New Criterion, February 1st, 2004
What most readers remember of Marianne Moore are her beasts--her jerboa, her ostrich, her pangolin. Late in her life, when the brilliant strangeness of her early poems had receded into the mists, she became a fabulous beast herself, poetry's most endearing mascot. In her tricorn hat she looked as if she'd just emerged from a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution; and her befuddled, otherworldly air suggested that poets were absentminded nocturnal creatures, unused to daylight. Her antics made poets, and poetry, seem slightly ridiculous--she threw out the first ball at a Yankees...
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