In the real "original version" of "Poetry" Moore worked out her stanza with a rigor already obscured by revision in the 1924 Observations text, the one substantially copied in her 1967 note, & here.

Moore's description of the longer version of "Poetry" in her Notes to the
1967 Complete Poems as the "original version" needs qualification. The
first published version of "Poetry" appears in Others magazine (5.6) in July
1919.

Moore revised this 1919 text in 1924 when she included the poem in her first
authorized collection, Observations. She made cuts in every stanza except
the first, obliterating several rhymes, changed one word, and deleted the
4th verse of the 3rd stanza entirely.

This original 1919 text is the only published version that exactly
replicates the rhymed syllabic stanza of the first stanza in the other four.

This 6-verse stanza goes (syllable count, rhyme):

19 x, 22 A, 11 A, 5 B, 8 B, 13 y.



The 1919 text differs from the 1967 "original version" as follows:


1919 stanza 2

... to become unintelligible, the / same thing ...


1919 stanza 3

... the statistician--case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate ...


1919 stanza 4 3rd verse

nor till the autocrats among us can be


1919 stanza 5, 2nd verse

it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand, in defiance of their
opinion--



These alterations are typical of the revisions Moore made in her stanzaic
poems of 1915-1924 as she collected them in Selected Poems (1935), Collected
Poems (1951) and Complete Poems (1967). They suggest impatience with
phrasing that in retrospect seemed too talky.

The more radical revisions of "Poetry" (to 11 verses in the 1925 2nd edition
of Observations, and famously to 3 in 1967) are atypical and probably
reflect impatience with the poems downright overt address of its topic.

Moore's most extensive revisions focused on her extended poems in large
elaborate stanzas of the 30s. The Steeple Jack, the most winning and
readily-grasped of them, is deservedly well-known because Eliot put it first
when he arranged the contents of Selected Poems (1935). For the 1951
Collected Poems Moore cut it from 13 to 8 stanzas. In 1967 she reverts to a
13-stanza version, labeled "revised, 1961."