In her interesting dialectical poem "Poetry," arranged in
five stanzas like an essay, Marianne Moore declares first that she dislikes poetry, but
it is really "all this fiddle" about poetry for which Moore has a distaste. Poetry has
a place "for the genuine" she declares in her thesis statement of the first
stanza.
With a tone that is both argumentative and witty,
Moore continues her dialectic in which she points out that "half-poets" who overanalyze
things and try to force meanings upon phenomena are the ones that render poetry
ingenuine. For, it is only when the poet creates "imaginary gardens with real toads in
them" that poetry truly exists. The combination of the imaginary with reality is what
constitutes true poetry:
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.
When poetry focuses on the genuine,
and moves away from "all this fiddle," real meaning is conveyed. Thus, poetic devices
such as allusions are used not to be unintelligible, but to reconfigure truth and
provide the "literal of the imagination" that is above
triviality.
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