Perhaps the most recognized images of Marianne Moore (1887–1972) are as poetry’s elder statesman in a tricorn hat, appearing with Joe Louis on the cover of Esquire magazine or lobbing out the first ball at a Yankees series opener. Such unlikely photo-ops capture the later celebrity enjoyed by the poet, but little of her renowned decorum and restraint (though idiosyncrasy had long been a hallmark of her poems). Currently on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “As They Were: 1900–1929” are two portraits of Moore done by artists of the poet’s acquaintance from New York art circles in the early 1920s. The likenesses, an ostrich-necked bust of Miss Moore by French-American sculptor Gaston Lachaise and a pencil sketch by William Zorach of a braid-bedecked Marianne decorously posed, give us the poet in her youth. That Moore represents only one of several poets and writers pictured in the Met’s exhibition—Charles Demuth’s tribute to William Carlos Williams, The Figure Five in Gold, and Jo Davidson’s famous bronze of Gertrude Stein in a sumolike squat are also included—suggests a kinship between writers and artists of the period that is at the heart of Linda Leavell’s new study, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts.

According to Professor Leavell, Moore modeled for Lachaise and for Zorach and his wife, Marguerite, in early 1925, the year after Observations, the first U.S. edition of her poems, appeared. The book received The Dialaward, and in a matter of months its