Poet's Choice

Guest wrote for the readers of his daily column (syndicated in 250 newspapers), and he never missed a deadline in 30 years. That was his project, and he did a good job at it. Before we scorn the rustic dialect of his lines, before we condemn them as merely naive or faux-naif or just false in an outdated fashion, we should remember the popularity of country music and also the affected, exaggerated "incorrectness" of the rap idiom. Most American popular song since the birth of rock has been in dialect: A spectacularly successful example is the vaguely Appalachian character created for himself by Bob Dylan. (Edgar Guest, by the way, was born in England; his family moved to Michigan when he was 10.) Experts of dialect and sentiment such as Guest, writing poetry to evoke an era's fantasy of countrified wisdom, a daydream of universal feeling expressed in primal or elemental voices, filled a need now satisfied by the recorded music industry.

Stevens and Moore, born about the same time as Edgar Guest (1879 and 1887, respectively), had a different project, reaching further back and further forward in time. That is, they wrote to the standard of artists like John Keats or Emily Dickinson, and they wrote for . . . well, for us, the readers decades after them. Here is Moore on the subject of home:

Silence

My father used to say,

"Superior people never make long visits,

have to be shown Longfellow's grave

or the glass flowers at Harvard.

Self-reliant like the cat--

that takes its prey to privacy,

the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth--

they sometimes enjoy solitude,

and can be robbed of speech

by speech which has delighted them.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;

not in silence, but restraint."

Nor was he insincere in saying, "Make my house your inn."

Inns are not residences.

Moore's lines, with their tricky repetitions of "speech" and "silence," the shocking image of that mouse-tail, are possibly not as catchy as Edgar Guest's poem. But I nominate them as likely to stand the test of time.

(Marianne Moore's poem "Silence" can be found in "The Collected Poems of Marianne Moore." Simon & Schuster. Copyright ©1935 and renewed © 1963 by Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot. Edgar Guest's poem "Home" is from his collection "A Heap O' Livin'," originally published by Reily & Lee in 1916.)