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

          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 twinkling his skin like a horse that

      feels a flea, the base-

      ball fan, the statistician—case after case

        could be cited did

        one wish it; 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 autocrats 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 one hand, in defiance of

      their opinion—

      the raw material of poetry in

        all its rawness and

        that which is, on the other hand,

          genuine then you are interested in poetry.