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, theresult 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.
