Known for her precise and measured observations of insects and animals, an often ironic tone, and idiosyncratic form, Marianne Craig Moore offered modern poetry a compelling alternative to T. S. Eliot's fragmented universe of archaic allusions, William Carlos Williams's speech-based poetics, and Wallace Stevens's flowery meditations on reality and the imagination. A naturalist as much as a poet, Moore wrote poetry with a painter's eye, packing an entire world of meaning into a single image. Her quirky rhyme schemes, odd stanzaic patterns, and use of unconventional syllabic patterns caused some critics to ask if she was even a poet. Moore often asked the same question.

Moore was born in 1887 in Kirkwood, Missouri, to John Milton Moore, a construction engineer, and Mary Warner. Her parents separated before she was born and Marianne never saw her father, who was institutionalized after a nervous breakdown. She grew up in...