But even with Death the modernist poet is in the main not quite at his clownish best because of his awareness of its bourgeois applications: it is very difficult to deal with Death and, considering its history, not treat it as a religious conviction--to treat it as a dead-earnest joke. A similar difficulty exists with Love, the twin bourgeois conviction to Death. In Love even the most modernist of modernist poets is bourgeois. He is narrowly idealistic and therefore incapable, except in rare cases, of making it another dead-earnest joke: The clown in this feat is afraid of not landing on his legs. The most he trusts himself to is a few ribald high jumps. CHAPTER X CONCLUSION So far our sympathy with modernist poetry has been contemporary sympathy. We have been writing as it were from the middle of the modernist movement in order to justify it if possible against criticism which was not proper to it, which belonged to the preceding stage in poetry-making and which should have passed as the stage passed. It is now possible to reach a position where the modernist movement itself can be looked at with historical (as opposed to contemporary) sympathy as a stage in poetry that is to pass in turn, or may have already passed, leaving behind only such work as did not belong too much to history. The apparent contradictions that will occur in this chapter and seem to gainsay the emphatic sympathy of former chapters will be found to be caused by this superseding of contemporary sympathy by historical sympathy. As nothing can remain contemporary for very long, we were obliged to assume this position if our criticism was to stand before rather than behind its subject.