Poetry

Selected Poems (1935)

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 init after all, a place for the genuine.Hands that can grasp, eyesthat can dilate, hair that can riseif it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they areuseful. When they become so derivative as to be unintelligible,the same thing may be said for all of us, that wedo not admire whatwe cannot understand: the batholding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf undera tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base-ball fan, the statisticianÐnor is it validto discriminate against ‘business documents and

school-books’; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinctionhowever: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,nor till the poets among us can be’literalists ofthe imagination’Ðaboveinsolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’, shall we haveit. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,the raw material of poetry inall its rawness andthat which is on the other handgenuine, you are interested in poetry.

“Poetry”