Gardens and Toads Or, Milton - Another Fly in Marianne Moore's Amber?

Arts and Grafts: Marianne Moore’s Poetry and the Culture of Exception

“…"Imaginary gardens with real toads in them" is no exception to the rule: while in the longer version reproduced in Moore's endnotes to the Complete Poems, the phrase is framed by quotation marks, therefore clearly marking the words as borrowed, the punctuation is actually absent from earlier editions of the text (including the one quoted above). 8 In such cases, readers can only intuit the foreign provenance of the fragment: they might then identify a potential echo to previously quoted excerpts ("business documents and school-books," borrowed from Tolstoy, and "literalists of the imagination," a distorted version of Yeats' qualification of Blake as "a too realist of the imagination" mentioned in Moore's endnotes 9 ), but they might also sense the fainter redolences from Williams' "Romance Moderne" 10 and Milton's Paradise Lost, 11 or recognize a hybridized version of such fairy tales as "The Frog Prince", "Cinderella" or "Rapunzel" for example.…”