“Pigeons” and the Future of Moore Criticism

This essay presents the textual history of Moore’s “lost” poem “Pigeons” and argues for the poem’s importance in unifying two major strains of Moore criticism: that pertaining to her Protestant faith, and that pertaining to her careful reading of Darwin. The essay suggests that those issues have seemed separate only because critics have thus far had an incomplete view of Moore’s work in the 1930s, the decade in which they converge. “Pigeons,” it concludes, is the salient poem for seeing the Protestant Moore and the scientific Moore come together in a deep exploration of “originality” as an issue of intermingled spiritual and biological significance.