involves an effort of criticism in the reader which it is not worth his while to make, when so many other alternative possibilities of enjoyment are offered outside of poetry. The first piece obviously takes him nowhere. The second (an insulting address to a man with a steam roller mind, lacking that half of wit which is to leave the whole unsaid) presupposes in the reader a critical attitude toward poetry; assumes that he is willing to part with the decayed flesh of poetry, the deteriorated sentimental part, and to confine himself to the hard, matter-of-fact skeleton of poetic logic. The plain reader may be brought to admire such a poet’s puritanical restraint in resisting the temptation to write an emotional poem of abuse in the style of Mr. Drinkwater, in conveying her meaning as dryly and unfeelingly as a schoolmistress would explain a mathematical problem. But while he may desire a reformation in poetry, he is interested only in results, not in the technical discipline to which poetry must perhaps be submitted. And Miss Moore’s poetry is wholly concerned with such discipline. The reader will therefore not sympathize with the prose quotation in the above poem which its author thought necessary as the documentary justification of her tirade, or appreciate the logical application of _butterflies_; a butterfly being the mathematical complement to a steam roller, and, as a metaphorical complement, suggesting the extreme, unrelieved dullness of this steam roller mind that has no possible complement, even in metaphor. Anything indeed which reveals the poet at work, which reveals the mechanism of his wit, is obnoxious to the plain reader. The poetic process, he declares, is a mystery; and any evidence, therefore, of what he may consider the technical aspect of poetry marks a poem as incomprehensible. Miss Moore, who turns her poetry into matter-of-fact prose demonstrations in order to avoid mystery, thus expresses the plain reader’s antagonism to poetry that perplexes rather than entertains. He might not understand her sympathy, but he would undoubtedly agree with her sentiments. POETRY I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. The bat, upside down; the elephant pushing, a tireless wolf under a tree, the base-ball fan, the statistician-- “business documents and schoolbooks”-- these phenomena are pleasing, but when they have been fashioned into that which is unknowable, we are not entertained. It may be said of all of us that we do not admire what we cannot understand; enigmas are not poetry.