Thus you may see what advantages to a heavenly life every condition and creature doth afford us, if we had but hearts to apprehend and approve them.... And as they have taught their pigeons, which they call carriers, in divers places, to bear letters of intercourse from friend to friend, at very great distance, so might a wise, industrious Christian get his thoughts carried to heaven, and receive, as it were returns from thence again by creatures of slower wing than doves, by the assistance of the Spirit, the Dove of God. The bulk of the piece is a review of Gordon Corera’s book, Operation Columba - The Secret Pigeon Service: The Untold Story of World War II Resistance in Europe, which is about a British campaign that used carrier pigeons to gather intelligence from German occupied territories during WWII. Yet Moore remains a poet apart. Robin Schulze’s magisterial, scholarly “Becoming Marianne Moore” (2002) gave every version of every poem up to 1924, but nothing else. --Morton Dauwen Zabel, Letter to Marianne Moore, Morton Zabel, then associate editor of Poetry magazine, asked his plaintive question of Marianne Moore in a letter congratulating her on the publication of The Pangolin and Other Verse in the spring of 1936. The winsome celebrity Moore of the 1950s and ’60s, often photographed in cape and tricorn hat, obscured her more demanding, younger self. By using our website, you agree to the use of cookies as described in our, Article details, ""Pigeons" and the Future of Moore Criticism", {{filterTypeLookup[searchItem.filterType]}}, {{searchTypeLookup[searchItem.searchType]}}, Primary Sources (Literary and Historical), Full access to this article and over 14 million more from academic journals, magazines, and newspapers, Access to powerful writing and research tools. We also see Moore emerging, in her 20s, from late Victorian light verse (“I could not bear a yellow rose ill will / Because books said that yellow boded ill, / White promised well”). Reuter’s News Agency was established in 1850 with a flock of 45 pigeons, which were used to cover a gap in the telegraph network between Brussels and Aachen, giving Paul Reuter a monopoly over all telegraph traffic between Belgium and Germany. They can fly extremely fast — up to 110 miles per hour — and with a following wind can cover 700 miles in a single uninterrupted flight (pigeons don’t like to fly at night but can be trained to do so). As a result, eighty years later Zabel's question still resonates. Pigeons can recognise video footage of themselves shown with a five-second delay (three-year-old children find it difficult to comprehend a two-second delay). Marianne Craig Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was an American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Heather Cass White. NEW COLLECTED POEMS By Marianne Moore Edited by Heather Cass White 480 pp. Take her emblematic elephant, its skin “cut / into checkers by rut / upon rut of unpreventable experience,” so that its hide becomes “a manual for the peanut-tongued and the / hairy toed.” (That scarred skin, in a poem called “Black Earth,” also suggests the “spiritual poise” of put-upon African-Americans: Moore elsewhere — “The Labors of Hercules,” for example — clearly set out to write anti-racist poems.). This is the right Dedalian flight; and thus we may take from each bird a feather, and make us wings, and fly to Christ. Yet the poems will not make our judgments for us. But where was "Pigeons?" The poems she finally decided to include in Pangolin, especially "Virginia Britannia" and "The Pangolin," became as definitive of her work in the thirties as were the "ammiles" Eliot placed first in Selected Poems. 63, No. Why did "Pigeons" disappear for so long? Moore’s longest single poem, “An Octopus,” folds into its many sunny descriptions a monitory strain — “Relentless accuracy is the nature of this octopus / with its capacity for fact.” (The “octopus” is actually Mount Rainier, the glacier and national park, whose arms and extensions make it resemble a cephalopod.)