National Poetry Month Day 19

Two poems that explore the dislike of poetry:
"Poetry" by Marianne Moore and "Against Poetry" by Sandra Gilbert
*

Poetry
Marianne Moore

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.

***
Against Poetry
Sandra Gilbert

Suddenly I too see
why everybody hates it--
the manifestos of metaphor, the mad
voice that mumbles all night
in the dark: this is like that, that
is this, the phosphorescent
flares of vision, the busyness
of words sweeping up
after all that sputter...

When the princess spoke toads
everybody loathes her,
but when her mouth spouted jewels
it was hardly better:

Not much difference, muttered the courtiers,
between a slide of slime, of jumpy
lumps on the table,
and a spurt of little glittering pellets
hitting you in the eye!

It would be more seemly all round
if that lady kept her shapely
lips
tightened on nothing.

Although, as a matter of fact,
those marshals and admirals
kept on dreaming of things
that were--like what?
like rubies? like
emeralds?