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.