Several years ago, rummaging through the archives of the Academy of American Poets, I came upon a box labeled “Ballots 1950” — the record of the secret vote by the chancellors the year the Academy’s prestigious fellowship was awarded to E.E. Cummings, catapulting him into renown . The voting process is a black box — no one outside the Academy ever finds out who else is in the running and by how much the winner wins. Leafing through the ballots, one other name appeared over and over, so much so that I was impelled to count. Marianne Moore had lost by one vote, never knowing how close she had come. It would be many more years until, at 77, she was finally awarded the fellowship. Long before that, before she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award ( sharing a table with Rachel Carson at the ceremony), Moore had set down her views on writing in a series of essays later collected in the out-of-print gem Predilections ( public library ).…