Others for 1919/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 that there is 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 be- cause 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 some- thing 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 – case after case could be cited did one wish it; 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 autocrats 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 one hand, in defiance of their opinion – the raw material of poetry in    all its rawness, and that which is on the other hand, genuine, then you are interested in poetry.