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 ahigh-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 toeat, 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 andschool-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 presentfor 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.