The modernist poet, then, as a type (and a type can, of course, contradict itself in its individuals) may be said to possess a peculiar and a recognizable intellectual slant; or, if we feel ‘intellectual’ to imply too bland a sort of seriousness, we may say that the modernist has such and such a technique of opinion in his poetry. He does not commit himself whole-heartedly to any obvious conviction. He does not, on the other hand, waste himself in obvious attack. When any choice of faith, action or habit is held to belong to the lower, less developed processes of reasoning, the making of a choice is a vulgarism. It is a point of intellectual pride with him to refrain from making utilitarian choices: his choices are in the more serious realm of speculation. His aversion to indulging in feelings merely because they are temporarily pleasant to him or to others, or because they are the feelings expected of him as a poet, or because they best show off his talents, or because they are easy and obvious feelings to have--this emotional abstinence amounts to a severe asceticism, as one modernist poet has himself put it. But asceticism is an easily parodied position and the modernist poet is aware of this. He is also aware, because he is a hard-headed, common-sense creature, that asceticism is in practice impossible. So he has common-sense even about his common-sense, which has led him to this asceticism: he is able to do what no generation of poets before him has been able to do--to make fun of himself when he is at his most serious. The poet’s self-mockery is that feature of modernist poetry most likely to puzzle the reader or the critic who has not properly appraised the poet’s intellectual slant. A poem which is a joke at the poet’s expense can obviously not be sympathized with as it should be unless the reader sees it as in some respects a joke against himself too. Obviously he cannot do this unless he is at least capable of discovering in the poem clues to the poet’s wit and its direction: the reader himself must have wit. The probable failure of wit in the reader, whether plain reader or critic, removes from the poet that measure of _address_ which an audience imposes. Relieved of the obligations of address the modernist poem frequently leaps from formal clownishness to unrestrained burlesque. The closing lines of a poem, _Winter Remembered_, by John Crowe Ransom illustrates that formal clownishness which is the poet’s rôle when he intentionally keeps himself within reach of his audience’s sentiment: Dear Love, these fingers that had known your touch, And tied our separate forces first together, Were ten poor idiot fingers not worth much, Ten frozen parsnips hanging in the weather.