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 the heart wears." (p. 133)

She is free to reconstruct the unfamiliar, to supply, with uncanny accuracies, the living environment of the strange and the faraway, because she has looked so discerningly at what is present. (p. 134)

Whatever she looks at, whether actually or in the pages of a book, she is able to see alive and can conjure up its distinctive motion. (p. 135)

This physical correspondence is carried out in the circularities, the risings and fallings of the rhythm. We are simultaneously in the position of looking at a merry-go-round and riding it. (pp. 135-36)

It is the precision of her imagination that earns Marianne Moore such varieties of freedom. Her refinements of thought and of style are always in the direction of greater, rather than less, inclusiveness. (p. 137)

Marianne Moore is able to use material hitherto considered inappropriate to poetry. The ordinary details of living are revealed in a new way…. [Marianne Moore feels that] poetry is in the use that is made of experience. It is not the experience itself; nor does it consist in a grading of experiences: "this is a fit subject; that is not." All are available, whether eccentric, like an upside-down bat, or common to all, like a bat foraging; deliberate or impulsive; of animal or human origin; special to the point of esoteric, or general to the point of abstract. (pp. 137-38)

[We] are in possession of a definition of poetry that satisfies the bigotries of neither "conservatism" nor "modernism."… [She] subscribes to the formal distinction of poetry as "verse," distinguished from "prose" by technical considerations of form. (pp. 138-39)