[Marianne Moore's] is a talent which diminishes the tomtoming on the hollow men of a wasteland to an irrelevant pitter-patter. Nothing is hollow or waste to the imagination of Marianne Moore. (p. 112)

A statement she would defend, I think, is that man essentially is very much like the other animals—or a ship coming in from the sea—or an empty snail-shell: but there's not much use saying a thing like that unless you can prove it.

Therefore Miss Moore has taken recourse to the mathematics of art. Picasso does no different: a portrait is a stratagem singularly related to a movement among the means of the craft. By making these operative, relationships become self-apparent—the animal lives with a human certainty. This is strangely worshipful. Nor does one always know against what one is defending oneself. (pp. 112-13)

I don't think there is a better poet writing...