The Cambridge History of American Literature

Perhaps no major poet of American modernism attained more public recognition in the United States during her/his lifetime than Marianne Moore. The real proof of her high public reputation as a verbal artist in the American scene was the invitation she received in 1955 from the Ford Motor Company to propose an attractive and suggestive name for a new series of cars. A good early illustration of Moore's handling of observation is To a Steam Roller, first published in The Egoist in 1915. Moore singles out an object, in this case an instrument of urban modernization (a steam roller), and turns it into a subject, by addressing the poem to it (to a steam roller) and by including it in the poem (you). Moore's deft handling of English monosyllables and Latinate polysyllables brings to mind her response to her own sly question in a much later poem, Armor's Undermining Modesty.