Marianne 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 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 unintel-
ligiblå, 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

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 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 the one hand
me raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.