Moss was born and raised in New York City. In 1942, he won Poetry magazine’s Janet Sewall David Award for his own poetry. His first book was published in 1946. He was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1968, and won the National Book Award for poetry for his Selected Poems in 1971. His New Selected Poems (1984) was awarded the Lenore Marshall / Nation Poetry Prize in 1986, a year when he received a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets.

All of Moss’s work possesses a subtle finish. His early and middle poems are end-rhymed and metered, his later work freer—but all of it has a striking regularity of meter and tone. The prevalent themes in Moss’s work involve fundamental issues such as change in life, human relationships, loss, and death. He writes ably of “the difficulty of love, the decay of the body, the passing of time, and the inevitability of death,” all set against “the inexhaustible beauty of the natural world,” as Dana Gioia has observed (102). He is, in fact, a great elegist who can portray attachment and loss with stunning acuity through graphic simplicity and bitter irony.