"Imaginary gardens with real toads in them" has always seemed an almost perfect formulation of what I seek in poetry. I suspect it's a matter of temperament. Those who prefer real gardens with real toads (Objectivists?), imaginary gardens with imaginary toads, and even real gardens with imaginary toads probably have their place too, although perhaps the latter is more the realm of children's literarature (Wind in the Willows?).

I can understand how Moore equates "imaginary gardens with real toads" with "literalists of the imagination," but I think Yeats meant something different by "literalists" when he used the term to criticize Blake. Blake, especially in his prophetic books, often does seem to take his imaginary worlds ("vales of Har") all too literally (instead of real toads, in Blake's imaginary garden we have to keep track of "Ahania, the emanation from Urizen" and a thousand other imaginary figures).

I'd say "imaginary gardens with real toads" is a much better description of Keats, the very real hawthorn and musk rose in the nightingale's "forest dim." If Blake sometimes errs on the side of imaginary gardens with imaginary toads (or orcs), I'd say Moore's own weakness in some of her poems is to err on the side of real gardens with real toads, her exquisitely precise descriptions that sometimes don't seem to go beyond their own precision. But of course her best poems do.