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 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.

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