Thesis Statement: Moore's poem, "Poetry" is her definition of what "genuine" poetry is. It is not using pretty words to assign special significance to everyday objects; it is creating an experience so true that it is more real than "real life."
A. There are more important things than poetry.
1. "I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle." (Line 1)
B. However, genuine poetry expresses important feelings, events, people, etc.
1. "...one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine." (Line 2,3)
C. Thesis Statement (above)
II. Poetry is more than pretty words.
A. The poet should not get hung up on the beauty of the words.
1. "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." (Lines 4-8)
B. Readers will not connect with a poem if so much attention is paid to the beauty of the words that the meaning gets lost.
1. "When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible ... we do not admire what we cannot understand." (Lines 8-11)
C. Poets who are not committed to being genuine, who don't truly work to convey something meaningful as well as beautiful, are not true poets.
1. "...when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry" but "insolence and triviality." (Lines 19, 23)
A. Demand both truth and beauty in poetry.
1. "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." (Lines 25-29)
Moore, Marianne. "Poetry." Accessed online April
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