For when they saw My mother-in law They decided not to tackle Me! She is tough as the armorian Leather that the saurian Sun spreads over the Sea-- So she saved my life Did the mother of my wife Who is more than a mother to Me! The humorous element in poetry, it is seen, has undergone a complete reversal and become part of the mechanism of fine writing; Miss Sitwell’s mother-in-law poem, for instance, is not offered as a comic poem. Even what appears to be an obvious comic satire of Victorianism in many of her poems is, in reality, a spiteful championship of a former comic subject--Victorianism as a bourgeois comic subject was long ago worn out. The humorous element here lies in the spice which a much abused institution acquires when restored by impudent artifice to connoisseur sentiment. A sophisticated partiality for Victorianism, is at any rate, one of the disingenuously irrational prejudices in which the three Sitwells indulge themselves. The Queen becomes a rather robustious and slangy old lady telling Lady Venus just where to get off. “For the minx”, Said she, “And the drinks, You can see, Are hot as any hottentot and not the goods for me!” Victorian fashions evoke literary enthusiasm: Rose Castles Those bustles Beneath parasols seen! Fat blondine pearls Rondine curls Seem. Even Victorian rococo architecture and interior decoration become semi-humorously aetherialized: Balmoral’s towers, its pitch-pine floors and special tartan, the Crystal Palace, the Albert Memorial and the horse-hair settees of Buckingham Palace. On the other hand this serious poem of Miss Marianne Moore’s: Openly, yes with the naturalness of the hippopotamus or the alligator when it climbs out on the bank to experience the Sun, I do these things which I do, which please no one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub- merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object in view was a renaissance; shall I say the contrary? the sediment of the river which encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used.... or the many serious pieces of Mr. Cummings written in comic vernacular, bring the full circle round to the professionally comic vein of traditional poetry. A poem by J. W. Morris, a writer of the American ’sixties, should be brought face to face with Miss Moore’s poem to mark the reversal that serious and comic elements have undergone in poetry. It is called ‘Collusion between a Alegaiter and a Water-Snaik.’ The scene is ‘Guatimaly’. It should be read as a parody of ‘unpoetical’ poetry, even perhaps as a prophetic parody. The following lines from it in fact might have been written by Mr. Cummings were he a traditional poet of the ’sixties, satirizing Miss Moore, a modernist poet of the nineteen-twenties: