Evidently a good chance for a water snaik Of the large specie, which soon appeared Into the horison, near the bank where repos’d Calmly in slepe the Alegaiter before spoken of About 60 feet was his length (not the ’gaiter) And he was aperiently a well-proportioned snaik. When he was all ashore he glared upon The island with approval but was soon “Astonished with the view and lost to wonder” (from Watts) (For jest then he began to see the Alegaiter) Being a natural enemy of his’n he worked hisself Into a fury, also a ni position. Before the Alegaiter well could ope His eye (in other words perceive his danger) The Snaik had enveloped his body just 19 Times with “foalds voluminous and vast” (from Milton) ... But soon by grate force the tail was bit complete- Ly off.... The mental agility required of the poet who wishes to reconcile poetry to modernism and modernism to poetry gives him an exaggerated nimbleness that one modernist poet may have had in mind when speaking of the ‘athleticism’ of this generation. Much of his superfluous energy is consumed in an ostentatious display--sometimes childish but in general harmless--of the Protean powers of poetry. The badge of the modernist poet might well be the one that the Stanley family gave to the Isle of Man--three legs conjoined at the middle and the motto “Wherever you throw it, it will stand”. For, though by his technical flexibility he may seem to be continually standing on his head, by his common-sense he inclines to be all legs; and however extreme the comedy--however wilful his caprices, however grotesque the contrasts between innocence and obscenity or brutality and preciousness--it is a point of intellectual vanity in him to laugh last, to be found on his feet when the performance is over. He completes and in a sense contradicts his clownishness by revealing that even clownishness is a joke: that it is a joke to be writing poetry, a joke to be writing modernist poetry. By this token he belongs to the most serious generation of poets that has ever written; with the final self-protective corollary, of course, that it is also a joke to be serious. Sometimes, however, the modernist poet in his grotesque pantomime is very nearly tempted, out of virtuosity, to leave himself standing on his head. The following is a passage from _Causerie_, a poem by Mr. Allen Tate. It is a rambling midnight pillow-cogitation on the vulgarization and mechanization of the language of Homer, Catullus, Shakespeare and Rousseau. The poem is otherwise historically interesting as a psychological synthesis of the manners of his contemporaries, among them T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, John Crowe Ransom, Marianne Moore, and at least one other poet: