[Mr. T. S. Eliot] is a major voyager on one stream of modernity with which we have a good acquaintance, but it is not the pellucid stream that Miss Moore is embarked upon.

I should wonder if Mr. Eliot does not do Miss Moore a disservice when he raises the question of the "greatness" of her work, even though he raises it provisionally as one to be answered finally by the judgment of generations later than her own generation. Greatness is something for the kind of poetry in which he practices, perhaps, but it would seem beyond the intention of her kind, and so foreign to it that if I am not mistaken she would be the first to repel the idea. For this reason: that in our judgment of personages and their accomplishments we attribute greatness to those that take their impulse out of more primitive or heroic occasions than she is concerned with.

Let us compare her kind of human interest with that, for example, of Marcus Cato, the countryman who had come into Rome and was proceeding to reform the society of the capital…. [We feel that Miss Moore] accepts her own society scarcely more than Cato accepted his. But her effort is a subtler one, and it is not delivered in the public forum, nor pitched on the plane of the folk morality and the laws.

Chiefly, she makes public in her verse the exempla of rightness or of beauty that have hit her fastidious taste. They are remarkably various. Sometimes they are the obscurer members of the animal kingdom; or rather, they are that as likely as not, and so often that we must conceive her in part as a curious naturalist in the succession of Pliny the Elder. Or they may be objects in the human sort, such as exhibit themselves in the regions of men, the classes, and the trades; or the works of men, such as the objects of art and the paraphernalia of fine living, including the precision instruments—for high thinking in Miss Moore's understanding of things goes with fine properties…. But these very special objects she is content merely to cite in their integrity as beautiful objects, or to furnish with a little commentary in the lightest of accents. This "merely," however, may be misleading. As beautiful objects they are conspicuously in their duty, for they impart the sense not only of the generous dispensations of prodigious nature, but of that responsive economic intelligence which is of the essence of being human, the very thing that common prudential discourse if fond of rendering with its gross precepts and its heavy emphases.

For these registrations of her world she has suitably delicate antennae. They reach to the limits of what is tangible, and beyond these they project her imaginatively and very surely into the world of her insatiable reading. But such is her fidelity that she is not afraid of the sheer and homely natural detail, as if she trusted that poetic illumination presently would rise even out of nature, even out of prose; as it does.

She is usually successful with her effects. But they are minor not major effects, in the degree of their remoteness from the primitive range of interest; it takes many of them to yield the full dimensions of this poet…. [She is much more] than merely the mistress of a casual elegance, such as she may well have seemed to our first impression. (pp. 102-03)

Miss Moore's rhymes if not her iambics must be very nearly the most unobtrusive to be found in English verse. She always pairs off her rhyming lines by equal indentation, and it is likely that otherwise the rhyme might escape even the good reader's attention. If it be claimed that in this light way of rhyming she is merely being evasive—as if wanting her poetry to be in the corpus of standard style but not really of it—it may be replied that she rather is being witty, as if to mock the compulsiveness of rhyming when it does not affect her own freedom. (pp. 105-06)