SOURCE: Engel, Bernard F. “Reaffirmations: Late Period Poems.” Marianne Moore, pp. 113-45. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.

In the following essay, Engel offers a critical overview of the poetry produced by Moore from the late 1950s through the publication of “Prevalent at One Time” in the fall of 1970, the last of her verse to appear during her lifetime.

Publication in 1961 of A Marianne Moore Reader indicated the poet's arrival as a celebrity and as a writer known to a wider public than critics and her fellow modernists. The Reader gives a sampling of her essays and reviews, twenty-three pieces from Collected Poems and twenty-four from Fables, an interview with Donald Hall, all of Like a Bulwark (1956) and O to Be a Dragon (1959), and five “other poems,” four of them recent and one, “Sun,” a reprinting of a poem that first appeared in 1916. The prose includes “The Ford Correspondence” (1956-57), letters...