Although written in a mood of intellectual severity, modernist poetry retains the clown’s privilege of having irrational prejudices in favour of a few things as well as against a few things. It assumes, indeed, the humorous championship of things that the last centuries have either hated, neglected or mishandled. Toward poetical items that have been worn out by spiritual elevation, such as motherhood, childhood, nature, national pride, the soul, fame, freedom and perfection, it maintains a policy of disinterested neutrality; not because of a prejudice against motherhood, nature, etc., but because of a feeling that they have had their day and that it is now the turn of other things like obscenity, lodging-house life, pedantry, vulgarity, frivolousness, failure, drunkenness, and so on, to be put into the scales. This is out of a desire not for sensationalism but for emotional equilibrium. The generation to which the modernist poet belongs is, as we have said, an exceedingly common-sense, ‘sensible’ generation, to which most things are equally poetic because equally commonplace. The only way that traditional poetry could treat drink, for example, was either with sentimental gaiety, as in Shakespeare’s: Let the canakin clink, And let the canakin clink! A soldier’s a man And life’s but a span, So let the canakin clink! or with irony, as in Gay’s song from _The Mohocks_: Come fill up the glass! Round, round, let it pass, Till our reason be lost in our wine: Leave conscience’s rules To women and fools, _This_ only can make us divine. or with loathing for its fatal fascination as in Lefanu’s _Drunkard’s address to a Bottle of Whiskey_: Oh terrible darling, How have you sought me, Enchanted, and caught me, See, now, where you’ve brought me To sleep by the road-side, and dress out in rags. Drunkenness, as a poetical subject, was either comic or disgusting. Comic, as in George Colman’s _Toby Tosspot_: when the drunken man on his way home at midnight saw a notice on a street-door “Please Ring the Bell”, and did so vigorously out of mere friendliness. Disgusting, as in Mr. Masefield’s _Everlasting Mercy_: “Look on him, there”, she says, “look on him And smell the stinking gin upon him, The lowest sot, the drunk’nest liar, The dirtiest dog in all the shire.” The modernist poet, however, does not have, properly speaking, ‘poetical’ subjects, since most subjects are to him commonplaces. So that when the fact of drunkenness gets into poetry, the poem does not explain how the poet feels about drunkenness but, in a callous, precise way, what drunkenness is. If, therefore, the poem is a ‘comic’ poem, it is not so because the poet thinks drunkenness a comic subject but because it happens, as a shrewd mental condition, to share in his wit. So Mr. Cummings: