My recent post of Marianne Moore’s poem, “Baseball and Writing,” got me thinking more about Moore and one of my other great loves, poetry.

If you approach Marianne Moore the same way as you approach most poets you will be quickly frustrated. Her poetry is more difficult, confounding, and requires more work than that of most poets, even other Modernists. She was a poetic experimenter, encyclopedist, and iconoclast.

One of the things that make her difficult on the surface is that she eschewed traditional poetic form and meter, believing that the true essence of poetry lay not in such outward “traditionalities” (to coin a phrase) but in a precise and luminous delight in language.

Her most famous poem is “Poetry.” Here she makes her case for the kind of poetry she is longing to read and write,… and the the kind of poets she is longing for. She is also making the case for why poetry, this most frivolous of things, really can and does matter.

Moore like many poets constantly re-wrote and redacted her poems, especially late in her life. When you find a poem by her you like, you may also find many, many versions of it. Her famous poem “Poetry” is no exception. Enjoy!

POETRY

by Marianne Moore

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 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 twinkling 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 the 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.

(From Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse (Nicholas L. Brown, 1920), edited by Alfred Kreymborg. This poem is in the public domain.)