Monday, September 09, 2019

Raw and Genuine Poets Marianne Moore

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