Marianne Moore. Poetry. Alfred Kreymborg, ed. 1920. Others for 1919

Alfred Kreymborg, ed. Others for 1919. 1920.

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 that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise	5
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 became so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us—that we
do not admire what	10
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	15
could be cited did
one wish it; nor it is valid
to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important.
One must make a distinction	20
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets,
the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among use can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above	25
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 one hand,
in defiance of their opinion—	30
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.