In his trademark, graceful prose, Douglas Crase makes the following comment in his review of The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, ‘To regard the prose as primarily a concordance, however, or a life, would be to imply that a poet’s prose is only ancillary to the poetry’. What is so typical of Crase’s prose is not simply the comment as a whole, which we can come back to, but the use of the word ‘concordance’, coupled as it is with ‘life’ and ‘ancillary’. Crase, who spent his professional life as a speech writer, knows exactly what it means to put such vocabulary into the air, as it were. Although poets as a breed might be seen as choosing their words with care, there is something utterly exquisite about the precision of the words I’ve picked out above. For one thing, to suggest that the poet’s prose is a concordance or, even, a life, and yet is ancillary is to make a rather strange claim. It is to state that the prose is a kind of reference to themes in the poems, and, almost, a life that the poetry is not. Life, here, is ‘ancillary’, additional or extra to the poems. But the sentence actually tells us that the prose is none of these things, or rather that the prose and the poetry are, as Crase comments just below this, ‘not even separable. Criticism, [Moore] wrote, inspires creation.’ This Crase follows up with ‘No surprise, then, to find it as recalcitrant as the poetry.’

Carl Phillips’s essays have often dealt with that sense of ...