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...