Poetry

Poetry Summary

The poet does not care for poetry and thinks there are more important things. It is possible, though, to find something valuable in it if you read with a bit of contempt. Plain, useful things like hands and eyes are good material for poetry as opposed to difficult things people do not understand.

Other things that work are horses, bats, a critic’s facial tic, a baseball fan; textbooks and business documents should not be ignored.

But "half poets" cannot do a good job with even those subjects; without an insistence on genuine sensibility, their attention to objects fails to make them available in their raw power. These poets have not yet achieved a "literalism of the imagination," "imaginary gardens with real toads” in them.

If we demand the raw material of poetry, in all its "rawness," and insist on the genuine, then it is clear that we are truly interested in poetry.

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