The career of Marianne Moore … provides us with a perfect example of the way a poet's fame may come in time to obscure the essential quality of the poetry upon which it is ostensibly based. The reputation achieved by this extraordinary poet in the later years of her life, when she was finally showered with literary honors and assumed the position of a cultural celebrity, was often grotesquely at odds with the very stringent and unyielding vision of her best writing. For the media that found her an appealing subject in those years, and thus for the many people who first came to know of her through the media, she was something that she had never been for her contemporaries: the very archetype of the quaint literary spinster….

Precisely what moved the elderly Marianne Moore to encourage this misperception—for there is no question that she lent herself...