SOURCE: Heuving, Jeanne. “Moore's ‘High’ Modernism: A Comparison with Her Male Peers.” In Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore, pp. 30-48. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Heuving contrasts specific examples of Moore's poetry with thematically similar poems by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.

Some feminine poets of the present day seem to have grown horns and to like to be frightful and dainty by turns; but distorted propriety suggests effeteness.

—Marianne Moore, Trial Balances (1935)¹

In making works of art, the only legitimate warfare is the inevitable warfare between imagination and medium. …

—Marianne Moore, The Dial (1926)²

Before beginning my discussion of the chronological development of Moore's poetry, I shall substantiate and augment my foregoing claims by comparing specific poems by Moore with poems by Eliot, Pound, and Williams. I maintain that to some extent all...