The Millennial Pedestrian

Marianne Moore’s "Poetry" 

 In the introduction to The Poems of Marianne Moore, the poet Grace Shulman writes that Marianne Moore once told her that she had reduced "Poetry" to a mere three lines: the first three. And many have seized upon just the first four words of the poem below to demonstrate that even famous poets hold their work in comtempt. But at the close of those initial three lines Moore points out that within poetry is "a place for the genuine."

When you read poetry — mine, or Moore’s, or Wordsworth’s for that matter — you should be looking for that quality, the genuine. The best poetry finds a way to show us the essence of our surroundings, our relationships, our own dreams and our understanding of the world. And that can be, in Moore’s wonderfully homely word, "useful."

 
Poetry

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 do not 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.