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/.