Taffy Martin, from "Craftsmanship Disfigured and Restored," in Marianne Moore: Subversive Modernist (The University of Texas Press, 1986).

Taffy Martin argues that Marianne Moore employs the resources of language, including such mundane items as quotation marks, to demonstrate the ultimate instability and fragility of language. Undermining the meaning of her own statements, distorting and occluding the many quotations she appropriates into her poetry, Moore wrenches language out of its overly familiar contexts, and somehow renews its vitality even as she baffles us with its enigmas.

"Light is Speech" also argues, then, that language leads to no end. Defenseless and almost totally hermetic, it becomes animated only when someone thinks of it. Moore has laid bare the skeleton of disfigured language. Neither words themselves nor their referential meanings are stable. Words joined together have referential meaning, but it is fragile and tentative. They can be withdrawn or interrupted at the slightest whim. Yet Moore by no means capitulates into silence. Her quotations aredisfigured, but they speak. They repeat instability but also show that language has become a "'precipitate of dazzling impressions'" (CP, 61). Throughout Moore's disfiguration, the components of language retain their raw power. "The spontaneous unforced passion of the Hebrew language" grew out of words, "'an abyss of verbs full of reverberations and tempestuous energy'" (CP, 61). As this line and so many others show, the perfect phrase withstands disfiguration—tropes for the primacy of written words and the fragility of speech. The quotations interrupt and comment upon discourse, but the discourse they interrupt is Moore's own. Ironically, then, Moore restores what she has just disfigured. Discourse is fragile, but it can continue.

In "Poetry," the components of Moore's disfiguration—distortion, suppression, and restoration—converge. She tampered with the poem incessantly, shortening some of its stanzas and even the basic pattern of the poem itself. She omitted it from her collection in A Marianne Moore Reader but relented partially in Complete Poems, where it becomes merely a three-line shadow of its former selves.