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 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.