Slatin, John.  The Savage's Romance: The Poetry of Marianne Moore.  University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1986.

        Slatin offers a startlingly original reading of Marianne Moore's poetry.  His starting point is the New Critical conception of the poem as a largely self-sufficient artifact.  Because Eliot and Pound quote to be recognized, and desire a certain kind of reader, they meet the self-sufficiency criterion.  Moore, by contrary, quotes to a context-specific purpose, and the quotes she selects are from marginal texts or are marginal quotes from canonical writers.  Slatin divides Moore's career in three ways - biographically, formally, and intellectually.  The intellectual project gets the greatest shrift.  Slatin envisions a genealogy of chiliast thinking - that is, thinking concerned with the establishment of paradise on earth - that runs from the Puritans through Emerson and James to Moore, Williams, Pound, and Eliot.  Moore takes the most active role among the modernists in reshaping American, accounting both for the civic turn marked by the poetry she produced in the 30s and 40s and many of her poems about the natural world, beginning with "The Octopus." 

        Quotation contributes to this project by creating a dependent reader, one whom Moore asks to do more than simply nod in recognition.  The reader must identify the quotation and pay closer attention to the source text than before, and perhaps to gain a new perspective on the source text that stands in a feedback relation to Moore's poem.  In addition, most of Moore's quotations are from prose, destabilizing the boundary between the two.  Both practices of quotation thus complicate the New Critical model, the payoff of which is an understanding of Moore's pervasive tropes of clarity and simplicity.  Poems that are fully self-sufficient are unlikely to participate in the complex and messy process by which truths are arrived at, a process that Moore's poems better resemble.  In step with a decline in quotation over the course of her career, Slatin affirms the consensus of a decline in the quality of Moore's poetry.