Poetry is a famous poem by the American poet Marianne Moore. It was first published in 1919 and revised extensively thereafter. In 1924, the original 30 lines were cut to 13 and in 1967, Moore issued a 3-line version of the poem. The 29-line version below, collected in Moore’s Poems (1921), is the one used in most anthologies.
“Poetry” has become representative of Marianne Moore’s career. Its subject is the meaning and value of poetry, a lifelong fascination for Moore. In her poem, Moore uses an eccentric verse construction to ask what is “genuine” in the art of poetry. Her famous opening line is deliberately untraditional.
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.
Marianne Moore delighted in paradox, or self-contradictory statement. Her poem reads almost like a riddle as she teases out meanings. She begins by saying that she dislikes poetry but ends up defending its best properties. She admits that we cannot admire what we do not understand. However, she then lists a series of increasingly obscure images, as if to confuse the reader. Similarly, her form is both free and tightly constructed. Her lengthy lines seem at first to be written in free verse (poetry without a set rhyme scheme or meter). But on closer inspection, the reader can discern stanzas, careful line indentations, and rhymes. Moore herself said that she tended to write in “patterned arrangements.”
Moore’s poem seems to be arguing that poetry has a “place for the genuine” if it is sincere and unrestricted in its subject matter. Her famous claim that poetry must present “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” has come to represent an argument for both escapism and reality in art. Moore makes literary allusions—one to the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (“business documents and school-books”) and one to the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (“literalists of the imagination”). In her notes, she provides sources for these allusions, but not for her reference to “imaginary gardens,” which scholars have since puzzled over.
For more information about Moore, see Moore, Marianne. See also Poetry (Rhythm and meter).
