In the following essay, Garrigue provides an assessment of the poetry and career of Marianne Moore.

In the following essay, Engel offers a critical overview of the poetry produced by Moore from the late 1950s through the publication of “Prevalent at One Time” in the fall of 1970, the last of her verse to appear during her lifetime.

In the following essay, Holley provides an overview of poems written during the first several years of Moore's post-college career.

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.

In the following essay, Hicok explores “Bryn Mawr's crucial significance to [Moore's development as a poet.”]

In the following essay, Holley discusses the poems Moore published during her years at Bryn Mawr College, all of which appeared in the campus magazines Tipyn O'Bob and The Lantern.

Throughout my study of Marianne Moore's poetry I have found myself coming back again and again to two particularly intriguing questions that are intimately bound up with all the questions of style and mystery, confusions and morality, which the figure of Marianne Moore poses and persuades us to care about. One is her answer to her own question, "What is more precise than precision?" to which she answers, "Illusion." The other is her question, asked in the late poem "...

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.

In the following essay, Heuving explores the influence of gender on Moore's voice and identity as a literary figure among predominantly male peers.

In the following essay, Erickson offers an introduction to Moore's poetry, focusing in particular on a sense of magic and imagination inherent in the poet's work.

In the following essay, Merrin offers a critical assessment of Moore's poem, “A Grave.”

In the following essay, McMahon examines two poems which offer critical views of sex and matrimony, Marianne Moore's "Marriage" and Sandra McPherson's "Streamers. "

In Miss Moore's work inverted commas are made to perform significantly and notably and with a fresh nicety which is part of her contribution to the language. Besides the normal uses to determine quotation or to indicate a special or ironic sense in the material enclosed or as a kind of minor italicization, they are used as boundaries for units of association which cannot be expressed by grammar and syntax. They are used sometimes to impale their contents for close examination, sometimes to take their...

Miss Moore's prose-seeming, matter-of-factly rhythmed syllabic verse, the odd look most of her poems have on the page (their unusual stanzaic patterns, their words divided at the ends of lines, give many of them a consciously, sometimes misleadingly experimental or modernist look), their almost ostentatious lack of transitions and explanations, the absence of romance and rhetoric, of acceptedly Poetic airs and properties, did most to keep conservative readers from liking her poetry. Her restraint, he...

Miss Moore's poems deal in many separate acts of attention, all close-up; optical puns, seen by snapshot, in a poetic normally governed by the eye, sometimes by the ears and fingers, ultimately by the moral sense. It is the poetic of the solitary observer, for whose situation the meaning of a word like "moral" needs redefining: her special move in the situation where [she is] … confronted by a world that does not speak and seems to want describing. Man confronted by brute nature:...

Moore disliked enigmas and disliked being thought enigmatic; she wanted to be lucid without sacrificing implication. The deliberate (as it seemed) hermeticism of some modern verse repelled her…. The early poems visibly skirt [the dangers of both excessive emotion and excessive factuality], but are happily preserved from both by their brio and their scornful energy. They are the work of a girl who knows what she likes, and knows even more what she dislikes. (pp. 61-2) Moore's asperity in the po...

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 he...

The first aspect in which Miss Moore's poetry is likely to strike the reader is that of minute detail rather than that of emotional unity. The gift for detailed observation, for finding the exact words for some experience of the eye, is liable to disperse the attention of the relaxed reader…. But the detail has always its service to perform to the whole. The similes are there for use; as the musselshell "opening and shutting itself like an injured fan" (where injured has an ambig...

[Mr. T. S. Eliot] is a major voyager on one stream of modernity with which we have a good acquaintance, but it is not the pellucid stream that Miss Moore is embarked upon. I should wonder if Mr. Eliot does not do Miss Moore a disservice when he raises the question of the "greatness" of her work, even though he raises it provisionally as one to be answered finally by the judgment of generations later than her own generation. Greatness is something for the kind of poetry in which he practices, p...

Unlike Wallace Stevens who is known to have quoted lines of Chinese poetry in his writing … Marianne Moore never makes direct references to or gives quotations of classical Chinese poetry in her work…. But, while she is reticent about Chinese poetry, she alludes to Chinese objets d'art in many of her poems…. Miss Moore likens precision in writing to the skill of Chinese lacquer carving in her "Bowls."… With a "Chinese / 'passion for the particul...

Impressionist critics, because they have attributed to Miss Moore many of their own manias and virtues, have left her actual virtue—her "secret"—untouched. She belongs to a lineage against which the impressionist and the "modernist" have for so long rebelled that by now they are forgetful that it ever existed. In Miss Moore two traditions that modernism tends to ignore, meet. She is, on the one hand, a nearly pure example of that inquisitive, receptive kind of civil...

As we read ["The Steeple-Jack," in Collected Poems,] we begin to understand that we are not being offered a piece of mere realism: we are participating in the play of imagination over a time and a place. Miss Moore gives us, you will notice, not only the look of things but their sound, smell, and movement; she is rendering her material, as all artists must, through the senses. At the same time her with is in operation; the tone of the poem is light, almost gay, but with an underlying seriousne...

One might sort Miss Moore's poems into those that observe, meditate, and enact in this way, the rigorous pattern a dimension of meditation and enactment; those that soliloquize, like "A Grave" or "New York," and have as their center of gravity therefore the speaker's probity and occasional tartness; and those (rather frequent of late) that incite, that set themselves to exact, appropriate feelings about something public. For her public occasions Miss Moore seems a l...

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)

I have read Miss Moore's poems a good many times, and always with exactly the same pleasure, and satisfaction in something quite definite and solid. (p. 48) Miss Moore's poems always read very well aloud. That quality is something which no system of scansion can define. It is not separable from the use of words, in Miss Moore's case the conscious and complete appreciation of every word, and in relation to every other word, as it goes by. I think that Those Various Scalpels is an excelle...

Somehow, there is a difference between Miss Moore's bird [the ostrich of "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron'"] and the bird of the Encyclopaedia. This difference grows…. The difference signalizes a transition from one reality to another. It is the reality of Miss Moore that is the individual reality. That of the Encyclopaedia is the reality of isolated fact. Miss Moore's reality is significant. An aesthetic integration is a reality. Nowhere in the poem does she speak ...

[The] soundest account of the general function which Miss Moore's birds and beasts perform in her poetry [is that] they provide the perspective through which to see our (and her) finally human world. Birds and beasts have, of course, performed such general functions in literature from the time of Aesop down to the time of Walt Disney. Miss Moore's use of them is a variant of this general function, for all that Miss Moore's variant is peculiarly her own. It is, however, so peculiarly her...

Miss Moore is unique, and she never argues. Like peace she is indivisible, and of her verse it can be said that nothing resembles it so much as her prose. Not the least of her accomplishments is that her readers, unprovoked to question her definition of poetry, accept its premises implicitly, without supererogatory judgment or comparisons, because it is their pleasure to do so…. One would like to be able, if only as a reciprocal gesture, to describe Miss Moore's peculiar faculties with the sam...

It was like [Moore] to infuse the natural world with a sense of human willfulness, and like her also to derive moral sustenance from nature. She took as heroes—a word she used with unabashed frequency—not only people but a variety of flora and fauna…. In even her earliest poems it is notoriously difficult to glean the influences on her work. The cool and often prosaic language, the interlaced quotations from obscure books, newspaper ads, scientific reports, the use of titles as first li...

It is possible, as I have written, or intended to write elsewhere, to divide poetry into three sorts: (1.) melopoeia, to wit, poetry which moves by its music, whether it be a music in the words or an aptitude for, or suggestion of, accompanying music; (2.) imagism, or poetry wherein the feelings of painting and sculpture are predominant (certain men move in phantasmagoria; the images of their gods, whole countrysides, stretches of hill land and forest, travel with them); and there is, thirdly, logopoeia or ...

Unquestionably there is a poet within the hard, deliberately patterned crust of such soliloquies as Black Earth, Those Various Scalpels, Pedantic Literalist, Reinforcements—almost any of these titles—though a poet too sternly controlled by a stiffly geometrical intellectuality. Miss Moore is in terror of her Pegasus; she knows of what sentimental excesses that unruly steed is capable, and so her ironic mind harnesses down his wings and her iron hand holds a stiff rein. This mood yields prose o...

[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.