It might, however, be made clearer than it is if bigoted inefficiency of criticism were replaced by an intelligent policy of laissez-faire; which would allow that a variety of modes may exist side by side in a period, having strong or slight dissimilarities and strong or slight correspondences with one another; that sometimes the dissimilarities can be explained as conscious disaffections or as the unconscious result of dissimilar personal background; that sometimes the correspondences can be explained as conscious affections or affectations or as the unconscious results of similar personal associations, a personal association being at times nothing more definite than a certain literary slant two poets may have caught from some common source of infection--Mr. Tate, without having read Wordsworth or his imitators, might as easily have caught the Wordsworth germ as the Eliot germ, had he happened to be constitutionally subject to infection from it. The situation would be clearer still if many dissimilarities were left as unexplainable, except as facts of absolute personal eccentricity; and if many correspondences were left as unexplainable, except as facts of mysterious personal coincidence not to be accounted for in terms of causality or of excessive openness to infection from without. Some obvious correspondences must be explained, if only because they are easily explained, and because poetry in which too obvious correspondences occur is part of the clutter in the poetry of any time that can be immediately cleared away. The following complete poems are all by different authors: The beech-leaves are silver For lack of the tree’s blood. At your kiss my lips Become like the autumn beech-leaves. An old willow with hollow branches Slowly swayed his few high bright tendrils And sang: Love is a young green willow Shimmering at the bare wood’s edge. As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily-of-the-valley She lay beside me in the dawn. Among twenty snowy mountains The only moving thing Was the eye of the black bird