Totalitarian mama …

… All in the family by Bruce Bawer — The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The closest thing Marianne had to an escape from life with Mary was her poems. A key fact about them, underscored by Leavell, is this: On the one hand, she “could never have become the poet she was without the four years away from her mother at Bryn Mawr,” where she first became part of a creative community and found the freedom and confidence to forge a poetic voice of her own—in reaction, one might say, to the family language Mary had invented—and where, taking biology courses, she was drawn to the rigorous language of science. On the other hand, it was being back home under Mary’s thumb that made her feel compelled to write—compelled to escape from the world Mary had fashioned (itself an escape from the real world) into a literary landscape of her own devising. Many of Moore’s poems, Leavell reminds us, feature “camouflaged and armored animals” that are “misunderstood, self-reliant, and invariably solitary”—a manifest reflection, of course, of Marianne’s own circumstances. But the poems, as any reader of Moore well knows, are the very opposite of cries of the heart. Mary, after all, read every word—so raw confession, or anything close to it, was not an option. Hence Marianne was forced to devise what amounted to a new type of poem, stunning at the time, not only for being syllabic in form (something which was previously all but unheard of in serious English poetry) but, perhaps even more so, for its extraordinary, even clinical, degree of precision and dispassion.