Poetry, Marianne Moore

POETRY by Marianne Moore (1921)


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 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 raking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that fee;s
a flea, the base -
ball fan, the statistician -
nor is 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
not till the poets among us can be
'literalists of
the imagination' - above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real roads in them, shall we
have it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.