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: that is her situation…. Its etiology needs some looking into. (p. 92)

Her poems are not for the voice; she sensed this in reading them badly. In response to a question, she once said that she wrote them for people to look at. Moreover, one cannot imagine them handwritten…. Miss Moore's cats, her fish, her pangolins and ostriches exist on the page in tension between the mechanisms of print and the presence of a person behind those mechanisms. Handwriting flows with the voice, and here the voice is as synthetic as the cat, not something an elocutionist can modulate. The words on these pages are little regular blocks, set apart by spaces, and referrable less to the voice than to the click of the keys and the ratcheting of the carriage.

The stanzas lie on the page, one below another, in little intricate grids of visual symmetry, the left margin indented according to complex rules which govern the setting of tabulator stops. The lines obey no rhythmic system the ear can apprehend. We learn that there is a system not by listening but by counting syllables, and we find that the words are fixed within a grid of numerical rules. (pp. 98-9)

Marianne Moore's subjects—her fields of preoccupation, rather—have these two notable characteristics among others, that they are self-sufficient systems of energy, and that they can appropriate, without hostility, almost anything that comes near. They affirm, without saying anything, that "In This Age of Hard Trying, Nonchalance is Good," and that "There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious / fastidiousness." They are frequently animals; they feed and sleep and hunt and play; they are graceful without taking pride in their grace. They exemplify the qualities of the poems in which they are found.

Yes, they do; yes, it is striking, this pervasive singleness (though never obvious: nothing is obvious here). The singleness helps explain why she was able to make a revolutionary discovery, perhaps without ever knowing what it was. She resembles Columbus, whose mind was on something other than opening new worlds, and died supposing he had shown how to sail to China. For the language flattened, the language exhibited, the language staunchly condensing information while frisking in enjoyment of its release from the obligation to do no more than inform: these are the elements of a twentieth-century American poetic, a pivotal discovery of our age. And it seems to have been Marianne Moore's discovery, for [William Carlos] Williams, who also discovered it and extended it beyond the reach of her temperament, seems to have discovered it with the aid of her poems. A woman who was never convinced she was writing poems …; she and a frantically busy physician who kept a typewriter screwed to a hinged leaf of his consulting-room desk, to be banged up into typing position between patients: not "poets," not professionals of the word, save for their passion: they were the inventors of an American poetry. The fact is instructive.

Extracting its instruction, we may begin with her avowed hostility to the poetic. We had better not dismiss this as whimsy; it was heuristic.

"I, too, dislike it," she wrote of something called "Poetry." ("I, too"? In alliance with whom? The public? Well, sensible people, presumably.) (pp. 105-06)

She did indeed dislike poetry, she used emphatically to insist. One time, citing

                     No man may him hyde
                     From Deth holow-eyed,

she made a little inventory of dislikes:

I dislike the reversed order of words; don't like to be impeded by an unnecessary capital at the beginning of every line; I don't like, here, the meaning; the cadence coming close to being the sole reason for all that follows, the accent on "holow" rather than on "eyed," so firmly placed that the most willful reader cannot misplace it….

This is to reject, well, very much. If more careful in its discriminations than Williams' shoving aside of "Europe—the past," it has a comparable thrust. Nevertheless, reading poetry without enchantment, "one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine": a place, as she went on to say in 1919, for "real toads." That's what poetry is, a place; not a deed but a location. "A kind of collection of flies in amber," Miss Moore was to call her own poetry, "if not a cabinet of fossils." (p. 108)

Miss Moore's modest effort was not to deflect "poetry" or to destroy it, but to ignore it: that is to say, ignore its rituals. She made up difficult rules of her own, some of which as they evolved remained in force (end-stopped lines for choice, and after 1929, rhyme), while others—the specific syllable grid, the density and audibility of the rhymes—hold good only for the duration of the poem in hand. It's a homemade art, like the sampler wrought in cross-stitch. Sometimes it will allow the conjunction between rule and theme to appear almost naïvely…. (pp. 109-10)

Like [Wallace] Stevens', hers is a poetry for one voice; like Stevens', it works by surface complication, with little variety of feeling. Unlike Stevens', it has no traffic—has never had any at all—with the cadences of the Grand Style, with Tradition, but works by a principle exclusively its own, the witty transit through minute predilections. Unlike Stevens' poetry, finally, hers deteriorates, as it were, through insufficient grasp of its own principles. Having been held together by a temperament, it grows dilute as the temperament grows more accommodating. And yet it is a turning point, as Stevens' is not. When American verse was looking for a way to cope with the perceived world's multifarious otherness, it was Marianne Moore's best work that was decisive.

Causing her best poems to enact with such rigor the moral virtues they celebrate, Miss Moore skirted the tradition of the dandy, whose life was a controlled thing and whose norms of conduct were stylistic. Dandyism's principal modern celebrant was Ernest Hemingway, whose bullfights and lion-hunts were aesthetic gestures and whose descriptions of clear water running over stones were moral achievements. (pp. 113-14)

But Hemingway's conception of style as the criterion of life contains one element totally alien to any poetic effect of Marianne Moore's: self-appreciation. To take satisfaction in one's achievements, and to undertake like achievements in quest of more of that satisfaction—this is the dual temptation by which such a poetic is beset; and the theme of many poems of Miss Moore is precisely the duty to resist it. (p. 114)

Some of the formal obstacles Marianne Moore laid across the assertions of her sentences were to help her avoid seeming to imply that a cat or a fish has never really been looked at before. Their presence raises, however, a further problem: how to avoid asserting that one has had the dexterity to overcome formal obstacles. It is here that her preoccupation with otherness helps.

For those autonomous envelopes of energy she so admired are other, as Nature for Wordsworth never was. Where Hemingway imitated bullfighters, she was content to admire ballplayers. Her cats, pangolins, jerboas, elephants are not beings she half-perceives and half-creates. Their accomplishments are wholly their own. It is not the poet who notes that the jerboa is sand-colored, but the jerboa that "honours the sand by assuming its colour." Similarly, it is the jerboa that has discovered a flute rhythm for itself, "by fifths and sevenths, / in leaps of two lengths," and to play the flageolet in its presence is not our ingenuity but our obligation. "Its leaps should be set / to the flageolet." So when, as normally, we find that the poem is itself enacting the virtues it discerns in its subject, we are not to say that it is commenting on its own aesthetic, as in Hemingway's celebrations of the way one works close to the bull; rather that its aesthetic is an offering to the virtuosity of the brisk little creature that changes pace so deftly, and direction so deftly, and keeps intent, and keeps alert, and both offers and refrains from flaunting its agility.

This works best with animals, because they don't know their own virtuosity, and with athletes because at decisive moments they haven't time for self-appreciation, there being a ball to catch that won't wait. ("I could of caught it with a pair of pliers," said the exuberant outfielder, but that was afterward.) That is why Miss Moore's best poems are unpeopled save by glimpsed exemplars of verbal or synaptic dexterity. It is also why, as she admitted to her system other people's values, a poetic misfortune for which her sense of wartime obligations may be in part blamed, she relaxed and blurred her normal deftness and neatness, aware of the inappropriateness of seeming crisp. To be crisp even in praise of people's excellence is to make oneself a little the proprietor of their virtue; one senses that she sensed that to be improper.

At her best, she was other from us, and her subjects other from her, and saying with the elephant, "I do these/things which I do, which please / no one but myself," she was fulfilling a nature of her own. (pp. 116-17)