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)
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