Moore disliked enigmas and disliked being thought enigmatic; she wanted to be lucid without sacrificing implication. The deliberate (as it seemed) hermeticism of some modern verse repelled her…. The early poems visibly skirt [the dangers of both excessive emotion and excessive factuality], but are happily preserved from both by their brio and their scornful energy. They are the work of a girl who knows what she likes, and knows even more what she dislikes. (pp. 61-2)

Moore's asperity in the poems written in her twenties and early thirties shows the revengeful impatience of one not suffering fools gladly. The poems display a whole gallery of self-incriminating fools—self-important, illiterate, unimaginative, sentimental, defensive, pompous, cruel. For each of the fools, a portrait…. These deadly anatomies, so impossible in well-bred life, are unsparingly uttered in print: Moore tells all her fools to their faces exactly what she thinks of them, finding her own annihilating metaphor for each one. Hers is the aggression of the silent, well-brought-up girl who thinks up mute rejoinders during every parlor conversation. (pp. 62-3)

[The] early poems, one senses, were written entirely to please herself, an odd girl in her twenties, turning from her dissections to her verses…. Her repudiation of [the "imagist" label] is just, as is her repudiation of the label "syllabic verse": "I do not know what syllabic verse is. I find no appropriate application for it"—and yet she has so often been described as a poet deriving from Imagism who writes in syllabic verse that the discrepancy between the common view and her own begs some explanation…. The rhythm of the stanza and the rhythm of the sentence impelled the poem; the syllabic count imposed some strictness on her procedure, but even in the non-syllabic poems, written in a species of free verse, her rhythms are instantly recognizable. Whatever small formalities she employed—her internal rhymes, her "light" rhymes, her syllable counts—did not define her practice or her originality. (pp. 64-5)

[The] Imagist power, such as it was—and it now can be seen to have been, in itself, weak—was photographic, mimetic, perceptual. Moore's early poetry, by contrast, takes as its chief subject states of the soul, not external "reality."… If in attempting to describe the souls of people who are oppressive like streamrollers, or modestly contractile like snails, or patient and enduring like elephants she needed metaphor, she was not in that need unusual…. [Surely,] though these images may be drawn from a private or restricted code book, they are not the issue of an Imagist creed.

They come, rather, from religious usage, as in illustrations of the deadly sins the lustful man sits on a goat and the glutton on a pig. The difference between Moore and the emblem-writers is that she has a much more lively interest than they in real pigs and peacocks; she takes, so to speak, the two sides of the emblem equally seriously….

There is no doubt that some of the early poems on animals or objects are also, even principally, about human beings. The one on the elephant is, or ought to be taken as, a poem about Moore herself—her most personal and "lyric" poem, one that she suppressed when compiling the Complete Poems. (p. 66)

["Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight"] is agitated by all of Moore's central concerns: the nature of power, the nature of identity, the impassivity of selfhood, the wounds of circumstance, the failures of human perception. "I see and I hear," muses the poet-elephant, who accuses man, seen through his eyes, of self-delusion, of having eyes and seeing not, of having ears and hearing not…. Moore was perfectly and inhumanly removed, at such a moment, from her fellow human beings. The removal—her superior amusement and denigration—was the source of her virgin strength. (p. 67)

[The unsentimental poems of her 1921 publication Poems] have always at least one abyss hiding in their neat parterres, some crevasse down which the unwary reader could slip. Moore's most characteristic gesture is a throwaway remark revealing whole horizons explored and rejected. If she calls Greece "the nest of modified illusions," she is asking us to have illusions and to have—stunning word—"modified" them. It is almost the word of a seamstress. To tailor an illusion is already a cataclysmic fall from innocence, but the notion is so innocently slipped in that the careless eye skids over it. It has been said that America is barren because it has no ruins; for Moore it is deficient because it has "no proof readers, no silkworms, no digressions." What is this discontented patriotism that longs for a literate page, a natural fabric, an idiosyncratic learning, and sickens and dies for the lack of them? Can it be the same patriotism that turns on itself and insists that fineness must exist in America? ("It has never been confined to one locality.") Moore's crevasses are for herself, not her audience…. Moore's rebellious outspokenness about herself and others, no matter how disciplined by the angular geometry of her verse, is the chief ornament of the early volumes. (pp. 68-9)

Moore's first ethical impulse was, we might say, an Aristotelian one, interested in the taxonomy of the virtues and vices. The early poems served to set her mind in order about what was virtue, what vice—a question that was for her almost indistinguishable from what was art, what ugliness. (p. 69)

[The distrust of emotion resulting from Moore's animal poetry] made her increasingly submissive to fact; her isolation made her more dependent on books; and the war caused her flexible ethical meditations to rigidify into moral outcries. Animals became an end in themselves, as human beings became more remote or more repellent. The disjunction between her mind and her heart is reflected in two statements made in the same interview (she was then approaching eighty): the first was that now, as always, the "forces which result in poetry" are "irrepressible emotion, joy, grief, desperation, triumph"; the second was that "every day it is borne in on us that we need rigor—better governance of the emotions." To govern the irrepressible is the paradoxical aim of all art, but her governance seems to have become an almost habitual censorship. When the pain of the irrepressible emotion and the pain of governance remain intertwined in the poems, the poetry weighs on us as it did on her. Conversely, when the emotion is a wholly innocent one—usually, in her case, a visual emotion (her religious upbringing seems not to have repressed sight and hearing)—her pure joy brings her closer than any other American poet to the Whitman of Manhattan and the sea. (p. 70)

It is not sentimental, I hope, to see her great, if confined, poem "Marriage" as her most nearly perfect union of the pain of feeling and the pain of governance. The Marvellian theme that paradise was Paradise only when Adam was there alone is touched on in the early poem "In the Days of Prismatic Color," which, after beginning in an airy, happy, rainbow-hued atmosphere, quickly darkens into a miserable debate with itself about the value of complexity, darkness, and sophistication. By the time of "Marriage," complexity has inexorably entered, as prelapsarian radiance is intruded on by the worldly cynicism of Bacon and then by Moore's own expostulating humor…. (p. 71)

The poem vacillates between thinking that marriage should be the most natural, easy, and companionable of arrangements and thinking it a dangerous enterprise: "men have power/and sometimes one is made to feel it." Both the sweetnesses and the hatreds of marriage enter the poem, which sees both the propriety of human union and its competing narcissistic destructions…. In herself she clearly did not find that simplicity of temper, as she calls it, which sees in homely rules a natural order of things that it easily obeys. (p. 72)

Many of the early poems, all brilliant, remain relatively unpossessed by readers in part because of their peculiar titles, which have nothing to do with their subjects…. Emotionally speaking, ["An Octopus"]—written about Mount Rainier, and full of compressed detail—may be taken as a poem about America and its nature and its unclassical art, and as a poem about a life journey; while ["The Fish"] reproduces the sliding motions of the sea creatures, the brutal pressure of the water, and the stolid endurance of the cliff, all intermixed in what one might feel to be a transcription of conflicting motions of the nervous system transliterated into earthly symbols. (pp. 72-3)

In the last major poetic effort of her life, Moore spent a decade translating the fables of La Fontaine. Perhaps a flagging of her own inner energies made such a work proper, but the constraints of sense invaded her elegant rhythms and made the translations, in spite of many felicities of phrase, finally unsatisfying as poems by Moore. When they first appeared, Howard Nemerov called them "very jittery as to the meter." Not a great deal should be claimed for them, not even for Moore's affinities with La Fontaine: he was less soulful than she, and his animals have an existence not so much biological or visual as fabular. He was not a naturalist; Moore was. (p. 73)