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Sunday, April 03, 2022

Poetry

 

 POETRY
—Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

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 
 
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 the 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.

_____________________

—Medusa

For more about American poet Marianne Moore, go to www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/marianne-moore/.