Marianne Moore: “Poetry”

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.

–Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore: “Silence”

Silence

My father used to say,
“Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow’s grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat—
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth—
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.”
Nor was he insincere in saying, “Make my house your inn.”
Inns are not residences.

Marianne Moore
Born 15 November 1887

Image posted at Modern American Poetry