SOURCE: Holley, Margaret. “Nonchalances of the Mind.” In The Poetry of Marianne Moore: A Study in Voice and Value, pp. 133-55. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Holley examines the unique characteristics of Moore's poetry during the decade from the mid-1940s through the mid-1950s, a period during which she received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

During the mid-forties Moore's normally brisk pace of life, which had come to include a fair amount of travel for readings and talks, slowed down to accommodate her mother's advanced age and increasing infirmity. Mrs. Moore was bedridden, and paralysis of a throat muscle made the taking of even the slightest nourishment a difficult and exhausting process, which Marianne tended entirely by herself. “Work is a balm,” she wrote to Hildegarde Watson in August of 1946; “it is the shadowy resistance of...