One might sort Miss Moore's poems into those that observe, meditate, and enact in this way, the rigorous pattern a dimension of meditation and enactment; those that soliloquize, like "A Grave" or "New York," and have as their center of gravity therefore the speaker's probity and occasional tartness; and those (rather frequent of late) that incite, that set themselves to exact, appropriate feelings about something public. For her public occasions Miss Moore seems a little dependent on the newspapers; "Carnegie Hall: Rescued" has her inimitable texture, but the sentiment of the poem is extrinsic to that texture. The sentiment is that of The New York Times and The New Yorker, public relief, public gratitude; yes, public platitude. One need not quarrel with the sentiments to find the poems dedicated to them unlucky. The poems simply participate, with busy flutter and stir of unexpected particulars, in what right-thinking people would, presumably, think without their aid. And the fastidiousness that chopped whole sequences of stanzas out of "The Steeple-Jack" and "The Frigate Pelican" and "Nine Nectarines" because irritated by minute inadequacies is now willing out of public spirit to glue mannerism over cliché…. (pp. 163-64)
Mannerism, agreeable mannerism, is what the newcomer is likely to suppose Miss Moore chiefly offers, if the Reader is to be his introduction. A manner offers pleasures of its own; but whether a reader so introduced is likely to notice, when he turns back to "The Buffalo" or "The Pangolin," anything but the idiosyncratically close observation, set into an unaccountably rigorous stanza, is open to question. Such poems were receiving too casual an attention even before The New Yorker, by developing Miss Moore as a "personality," left everyone with so misleading a clue.
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