Poems (Marianne Moore)/POETRY

by Marianne Moore

For other versions of this work, see Poetry (Moore).

POETRY

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
 Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
 it after all, a place for the genuine.
  Hands that can grasp, eyes
  that can dilate, hair that can rise
   if it must, these things are important not because a

high sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
 useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible the
 same thing may be said for all of us that we
  do not admire what
  we cannot understand. The bat,
   holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
 a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base-
 ball fan, the statistician—case after case
  could be cited did
  one wish it; nor is it valid
   to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
 however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
 nor till the autocrats among us can be
  "literalists of
  the imagination"—above
   insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
 it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
 the raw material of poetry in
  all its rawness and
  that which is, on the other hand,
   genuine then you are interested in poetry.