Poetry

Fotografia Olho de Gato

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.

Marianne Moore