Marianne Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the house of her grandfather, a Presbyterian minister. She never knew her father, who had suffered a breakdown before she was born. She was raised by her mother, Mary, and lived with her for nearly all of Mary’s life, in a close and formidable partnership. Mary read every poem Marianne wrote.

After Bryn Mawr College, Moore taught typing, bookkeeping and commercial law at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, where one of her students was the great athlete Jim Thorpe. In 1918 she and her mother moved to New York, first to Greenwich Village and later to Brooklyn, where Moore worked as an assistant at a branch of the New York Public Library.

Her poems were like no one else’s. They are made of careful observation, quotations from newspapers, guidebooks and sermons, and syllable counts so exact that the lines form patterns on the page. Many are about animals: the pangolin, the jerboa, the frigate pelican, the paper nautilus. Her friend the poet H.D. and H.D.’s companion, Bryher, published Moore’s first book in London in 1921 without asking her first. Her most famous poem, “Poetry,” begins, “I, too, dislike it,” and argues for poems that are “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Late in life she cut it down to three lines.

From 1925 to 1929 she edited The Dial, then the most important literary magazine in America, where she published and encouraged many younger writers. Her Collected Poems (1951) won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize.

In old age she became a public figure, instantly recognizable in her tricorne hat and black cape. She was a passionate baseball fan, first of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and in 1968 she threw out the first pitch of the season at Yankee Stadium. And in 1955, the Ford Motor Company asked her to suggest a name for a new car. She sent them a series of wonderful ones, including “Utopian Turtletop” and “Mongoose Civique.” Ford called it the Edsel.