I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all <br />this fiddle. <br />Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one <br />discovers in <br />it after all, a place for the genuine. <br />Hands that can grasp, eyes <br />that can dilate, hair that can rise <br />if it must, these things are important not because a <br /> <br />high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because <br />they are <br />useful. When they become so derivative as to become <br />unintelligible, <br />the same thing may be said for all of us, that we <br />do not admire what <br />we cannot understand: the bat <br />holding on upside down or in quest of something to <br /> <br />eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf <br />under <br />a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that <br />feels a <br />flea, the base- <br />ball fan, the statistician-- <br />nor is it valid <br />to discriminate against 'business documents and <br /> <br />school-books'; all these phenomena are important. One must <br />make a distinction <br />however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the <br />result is not poetry, <br />nor till the poets among us can be <br />'literalists of <br />the imagination'--above <br />insolence and triviality and can present <br /> <br />for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', shall <br />we have <br />it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, <br />the raw material of poetry in <br />all its rawness and <br />that which is on the other hand <br />genuine, you are interested in poetry.<br /><br />Marianne Moore<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/poetry/
