Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today's Tuesday, March 8, 2022.

Today's poem is by an American modernist poet. Her name was Marianne Moore, and she lived from November of 1887 until February of 1972.

Among many awards, she received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollinger Prize,

and the National Metaphor Literature.

So she is certainly one of our more celebrated and fascinating poets of the 20th century.

The poem that I'm going to read today is one of her more famous ones.

It's called Poetry.

It goes like this.

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're 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

...