"the lesson of the moth” was published during a revolutionary time in English poetry. Modernism, a late-19th and early 20th-century movement in art and literature that shunned formal tradition, reached its apex during the 1920s and 1930s. “the lesson of the moth” draws heavily from modernist free-verse forms. One of modernism’s main issues with the clean poetic forms of the previous generations is that they struggle to depict the messy and chaotic nature of modern life. Perfect rhyming couplets and iambic pentameter are not fit to bear witness to the First World War.

The chaos of modern life was not limited to the battlefield, however. Early modernists like T. S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” were both published during the war, focused on the chaos inherent in the new urban metropolises. The new, faster news cycles in these large cities also contributed to the chaotic lifestyle. For the first time in Western human history, there was more information than one could process. Marquis’s work as an editor made him acutely aware of this surplus of information. The Evening Sun, where he began “The Sun Dial,” was the evening version of The Sun. Together, The Sun ran two 16-page newspapers every day to keep up with the influx of information.