The enchanting and enchanted mind defines imagination. And it is her imagination that defines the mind of Marianne Moore; an imagination articulated by fact….

[The title of her book, Observations, is symbolic of] her point of departure. Active rather than contemplative, observation is for her a motion of the mind corresponding to what is being observed. Wherever our attention dwells in her poems, we are made aware of exquisite correspondences. (p. 131)

Through art such as [Marianne Moore's], with its demands upon the attention of the whole person, we are restored, not to a state of nature, but to that totality of experience which is the sign of organic development. It is a reintegration on a higher level of consciousness, to which the intervening specialization, the "loss of innocence," has contributed….

Marianne Moore's is not a poetry of nostalgic return. It "tears off the veil," the "temptation," the "mist...