Although an elaborate system of poetry-writing can go into the making of a natural poet like Rimbaud, it may on the other hand end in mere preciousness, which in turn may harden into a convention as tyrannic as the one it was originally invented to criticize. There is more danger of this, however, in French poetry than in English. Paul Valéry has even been made a member of the French Academy, in recognition, presumably, of his formal influence on contemporary poetry. Like Cummings, although as classical in form as Cummings is romantic, he relies almost entirely on the effectiveness of images--on their power to evoke sensations and on their strangeness. To describe how night hid from Narcissus his own beloved image in the fountain, he says that night slid between him and his image like “a knife shearing a fruit in two”. What he means is that Narcissus and the image form a whole as symmetrical as the two halves of an apple before they are divided. Cummings’ images are as strange and vivid as this (“gold swarms” or “ringing with rose”, for example); but we do not suggest making an academician of Cummings or calling his most recent and more methodical phase ‘Pope-ian’ as Valéry’s last phase is known by his admirers as ‘Racinian’, after the master craftsman of the most formal period in French poetry. Modernist English poetry also imitates the French in the use of combinations of sounds to give a musical picture. This is, of course, no new thing in English poetry. Gray, one of the most traditional of all English poets, wishing to give the picture of slow and painful descent down a steep mountain, writes: As down the steep of Snowdon’s shaggy side He wound with toilsome march his long array. But this usage has never been applied except in occasional decoration, and even as such has been discouraged rather than encouraged by criticism. It may escape adverse criticism only where the combinations of sounds add musicalness without taking away from the meaning; but never where they over-represent the meaning. For example, Milton’s _Lycidas_ and Tennyson’s _Blow, Bugle, Blow_ have been praised, because the predominance of _l_’s, _m_’s, _n_’s, and _r_’s in the former and the variation of vowel sounds in the latter please the ear by acting as a musical accompaniment to the idea and cannot be regarded as in any sense containing the idea itself. The only general principle implied in such practice is that poetry should be, where possible, as pleasing to the ear as to the mind. The danger in it is that it can have the effect of allowing the thought of the poem to be controlled by its ability to please musically, as in Victorian poetry.