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Marianne Moore has characterized the emotional posture of her poetry as a “feigned inconsequence of manner.” What is this “feigned inconsequence” and how did it come about? The psychoanalytic critic might look for clues to these questions in the biographical details of Moore's early life and in the language and style of her early, often unpublished, poems of the 1910s.
The overriding biographical influence on Moore's early life was the absence of her father. Moore never knew him, as he left his wife and son before Moore was born. Elizabeth Fishel (1985) has interviewed women extensively about their fathers and finds that a father's absence always has a profound effect on a daughter's life. Henry Biller, in his 1974 study of paternal deprivation, observes that the father is especially important in determining the daughter's conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Such daughters are often shy and timid with men. Alone or with other women, however, these daughters can show aggressive impulses. They also frequently exhibit a heightened creativity, with some encouragement from the mother (Biller, 1974, pp. 106-133). and the daughter's reactions to the absent father are shaped by the mother's attitude toward the father.
Both Marianne Moore's early poetry of the 1910s and her later work are the results of this underlying aggressiveness, heightened creativity, and the influence of her mother. However, in her later poetry she hides behind a mask of feigned inconsequence. She is most famous for a visual style of loosely associated, descriptive phrases. Graphic closeups of animals, fish, and outdoor scenes seem at once myopic and intellectually astute; the careful insertion of philosophical, political, and religious tags implicitly states judgments that sound no more specific than the poem's list of images.