Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869 - 1935)

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored and imperiallycharacteristic of an empire or emperor; majestically, regally slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,nicely decorated or dressed
And he was always human when he talked,
But still he fluttered pulsesWhat does it mean to "flutter pulses"? Whose pulses are being fluttered? when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich--yes, richer than a king--
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread;Why would they curse the bread?
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Marianne Moore (1887 - 1972)

			
I, too, dislike itWhat does "it" refer to?: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. 
   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers 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 derivativenot original, adapted from another 
source 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 twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base- 
   ball fan, the statistician--What connection is Moore making 
between wild animals and a baseball 
fan?
      nor is it valid 
         to discriminate against "business documents and 

school-books";a quotation from the Diary of 
Tolstoy in which the famous Russian
author argues that "poetry is 
everything with the exception of 
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 poets among us can be 

      "literalists offrom 20th-century Irish poet William
Butler Yeats's Ideas of Good 
and Evil; the description faults 
English romantic poet William Blake's 
view that imagination was from
the divine.
      the imaginationfrom 20th-century Irish poet William 
Butler Yeats's Ideas of Good 
and Evil; the description faults  
English romantic poet William Blake's 
view that imagination was from
the divine." --above 
         insolencerude behavior or speech 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 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. 

Educational Options, Inc., is grateful to the author and publisher for the use of this selection:

Moore, Marianne. "Poetry." Reprinted by permission of the Marianne Moore Estate.