One of Marianne Moore's most famous poems is appropriately titled, Poetry. It is also the poem that has vexed scholars and readers alike as she repeatedly edited the piece throughout her life. Her definitive version of Poetry — as she saw it — was reduced to three lines in the 1981 re-issue of The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. It reads as follows:
Poetry
I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.
— Marianne Moore
In one of it's earliest forms, Poetry as it appeared in, Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse, edited by Alfred Kreymborg is significantly longer.
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 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.
— Marianne Moore
In his introduction to Marianne Moore's 1935 volume entitled, Selected Poems, T.S. Eliot wrote in part that, “Miss Moore is, I believe, one of those few who have done the language some service in my lifetime.” In her lifetime, Moore’s Collected Poems (1951) won both the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the National Book Award. In 1953 she was awarded the Bollingen Prize. She died in 1972 in New York City.
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