Moore's friendships with poets Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens placed her at the heart of the era's literary achievement, which color her essays later collected in Pedilections (1955), an examination of the artistry of poets Ezra Pound and Louise Bogan and dancer Anna Pavlova. In the introduction to Selected Poems, T. S. Eliot epitomized Moore's writing as durable and continued to laud and promote her verse for thirty years. She maintained a steady output with The Pangolin and Other Verse (1936), What Are Years (1941), and Nevertheless (1944), her most emotionally charged anthology.
Following the death of her mother in 1947, Moore worked for seven years translating the fables of Jean de La Fontaine. A significant addition in her canon, Collected Poems (1951), won a National Book award, Bollingen Prize, and Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She issued five more volumes — Like a Bulwark (1956), O To Be a Dragon (1959), The Arctic Ox (1964), Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite Steel, and Other Topics (1966), and A Marianne Moore Reader (1961), a compendium of poetry, prose, and an interview — and concluded her verse contributions at age 81 with The Complete Poems (1967). In addition, in 1962, she produced a stage version of Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee and revised Charles Perrault's fairy tales (1963).
Moore died on February 5, 1972, at her Brooklyn home, and was memorialized at the nearby Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church.
