In the following essay excerpt, Phillips analyzes "The Fish," calling it "both imagist and extra-imagist."

"The Fish" (1918) are among the poems responsible for association of Moore's verse with the seminal movement of the Imagists in the pre-World War I period. She said simply, "I like to describe things."

Moore correctly insisted that she was not one of the Imagists. They, of course, had no monopoly on a tenet essential to their poetry: language "should endeavor to arrest you, and to make you see a physical thing, and prevent your gliding through an abstract process." On that basis alone, however, they could claim Moore's work. She said simply, "I like to describe things."

She was a fine descriptive poet whose keen sense of the visual and shifting images is perfected in "The Fish." The initial perspective is that of an observer looking down into the sea as she...