Marianne Moore
Poetry (1921)
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I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. |
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Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in |
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It after all, a place for the genuine. |
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Hands that can grasp, eyes |
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that can dilate, hair that can rise |
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if it must, these things are important not because a |
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high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are |
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useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, |
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the same thing may be said for all of us, that we |
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do not admire what |
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we cannot understand: the bat, |
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holding on upside down or in quest of something to |
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eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under |
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a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base- |
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ball fan, the statistician -- |
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nor is it valid |
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to discriminate against "business documents and |
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school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction |
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however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, |
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nor till the poets among us can be |
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"literalists of |
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the imagination" -- above |
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insolence and triviality and can present |
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for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," shall we have |
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it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, |
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the raw material of poetry in |
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all its rawness and |
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that which is on the other hand |
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genuine, you are interested in poetry. |
1. fiddle: nonsense.
23. insolence: rudeness or disrespect.