SOURCE: “Controlled Creatures: Marianne Moore,” in Animals in American Literature, University of Illinois Press, 1983, pp. 97-114.

In the following essay, Allen argues that Marianne Moore associated discipline and modesty with freedom in the animals in her poetry.

Among animals, one has a sense of humor.

—Moore

The apartment in Brooklyn where Marianne Moore lived for thirty-six years was furnished with minuscule mice of carved ivory, pictures of kangaroos, and an ebony sea horse. A box of wild bird feathers graced the home, and the poet was known to offer eagle down and a bluejay claw to one of her guests.¹ Here was a brick with the imprint of a cat's paw brought from Pennsylvania. And in this apartment she kept Tibby, her pet alligator.

Moore's reputation for the exotic elicited a request from the Ford Motor Company for assistance in the “ethereal” matter of naming a 1955 series of...