| |
| 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 | 5 |
| 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 became so derivative as to become unintelligible, the | |
| same thing may be said for all of us—that we | |
| do not admire what | 10 |
| 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 | 15 |
| could be cited did | |
| one wish it; nor it is valid | |
| to discriminate against “business documents and | |
| |
| school-books”; all these phenomena are important. | |
| One must make a distinction | 20 |
| however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, | |
| the result is not poetry, | |
| nor till the autocrats among use can be | |
| “literalists of | |
| the imagination”—above | 25 |
| 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 one hand, | |
| in defiance of their opinion— | 30 |
| the raw material of poetry in | |
| all its rawness, and | |
| that which is on the other hand, | |
| genuine, then you are interested in poetry. | |
| |
