up with political Fascism, by the same atmosphere of suspense that prevailed from 1911 to the outbreak of nationalistic war and now again gathering around further nationalistic and civil wars. The other set of experiences beside the War that have most impressed this generation might be called knowledge-experiences. It has witnessed, as well as a variegation, a fresh synthesis of intellectual interests. It must not only revise traditional values; it must appreciate new ones. That is, as a generation writing in the limelight of modernism it has an over-developed historical sense and professional self-consciousness. It is mentally uncomfortable--shrewd, nervous, suspicious of itself. It rejects philosophy and religion in the old drivelling romantic sense, but would welcome an intellectual system--a permanently accessible mental cock-tail--that would be a stiff, sane, steadying combination of both. It cares so much that in all matters where the plain reader is accustomed to meet with earnest conviction of one kind or another in the poet, it is hysterically, gruesomely ‘I-don’t-care-ish’. It is like a person between life and death: everything that would ordinarily seem serious to him now seems a tragic joke. This nervousness, this superior sort of stage-fright, is aggravated by the fact that in the new synthesis of values--even in the system that he is attempting to realize for himself--the historically-minded modernist poet is uncertain whether there is any excuse for the existence of poets at all. He finds himself in a defensive position; and in sympathy with his position; but also with the system that has put him in this position. So he brazens out the dilemma by making cruel jokes at his own expense--jokes which he expects no one to see or not to be laughed at if seen.