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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 | |
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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 usthat we | |
do not admire what | 10 |
we cannot understand. The bat, | |
holding on upside down or in quest of something to | |
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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 statisticiancase after case | 15 |
could be cited did | |
one wish it; nor it is valid | |
to discriminate against business documents and | |
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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 imaginationabove | 25 |
insolence and triviality and can present | |
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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. | |
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