SOURCE: Garrigue, Jean. Marianne Moore. St. Paul: University of Minnesota, 1965, 48 p.

In the following essay, Garrigue provides an assessment of the poetry and career of Marianne Moore.

We know this poet by her voice, by her “astonishing invention in a single mode,” by her delicate, taxing technique; we know her for the “relentless accuracy” of her eye.

This is Marianne Moore, ironist, moralist, fantasist.

She was born in 1887 in St. Louis, Missouri, and has written of herself that she is a Presbyterian and was brought up in the home of her grandfather, the Reverend John R. Warner, who was for twenty-seven years the pastor of Kirkwood Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, that her brother was a chaplain in the Navy for forty and more years, and that the books to which she has had access have been, on the whole, serious.

Of her father, John Milton Moore, she...