‘Words are constructive / when they are true; the opaque allusion—the simulated flight / upward—accomplishes nothing.’ So writes Marianne Moore in ‘Picking and Choosing’. Published in The Dial in 1920, the poem provides a remarkable statement on her poetic technique and a premonition of her distinctive, creative work as the editor of that same magazine. Editing is a creative-critical practice. For Moore, writing and editing were synonymous with revision, as is demonstrated in both her poetry and throughout her tenure at The Dial, as Bonnie Costello and Victoria Bazin have argued. In her poetry and at The Dial, Moore’s editing demonstrates complex, interacting aesthetic principles. For Moore, Crane’s poetry was bristling with ‘wrong meanings’ and artificial gestures. Editing Crane’s poetry, then, required the careful imposition of discipline, at odds with his associational forms. Moore’s edit of Crane’s ‘The Wine Menagerie’ (retitled ‘Again’ by Moore) might be seen as a material example of Emily Dickinson’s lines of influence colliding. Here principles of indeterminacy and fluidity, ‘dwell[ing] in possibility’ (Crane) collided with precision and restraint: the prudence of the microscope (Moore).

In 1926 Crane had two notorious disagreements with editors. Despite their own aesthetic quarrels, Marianne Moore’s and Harriet Monroe’s views converged when it came to Crane’s poetry. Crane had fraught interactions with Moore at The Dial and with Monroe at Poetry over editing interventions made to, respectively, ‘The Wine Menagerie’ and ‘At Melville’s Tomb’. Monroe agreed to publish ‘At Melville’s Tomb’ on the condition that Crane provide a gloss of his ‘confused’, ‘champion mixed metaphors’ for publication alongside the poem in the October number of the magazine. Moore’s famous edit of ‘The Wine Menagerie’, meanwhile, brought the poem down from 49 to 18 lines for the May 1926 number of The Dial. Both Crane’s response to Monroe’s and Moore’s edits have received significant and useful critical commentary. But the ways that both interventions set critical precedents for criticism of his work, formulating an influential language for dealing with his poetry, have yet to be explored. This chapter offers a new framework for the development of his reception history and the resulting shibboleths that remain in criticism of his work.

Monroe’s explicit request that Crane paraphrase his ‘confused mixed metaphors’ and Moore’s changes to ‘The Wine Menagerie’ form a similar critique, with the latter brought to bear on the poem through excisions and rearrangements.