I, too, dislike it.
__Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
__it, after all, a place for the genuine.
---
About "Poetry" by Marianne Moore
In 1927, modernist poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) laid bare her thoughts on poetry---the ability of "literalists of the imagination" to create “imaginary gardens with real toads in them", while "half poets" create something that is not poetry at all. Her lines, almost a manifesto, were widely read and admired. When she revisited the poem in 1967 for its publication in an anthology, she presented her views much more succinctly: "I, too, dislike it."
"Poetry" (original 1927 version)
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, the
result 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.