Moore's critical essay in verse, "Poetry" (1921), plays the devil's advocate by forcing the art to prove itself. Composed in her fastidious "if . . . then" style, the poem names types of response: "Hands that can grasp, eyes / that can dilate, hair that can rise / if it must . . ."
In line 18, she reaches a pivotal point in the discrimination between poetry and prose with the declaration that "One must make a distinction." Like a punctilious grammar teacher, she calls for "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," an image freighted with her expectations of "raw material" that she labels "genuine."
With the graceless pedantry of a schoolmarm, Moore pursues a clear definition of nationality in "England" (1921). In line 26, she halts differentiation between English and French style or Greek from American to pose a rhetorical question: "Why should continents of misapprehension / have to be accounted for by the fact?" As though chastising the slipshod student, she concludes, "To have misapprehended the matter is to have confessed that one has not looked far enough." With crisp geometric finality, she winds down her argument against comparisons with incontrovertibility of logic: "It has never been confined to one locality."
Curiously devoid of humanity, "A Grave" (1924) offers a naturalistic view of the sea as a repository of lost objects and the dead. Moore pictures the "well excavated grave" flanked by firs standing appropriately at attention, "reserved in their contours, saying nothing," like well-disciplined ushers. She pictures the drowned corpse as unheeding to scavenging fish and unintrusive on sailors, who row on the surface with no thought to the skeletal remains below.
