unique in many senses, First, it appears there as a part of Lhe American maLerial culture. Secondly. iL
challenges in the poem ideas on various contemporary issues such as
eugenics, racism. and American commercialism. Finally. even though Lhe arL of the Chinese porcelain piece is highly praised. Lh e poem
118 Mi-Jung Jang
does not fall inl.o the fallacy of idealizing a race. This essay shows
how the poem almost forete ll s that the use of East Asian motifs in
US poetry would take a "naturalizing" or "nativizing" direction from
the latter balf of the last century.
Before dealing with Marianne Moore's poetry. I must vindicate my
choice of the term , "East Asia", over national demarcations such as
Japan or China. as well as ove r the geographically- Eurocentric and
cu lturally- exotic "Far East." Since Korea was largely absent in US or
European cultural scenes at the turn of tbe nineteenth and twentieth
century, a Korean student of cultural exchanges is probably fated to
have a predilection for 8 broader term over national identities
However, I have another reason to opt for the global term. It can
help provide a perspective to discuss and unravel the complicated
process of East Asian influence in modern American poetry, Recent studies have identified the origins of specific influence in literature,
e. g. that of Ezra Pound's Cathay. using in-depth precision OD
newfound evidences. Certainly. rigorous scholarship may not and
should not allow unheeding eyes on the origins of influences. Yet, as
history warns us, too much discrimination will achieve less insight
than when balanced witb synthesis. East Asian countries such as
Japan, China. and Korea share much of their history, culture, and
tradition, and most writers in the US had sbared interest in more
than ODe of them-China and Japan, most often. Also. the journey of
the East Asian resources to tbe US was often co mplicat ed, having one
or another country as the intermediary. Similarly, their circulation in the new land was very intricate too, with poets exchanging information and influence with each othe r. Fo r these complexities, the
broader regional term, East Asia, rather than specific country names,
120 MI-Jung Jang
Percival sent. Therefore, it should be seen rather natural that while
growing up many of these young poets picked up many East Asian
themes, motifs, and forms to use in their poetry.
Young poets we re often not simply pursuing a sheer exotic taste
either. When they included East Asian themes and motifs in their
poetry, they did it to show their grievances at and responses to
various contemporary i ss ues, When Ezra Pound published his translation of Chinese poems from Ernst Fenollosa's manuscript, Cathay, in 1915. he was not advertising an exotic aesthetic but
undertaking an indirect response to the War. 3) Many of the poems in
the collection were songs by soldiers, farmers, merchants, and their
wives resenting the legacy of wars. When "Kung I walked" in the
magnificence of an opening spondee into the English Contos later in
1930." ) Confucius and his disciples wer e coming at Ezra Pound's
behest to be a clear contrast with the filthy American or European
reality and thus to scandalize it. For the same effect it was that the
Chinese history in cantos UI-UX had to be introduced after Pound 's
pounding against usury in the US and Europe, Similarly, Amy Lowell
borrowed a butterfly image and a short verse form from the Japanese
haiku in her 'Peace 51 published in Pictures of the Floating World in
3) It is Hugh Kenner who calls the poems "amon g the most durable of all poetic responses to the World War I, ~ He introduces a letter from Henry
Gaudie r appreciating the poems with his comrades in trench, See Hugb
Kenner. The Pound Era **(Be rkel ey and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. 197)) , 202-203,
- Ezra Pound. -Canto x.n(** The Omtos of Ezra Pound (New York : New Direction, 1996), 58. 5) Amy Lowell's ~ PeBc e~ shows a butte rfly image borrowed from ·On a Temple Bell. ~ a Japanese haiku by Buson , Earl Miner, The Japanese Tradition in British (lnd American literature (Princeton: Princeton University Pr ess. 19 66), 114
Und oin g Disc rim inat ion wit h Discretion 121
1919, not just to experiment on the Japanese image or the Japanese
verse form in English but also to ta ke a snapshot picture of he r
war- inflicted world, Sheer exotic taste was even lightly mocked at as
we see Wallac e Stevens mentioning "old Ch in ese I sat titivating by
their mountain pools / Or in the Yangtze studied out their beards
and "Utamaro's beauty" in "Le Mon oc le de Man Onele,'
1'0 say that those poets tried to relate East Asian themes and
motifs to their reality is, however, not to say that th e themes and
motifs in th e ir poems are not exotic, Those themes and motifs are exotic. to be true, giving a touch of fore ignness in the poems to cap tur e readers' eyes at once, Ye t, the more important. is the
corollary that they bave to remain exotic for the poetic effect to stay,
In other wo rds, their poetic relevance comes from their foreignness,
Applied in the American context, the old-time Chinese so ldi ers, a
Japanese butterfly image, and Confucius and his political philosophy
create a new pe rspective to see American issues in a fresher tight. Therefore, it is their fo reignness that affords the new perspective, and they have to stay foreign, st ay apart f rom the American context,
for the poetic effect to last, They should not become a part of the
American context because, if th ey did, they might loose t he
freshening or "estranging" effect. In order to have the East As ian and the Am e rican stay separate, a proce ss of essentializing the race is not infrequently involved: to find one or another set of aspects as
definitive of the racial ch aracters, Poets often turned to the East
Asian past a nd idea li zed the East Asia in its past radian ce: the great Chinese Civilizatio n, the aesthetic Japanese, etc,
While this is far from saying they should have done this or they
shouldn't have don e that, find in Marianne Moore's wNin e
Undoing Discrimination wi th Discretion 1 23
titular porcelain plate-as it will soon turn out in the poem-has a
three - fo ld Chineseness, The piece itself is from China: the nectarine
is of Chinese origin: and porcelain tableware in general has Chineseness
in English- they are chinas, Nevertheless, it be longs in American
scene as well, just as Chinese art and craft pieces ore circulated in
the US market, nectarine trees are growing in the American soil , and
chinas are used at any US households, In the poem, furthermore, the
Chinese porcelain piece is set in conversation with American
contemporary issues such as eugenics, racism, and American
commercialism and passes through ordeals from those issues,
The poem begins in an ordinary scene observing the titular
nectarines' ar rangement on a tree, However. as the arrangement is
descr ibed, it gently yet sternly knocks at the issue of eugenics,
Arranged by two's as peaches are,
at intervals that 011 may live-
8} Why she first paired '"The Buffalo· and ~Nine Nectarines and othe r Porcelains· is not clear yet, She was asked to send a pair of poems by lhe editor, "The Buffa!o~ also shows an Asian- but not exactly East Asian- object, the Indian water buffalo, llS its main subject, yet how they correspond to each ot. her is not ve ry obvious. Also, even though the two poems were writt en in the same period and published together. the processes of writing were separnte and somewhat different: while ·The Buffalo· wa s composiled from her ea rlier observations from 1920, ·Nine Nectarines" was ar isen from her Teee m observations in 19305. Focused on the use of East Asian motifs, this essay acknowledges the difference and sepanlle "The Buffalo" from the discussions hereafte r. For a detailed discussion on the twO poems' associQtion, sec Robin G, SchuJtz, "Marianne Moore's "Imperious Ox, Imperial Dish· and the Poetry of the Natural World·, Twentieth Century Literature 44,1 (Spring 1994): 1-32, For the circumsl.8nces s urr ounding the two poems, see Lawrence Stapleton, Marianne Moore: The Poe t 's Advl1nce. Princeton (NJ: Princeton University Pro••, 1978), 75-77,
124 Mi-J ung Jang
eight and a single one, on twigs that grew th e year before- they look like a derivative: although not un co mm only the opposite is seen- nine peaches on 8 nectarine.
Eugenics, the pseudo-scientific belief in the possibility of
improvement of species- including human one, as well as animal and
plant ooes- by artificial means such as se le ctive breedin g, is
touched on here. Fir st of all, the nectarines ore growing on a peach tr ee ("A r e they e ngrafted? ~ readers may question), in an arrangement
"that all may live ('"Were th ey pruned in an orchard?" readers may
Qu esL ion again), and they are sa id to seem a ~deriv8tive ~ of peach (- Are n 't nectarines truly II gorden variation of the peach?" readers may co ncl ude, re mem be ring the European folk-genealogy of nectarine as B garden variation). AJI these associations are suggested. howeve r,
only to be disbelieved soon in the fifth to eight lines: "although not
un co mm only / the opposite is see n- I nine peaches on a nectarine.
In other wo rd s, the nectarine fruits on a peach tree are not
engra fted but natural: nor are they a derivative but so close a
co usin of peach tbat mutations between the peach and the nec tar ine are often found on either tree. Therefore, the fruits are not necessar il y growi ng in a garden, and the belief in artificial improvement of species is deri ded in rhyming ·d erivative ~ with "live," initiating the binary oppositi on of ~artificial cultivation" versus
"natural growth" later to be dealt with,
Nectarine and peach are indeed not randomly picked topics but
carefully chosen ones, for the debate concerning the origins of peach
126 Mi-Jung Jang
Fuzzless through s lender crescent leaves of green or blue or bot h, in the Chinese style,
In years of the anti - Asian hysteria fomented by the "Yellow Peril"
propagandists such as wthrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, II )
identifying a beautiful piece of art as "Chinese should have sounded
as nothing casual but piqued. Moore was working on the poem in
1933, 12) the year when Adolf Hiller took t be rein of Germany. While
witnessing the rise of tbe Nazism and other brancbes of radical
racism in parts of Europe and in Japan, America in the 1930s was
also racially highly controversial with its own legacy of slavery and
an almost epidemical variety of racist theories propounding public
ears. She had actually toned dO"ll the poem's anti-Nazi vehemence in
this second version by deleting the "jack-boots part in the first
version. but not sacrificing its ant.i - racist slance, The issue of racism was closely related with that of eugenics introduced above, for facist theorists from the end of the nineteenth century in Europe or in the US had often mobilized pseudo- Darwinian evolutionary theories and eugenic ideas at their service, According to racist theorists, human races elsewhere but in Europe wer e genetically flawed, or less -fi(
for survival, or evo lutionarily backwarded, or historically belated,
II) u,throp Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Co lor Against White World -Supremacy was published in 1920: Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Roce in
1916. Earlier versions of 'Yellow Peri( theory had innuenced the setting up of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. For a discussion of ·Yellow Peri( discourse in the 1920s and 1930s in the US. see David PaJumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Hist orical Crossings of 8 & ciaJ Frontier **(Sta nfo rd, CA: Stanford University Press. 1999 ,.
- Moo re menti oned her nectarine poem in a letter to her brother in 1933. Stapleton.** The Poet s Advance. 77.
Undoing Discrimination with Discretion 127
etc .. and were inferior to the European race by nature.
As a matter of fact, the observer is not even looking at a real
Chinese art piece but a printed reproduction of it, because lines 13 - 17
say the col ors are "by the uninquiring brush / of mercantile
bookbinding:
.... the four
pairs' half-moon leaf-mosaic turns ou t to the sun th e sprinkled blush of puce-American-Beau ty pink applied to bees-wax gray by the un i nquiring brush of merca ntile hoo kbinding.
Most critics s upp ose the poetic situation as an observer looking at a
Chinese artwork and do not pay due attention to the wo rd
"bookbinding." In a recent article on the poem, Victoria Bazin actually introduces one entry from the poet's mother Mary Warner Moor e's notebook as a credi ble so urc e, wh e re the mother describes a Chinese
pla te in a window display of an automobile company.1 3J Details in tbe
entry look very close to the poem's, and highly plausible is tbe
surmise that Marianne Moore, living with her mother in cl ose relati onship, was inspired by her moth er' s observation. Yet. as we
know with John Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn" -which MOOl'e also
knew and possibly bad in her mind whi le writing "Nine Nectarines - ,
a poet writing a poem on art does not necessarily have to stay
faithful to one spec ifi c piece of art. The usual guess might seem
13 ) Victoria Bazin. "'J ust Looking at the Ev eryday' : Marianne Moo r e's Exo ti c Modernism: Madernist Cult ures 1 .2 (2 006): 66.
Undoing Discrimination with Discretion 129
the poet. Marianne Moor e. who was earlier invo lved in the American
Arts and Crafts movemen ts, was sharing the then dying -o ut "i nstinct
of workmanship' of New Engl and craftspecple, IS) Here in th e poem,
she perceives the eleme nt of mercantilism in the printed page and
takes side with the artisanship, identified as Chinese, so much so
that she almost vies herself with the Chinese artistry in the porcelain
piece with her own craftsmanship in her poem,
Looming in the co ntra st between the ~ uninquiring brush ~ of
American "mercantilistic bookbinders and 'inqui ring brush' of 'Chinese
artists' by inference, is another concern that may have made the poet
feel the more un co mfortable at the printed page, East Asian goods
occupied a ve ry contradictory pos ition in the newly arising commodity
culture in the US in the late nineteenth and the early twe ntieth
century, They became successful merchandise because they were highly
appreciated as the outcomes of unalienated labor of artisanship.1 6) In
an article on the status of Japanese goods at the end of nineteenth
15) Cynthia Hogue, "'The Plu cked String': Emily Dickinso n, Marianne Moore and the Poetics of Seh..>ct Defects: The Emily Dick in son JourtJsJ 7,1 (1998): 89-100. For MariWllle Moor e's relationship with the Arts and Crafts movement as well as her s with various avant-garde artists, see Linda Leavell, Moore and the Visual Art (Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1995 ), 15-16, t3 8-39, 16 ) Acco rding to Thomas W. Kim in -Being Modern: The Circulation of Oriental Objects." they wer e not just comme rcially but also aesthetically success fully ci rculated that they e ventually influenced public Laste and creat ed new demand, See Thomas W, Kim , -Being Modern: The Ci rculation of Oriental Objects." American Quanerly 58, 2 (June 2006): 379-405, Kim also points out the spec ia ln ess of Orie ntal goods as ·while museum curators and private co ll ecto rs also gathered African and Native objects, Orient.a1 objects were the ones that entered th e borne and everyday lives of the general pop ulace not ju st 8S curiosities but 8S exemplars of cultu ral refinement and the highes t aesthetic aspirations. - Ibid" 387,
130 MI-Jung Ja ng
century and in the beginning of twentieth century, Christopher Bush
says 'the American enthusiasm for things Japaoese fed both the rise
of the commodity and the rise of an anti modernist, vaguely
anticapitalist ideology that sought alternative to the culture of mass
consumption, Japanese things excelled in the former area by
appealing to the concerns of the latter,'171 With a few reserves and
distinctions, the same will hold true with Chinese goods, Indeed, the
aforementioned American Arts and Crafts Movement and the notion of
the American or New England workmanship itself were developed
simultaneously with the circulation of Oriental art-and craftworks in
the mass market. The American movement was partly influenced by
the Oriental examples, and often found a model in the Oriental
culture, 18 1 In this light, Marianne Moore's sympathy with Chinese
artisanship is not surprising at all. It is father like recognizing a
comradeship, if not decisively turning her hack agai nst American
mercantilism and racial discrimination.
Nevertheless, the anachronism of finding a model for modem
American craftspeople in ancient East Asian artisans is just obvious.
On the one hand, to have an ancient foreign land as the mode l
without considering the differences in conditions surrounding the
production and consumption of goods is not practically or
ideologically enabling the movement either to meet 'what the age
demanded,' to quote Ezra Pound, or to resolve the discontents and
17) Christopher Bush, '"The Et.hnicity of Things in America's Lacquered Age·,
Reprose.tations 99 (Summer 2007), 80,
18) Jackson T. J. Lea rs says American antimodemism found their models in medieval or Oriental cultures and gives ample examples and analysis of them in No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the TransfOTl118tion of AmeriClln Culture, 1880 - 1920 (C hi cago: University of Chicago Press. 1981).
132 Mi-Jung Jang
"He ro." she had a "decorous frock-coated Negro" be Lhe hero enduring
the "fearless sightseeing" white "hobo: In "The Labo rs of Hercules
she derided the racial prejudices by ca ll ing the following as a part of
the heroic toi I:
to convince sna ke -charming controversialists that one keeps on knowing -thD.t the Negro is not brutal. tha t the Hebrew is not greedy. that the Oriental is not. immoral. that th e German is not a Hun, -
In MNine Nectarines, - to W1do the racist and eugenicist argument..
Marianne Moore has her Chinese mo tif go re ve al the wonders of China
and sha tter American or European misconceptions on the origin of the
nectarin e,
Like the peach Yu, the red- cheeked peach which cannot aid the dead. but eaten in time prevents death, the Italian peach-nut. Persian plum. Ispahan
secluded waH-gr ow n nectarine, as wild spontaneous fruit was found in China first. But wa s it wild? Prudent de CandoUe would not say.
Pound were in the beginning or their corre spo ndence. Moore replied. after narrating her personal data long, "co n tra ry to your impression. I am altogether a blond and have red hair. ~ Qtd. Ibid .• 134: Charles Tomlinson ed, Marianne Moore: A Collec tion of Critical Essays (Englwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 1969). 16.
Undoing Disc riminalio n wi th Disc retion 133
At the peach Yu legend in the heginning, the life- preserving power
is entitled as Chinese, echoi ng tbe co-prosperity theme of "al l may
live" in the first stanza. Th e n, the tracing of the tree's genealogy discove rs it s spread t.o Europe as a process of "walling-in" of the wild
plant, Here "the Italian" put in a separate line is more tban
conspicuous. Therefore, t he binary opposition of of wi1d spontaneous" versus 'cultivated' 'artificial' life is transferred to that of China versus Eur ope, Two misconceptions are dispe ll ed too. One is the
European folk-helief tbat nectarines and peaches are from Persia,
whi ch was recently corrected when Moore wrote the poem. The other
is that nectarine was a cultivated variety of the peach, whi ch wa s
also recently disputed by Charles Darwin mentioned above when Moor e
wrote the poe m, "Prudent de Candoll.: Alphonse De Ca ndolle, was a
French- Swiss botanist wh o bad to reluctantly accept Darwin's
observation in 1868, In hi s 1855 treatise Geographie Botonique
Raisonne. de Candolle argued that nectarines must be completely a
product of human cultivation, not a natural mutation but an artificially engineered variatio n. According to Robin G, Schulze,
Darwin in the nectarines and peaches section in Variations was
debating de Candolle, and de Candolle bad to retreat later in hi s 1886
work Origin of Cuitil'Dled Plan ts,
I laid stress, in 1855 , on other considerati ons in suppo rt of th e theory that the nectarine is derived from the common peach: bu t IAtrwin has giv en such a large number of cases in which 8 branch of necLari ne has Wlexpectedly appeared ulX>n a peach tree, that it is useless to ins ist longer upon this point , and I will only add that the
22) Alph onse De Cadolle, Origin of Cultivated Plants (New York: App leto n, 1 886), 226 - 27: qt d. Sc hu lze, ~ ' I mperiou s Ox, Imperial Di sh," 19.
Undoing Discriminalion wilh Discrelion 135
and the animal featured in the piece, "unantlered moose or Ice land ho rse I or ass," is ~also accurate~ even though it is seems
unidentifiable at all in her depi ction. How is an animal 8 "moose"
when it is "u nantl ered"? Wh en such incongruities pr evail, qu estioning of the fundamental criteria rather than ve rifying the stated on them is often the poetic effect, Indeed, words such as "flaws· and italicized .. curcuJio," Latin fo r .weevil: therefore 'vermin. ' reverberate eugenic racist propagandas, and the marked use of those words have the propagandas put inlo interrogation. It is only under human bias that the "much- mended" plate seems flawed , and the physique of the animal seems inaccurate, and to believe we can handle or "mend~ ~f1aws" is a human hubr is. Have tables turned, and an alternative hierarc hy set? That Chinese imagination is superior to European or American scientific enquiry? Moore seems to have known the danger in essentia li zing races 85 well as thm in discriminating races, so she bridles the poem and lets it veer away from the danger:
A Chinese ~ unders t8nds the sp irit of th e wilderness" and the nectarine-loving kylin of po ny appeara.nce-the \ong - t.o.iled or th e tailless smaJl cinnamon-brown. common camel-haired unicorn wi th antelope feet and no horn, he re enameled on porcelain. It was 8 Chinese who imagined this masterpiece.
136 Mi-Jung Jang
The poem as a who le sbows a visual resemblance of a nectarine
tree. It has three eleven-lined stanzas. one five-lined one. a line of
six dots as if denoting an omission - it is actually where Moore
deleted several stanzas-. and again the regular eleven - lined stanza
as the last, so it looks like a nectarine tree with flowing leaves and
hanging fruits in the first two stanzas, the stout tree trunk in the
third and fourth, and with the dotted line as the ground line, the last
stanza as its root. Each stanza is, roughly if not exactly, dealing
with the corresponding part of a tree. Leaves and fruits in the first
stanzas, the tree trunk with a quadruped leaning against it in the
third and fourth , and reaching the root in the final stanza, naturally,
origins are uncovered, mysteries resolved. and potentials released. First. the perfection and accuracy in the plate piece is identified as
from the Chinese gift to "understandlsl the spirit of wilderness."
unlike the Persian or European or American pursuit to tame, or
domesticate. or artificially engineer it. Second, the unidentifiable animal in the previous stanza is finally given name as - kylin" (i1lfA). or qilin in pinyin. the imaginary Chinese unicorn, Third. syntactically
resembling "the spirit of wilderness: the portrayal of the kylin shows
the paragon of the power of wilderness released in all its
changeability and inconsistency : a "Iong- / tailed or the tailess."
"cinnamon-brown" in co lor yet "common camel-haired," "unicorn" with
"no horn: And the spirit did the Chinese understand.
However, things do not take the path to idealize China. While still
appreciating the wilderness depicted in Chinese Brt, the irony of
which I will soon turn back to, however, Marianne Moore adroitly
hedges the adoration for Chinese art. Reminding us of the controversy
over the "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" in John Keats' last stanza in
