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 ah-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.

"Poetry" ~ Marianne Moore

Comments

Dinesh ^club

. . . In the Romantics’ interpretation of Fichte’s en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gottlieb_Fichte self-reflective activity, the world emerges as a realm of infinite representation captured in form. By emphasising Idealist philosophy’s inability to grasp the absolute securely within a method, the early Romantics credit art with the power of representing the unrepresentable, in other words, to intimate the absolute that eluded all reason. As Friedrich Schlegel en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Schlegel famously remarked ‘Das Hochste kann man, eben weil es unaussprechlich ist, nur allegorisch sagen’ -- ‘the absolute, because it is inexpressible, an only be expressed allegorically’; inspiration for raising the cognitive and expressive potency of poetry to ever-higher levels was transcendental idealism. Friedrich Schlegel saw ‘higher poetry’ as yet another expression of he same transcendental understanding of the world. ~page 10

2 years ago. Edited 7 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

. . . . The humanistic heritage, the fragments of German classical literature that floated through my mind, had been worth reading, but I wasn’t surprised that the Germans hadn’t taken them to heart. The idea that culture imposes an obligation, that literature ought to influence conduct, was a problem which I only tackled when I was grown and well-off. In those earlier days, I didn’t know such claims. They seemed too much to ask of entertaining books – and they still do. Poetry wasn’t connected with the outside, the real, world. Its value lay in the comfort it provides, in that profound consolation that could fill the mind when a malevolent environment tried to suck it dry. But I didn’t expect it to teach and convert. . . . . Page 101 (From "Still Alive" ~ Ruth Kulger - Authoress)

7 months ago. Edited 7 months ago.

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