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 be-
  cause 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 some-
  thing 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 – 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.