Summary
The poet admits that she does not like poetry and that there are many more important things. However, if one reads it with “contempt” one might discover something genuine in it. Things like hands, eyes, and hair show their importance not because of the fancy interpretations one can build on them but because they are “useful.” When they are no longer understandable then they do not matter; we cannot admire “what / we cannot understand.”
The poet gives examples of things that are "useful": a bat in a cave looking for food, a horse, a wolf under a tree, a critic’s face twitching, a baseball fan, a statistician. One should not dismiss business documents or textbooks either.
There is a distinction that should be made, though. Just writing about these things does not constitute genuine poetry. When “half poets” write of these subjects, they remain trivial; they have not captured the essence of these things because, though they may attend to literal things, they are not yet "literalists of the imagination." When they can finally give us “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” then it will be real poetry. Until that happens, if you defy the half poets, and demand poetry constituted of “raw material” and "genuine" feeling, you can officially be deemed “interested in poetry.”
Analysis
“Poetry” is both a famous poem and, to some extent, an infamous poem; Moore extensively revised it, even shortening it to three brief lines for her Complete Poems (1967). Caring little for the hue and cry from critics, her preface to the collection cheekily stated “Omissions are not accidents.” The criticism and scholarly analysis of this poem thus spends a great deal of time on the revisions issue, for it is impossible to discuss the content of the poem and all of its literary elements and possible meanings without taking into account the extent of Moore’s tweaking and excising. The final, five stanza version is the one we will spend the most time on; but for purposes of comparison, the other two versions are the thirteen-line one: "I, too, dislike it: / There are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. / The bat, upside down; the elephant pushing, / a tireless wolf under a tree, / The base-ball fan, the statistician— / "business documents and schoolbooks"— / These phenomena are pleasing, / but when they have been fashioned / Onto that which is unknowable, / we are not entertained. / It may be said of all of us / that we do not admire what we cannot understand; / enigmas are not poetry."
And the final, three-line version is: "I, too, dislike it. / Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it, after all, a place for the genuine."
Before moving on to the five-stanza poem, a few comments on the revisions are necessary. Moore worked through the poem several times, and even though she chose to include the three-line one in her collection, she included the five-stanza one in the notes at the back of the volume, as if she could not bear to excise this material completely. Robert Pinsky suggests “this drastic compression seems designed to frustrate the poem’s admirers (perhaps especially the critics and scholars who had commented on the poem), taking back the exquisitely twisty epigrams and images that readers had enjoyed, analyzed, quoted.” He admires her deeply idiosyncratic aesthetic vision, claiming that she “sets forth an art that is irritable, attentive, and memorably fluid.” Donald Hall admits to liking the thirteen line version best, explaining that it is the one that best “denigrates a particular kind of modern poetry in which intellectualization has led to incomprehensibility, but it does not, as the longer version does, seek to define what poetry ought to be. The longer 1935 version does this.” Bonnie Honigsblum sees the inclusion of the five-stanza poem in the notes to the three-line one as a truly modernist gesture and explains that “In [Moore’s] note to the poem ‘Poetry,’ she emphasizes the place for the five-stanza version; it belongs in the place for those things that came before the finished poem, its sources. By giving the note an archival function, she allowed it to become a cue to her readers, telling them how to react to her latest venture into unconventionality. In this light, the revision and its appended note are hardly frivolous. For Moore, this change was loaded with meanings, and the note tells us that she intended the revision to have meaning for readers as well, and not just shock value.” Similarly, Taffy Martin notes that Moore loves to disfigure, distort, repress, and revise, and that with the 1967 version of “Poetry” she achieved her “ultimate disfiguration…[the] effacement and restoration of the very poem which anthologists most like to borrow.”
Now, turning to the final version, the basics of the poem are these: Moore says in a conversational and informal tone that she is not a fan of poetry because it tends not to be genuine. “Real” things like hands and eyes are important because they are useful; they are not idealized or intended to produce a transcendental experience. People tend not to like things they do not understand. She gives examples of things that are quotidian and yet rich and vital, such as a bat hanging upside down, a rolling horse, a baseball fan, and a critic; these, and even the most ordinary pieces of text like business documents and textbooks, should be the raw material for poetry. We are encouraged to look anew at the world, considering nothing too banal or prosaic to be a subject for verse. The earthiness of beasts, the hoarse and hyper sports fan, the piquant critic may not be something that the “autocrats” of the medium admire, but Moore does. Her images are humorous, potent in their confluence of sight and sound, attractive to us in their appeal to our physical senses.
She has harsh words for bad poets who cannot work with even these subjects, and the prominent poets who care more for the petty and piddling and cannot produce anything real. A true lover of poetry, then, is interested in both “raw material” and the genuine. As critic Maureen W. Mills sees it, the raw material is “both the data of life and the recognition that life is not ideal, that there is much ugliness but that poetry is certainly no sermon to proclaim high moral values. The raw material...should find its way into an artistic structure which is the poet’s own particular ‘garden’ of impressions, of feelings, or ideas absorbed in a given time and place.”
We must also delve into Moore’s extensive use of quotations/allusions/citations. In much of her poetry she uses sentences and fragments and words culled from a myriad of sources. Moore delights, as Martin writes, in “[sharing] with her readers the joke of altering yet retaining a source, a quotation.” “Poetry” has three major references (see the “Other” section in this study guide for more information). The first is her line “I, too, dislike it,” a reference to Samuel Butler’s recorded conversation with a young boy who claimed he did not like poetry. The second is the phrase “raw material of poetry,” which is from a quote she copied out of the May 10th, 1913 Spectator in which a reviewer of G.B. Grundy’s Ancient Gems in Modern Settings explains, “All appeal to emotions which endure for all time, and which, it has been aptly said, are the true raw material of poetry.” The third is the line “literalists of the imagination,” a reference to William Butler Yeats’ critique of fellow poet William Blake: “The limitation of his view was from the very intensity of his vision; he was a too literal realist of imagination, as others are of nature…” Moore is not critical like Yeats, though, and admires the earlier poet’s imaginative world.
All of the references are nods to the fact that almost all poets are deriving some of their images, style, themes, etc. from poets of the past. Moore says as much in “Poetry,” but offers a nuanced critique of exactly when such borrowing becomes problematic: when the resulting poem is “so derivative as to become / unintelligible.” Moore knows that she is culling from other sources, but she is self-effacing and ironic about it, turning Yeats’s assessment around and teasing Butler.
Finally, perhaps the most famous line of the poem, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” has no known source besides Moore herself. Harold Bloom writes that it is the ugly toad, very much part of the real as opposed to the ideal, that is necessary to let viewers conjure up the garden. Poetry can be valuable as a conduit to reality if the poet abandons the “stylistic cartwheels” that they think are necessary for their craft and work assiduously to let their imagination create a world in which the real is as important as the ideal.
