56 
cation and “complexity moreover, that has been committed to 
darkness, instead of granting itself to be the pestilence that it is.” 
But to reach the elements that compose this simplicity, through 
what labyrinths one must work, what traps for the inattentive 
one must evade! 
Her method of forming her poetic conceptions is equally 
interesting as a delimitation. On one side there is “the raw 
material of poetry in all its rawness”—which in Miss Moore’s 
case means records: belles lettres by other writers, government 
reports, magazines, bits of conversation, pictures, curios of one 
sort or another: 
the bat 
holding on upside down or in quest of something to 
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless 
wolf under 
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse 
that feels a flea, the base 
ball fan, the statistician— 
nor is it valid 
to discriminate against “business documents and 
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. 
These things excite Miss Moore. On the other side, there is 
poetry conceived as 
Not brittle but 
Intense—the spectrum, that 
Spectacular and nimble animal the fish, 
Whose scales turn aside the sun’s sword with their polish. 
Miss Moore’s life is spent in taking leaps from one to the other, 
from the record to the poem. She is indeed a “literalist of the 
imagination” setting “real toads” (her facts) into “imaginary 
gardens” (her poems). 
A great poet, however, with his own robust magnitudinous 
experience so close before him, could not be content with records 
as his sources of subject-matter nor could he make a strictly 
esthetic effect his entire aim and end. Of Miss Moore, on the 
other hand, it can be said by altering one of the quotations in one 
of her poems that excitement provides the occasion and self 
protectiveness determines the form. A further distinction to be 
noted is that Miss Moore is a person of learning but not, as has 
been claimed, a scholar, for scholarship is synthetic and ap 
proaches wholeness. 
But leaving these considerations as classifying Miss Moore 
but not describing her work for what it is, one is then free to 
pay homage to her consummate quality within her sphere. It 
is singularly hard to criticise that. Clearly some measure of 
her excellence depends upon her cleanliness with words, the