A tour of England and France provided Moore with inspiration from art and architecture she found at museums and Victor Hugo's residence. To support a publishing career, she completed a year's business training at Carlisle Commercial College. She taught math, typing, commercial law, and shorthand at Carlisle's U.S. Industrial Indian School for four and a half years while publishing "Pouters and Fantails" in Poetry, "To a Man Working His Way Through the Crowd" and "Poetry" in Others, and "To the Soul of Progress" in The Egoist. Her tentative literary beginnings earned the support of poets H. D., Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.
After moving with her mother to Chatham, New Jersey, then to Greenwich Village, New York, Moore tutored privately while working part-time as assistant librarian at the Hudson Park Public Library from 1918 to 1925. During this era, she established literary friendships with Robert McAlmon and Winifred Ellerman, who published a Moore collection, Poems (1921), in London without her knowledge. A well-received beginning, Poems was issued in the United States as Observations (1924), winning an award from The Dial, which Moore edited from 1925 to 1929. Additional submissions to The Egoist established her reputation for imagist modern poetry. She ceased writing for three years, then earned the 1932 Helen Haire Levinson Prize and the 1935 Ernest Hartsock Memorial Prize for Selected Poems (1935).
