'One must make a distinction, however': Marianne Moore and Democratic Taste

This essay attempts to characterize the thinking of Marianne Moore on the nature and purpose of aesthetic taste in a democratic culture. Moore stands within one of two traditions of thought on the subject, though "tradition" may be somewhat too strong a word to describe a constellation of writers without a self-consciously declared affiliation to one another. Those in the first camp, which includes Alexis de Tocqueville, Henry Adams, Henry James (in some moods), George Santayana, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jose Ortega y Gasset, cast a suspicious glance upon democracy because of its apparent hostility to personal distinction and artistic achievement. These writers resent the spread of democratic ideals into the realm of culture, and accuse egalitarian forms of government of suppressing artistic quality in the name of political equality. Santayana offers a concise formulation of this line of argument in his polemical remarks about Walt Whitman in "The Poetry of Barbarism": Democracy was not to be merely a constitutional device for the better government of given nations, not merely a movement for the material improvement of the lot of the poorer classes. It was to be a social and moral democracy and to involve an actual equality among all men. Whatever kept them apart and made it impossible for them to he messmates together was to be discarded. The literature of democracy was to ignore all extraordinary gifts of genius or virtue, all distinction drawn even from great passions or romantic adventures. (112) For Santayana, a government organized by popular sovereignty is a worthy and enlightened political idea, at least in theory. The problem with egalitarian politics is that it leads the public to resent and repress those persons who achieve some measure of cultivated accomplishment in society. When the standards of egalitarianism are applied to the realm of culture, there is no longer any reason to honor literary "distinction" or appeal to "higher" tastes, since each of these categories presume a form of social hierarchy, and social hierarchy violates the democratic creed that all persons are created equal. Once the democratic public begins to clamor for equality in every sphere of social life, Santayana suggests, political ambition and artistic refinement are sacrificed to the vulgar passions and common standards of the mob. A second strand of thought, which includes figures like John Stuart Mill (with reservations), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, William James, Henry James (in some moods), and John. Dewey, celebrates democracy's potential for spreading a measure of cultural ambition throughout the populace, encouraging ordinary citizens to strive for and attain the rare and distinguished. For these writers, democracy names a minimal condition of political equality out of which the forms of individuality can be given definition. On this account, the distinctive and idiosyncratic expressions of the individual imagination become the proof by which political equality justifies itself. It is this cluster of assumptions that leads John Dewey to reject the idea of democracy as a "leveler" of cultural achievement or artistic genius. On the contrary, Dewey writes, "moral equality means incommensurability, the inapplicability of common and quantitative standards ... Democracy will not be democracy until education makes it its chief concern to release distinctive aptitudes in art, thought, and companionship. A democrat regards "equality," Dewey concludes, as "that of distinction made universal" (Individuality 79-80). Distinction: the word surfaces in the vocabulary of both Santayana and Dewey when discussing democracy's relation to aesthetic taste, and, as we shall see, it makes another prominent appearance at a crucial moment in Marianne Moore's "Poetry." Yet this word generally carries pejorative overtones among contemporary literary scholars., in large part because of the influential sociological writings of Pierre Bourdieu. …