Poetry
by Marianne Moore

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 twitching his skin like a horse that

feels a flea, the base-

ball fan, the statistician--

nor is it valid

to discriminate against "business documents and

schoolbooks"; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not pretty,
nor till the poets 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,

the raw material of poetry in

all its rawness and

that which is on the other hand

genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

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