SOURCE: Holley, Margaret. “Art as Exact Perception.” In The Poetry of Marianne Moore: A Study in Voice and Value, pp. 1-17. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Holley discusses the poems Moore published during her years at Bryn Mawr College, all of which appeared in the campus magazines Tipyn O'Bob and The Lantern.

Originality, it seems to me, always comes in disguise, as the inevitable precipitated by the courage to be natural.

Marianne Moore

The emergence of an original poetic voice is an uncommon cultural moment, and even traced in retrospect it brings both the brief pleasure of surprise and the more lasting gift of an enriched world. The emergence of Marianne Moore's distinctive voice happened within the first dozen and a half poems that she published, all of them in the two Bryn Mawr College magazines Tipyn O'Bob and its successor The Lantern...