#MIDDLEBURY
Poetry
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 twinkling his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base –
ball fan, the statistician-case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; 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 autocrats 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, in defiance
of their opinion-
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
About this poem
“Poetry” was published in “Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse” (Nicholas L. Brown, 1920), edited by Alfred Kreymborg.
About Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore was born on Nov. 15, 1887, near St. Louis. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including “Observations” (The Dial Press, 1924), “What Are Years?” (Macmillan, 1941) and “Collected Poems” (Macmillan, 1951), which won the Pulitzer Prize. She died on Feb. 5, 1972.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
This poem is in the public domain. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
