In discussing the difficulties which exist between contemporary poetry and the contemporary reader, it is necessary to discuss also the difficulties which the contemporary poet has had to face if he has wished to write as a contemporary--to be included in the generation to which by birth and personal sympathy he historically belongs. As the poet, if a true poet, is one by nature and not by effort, he must be seen writing as unconsciously as regards time as his ordinary reader lives. For one remembers the date only by compulsion; no one really feels older to-day than he felt yesterday. The relation of a poet’s poetry to Poetry as a whole and to the time in which it is written is the problem of criticism; and if this problem becomes part of the making of a poem, it adds to the unconscious consciousness of the poet when he is in the act of composition an alien element, a _conscious_ consciousness which we may call the ‘historical effort’. In reading poetry in which this alien element appears one must indeed make the same historical effort if the full intention of the poem is to be appreciated. Therefore the plain reader is likely to prefer to modernist poetry of a past period, in which the historical effort, wherever it has been present, has been absorbed or neutralized by the automatic passing of the period into history. The greatest difficulty is obviously to define ‘poetry as a whole’ from the point of view of a _temporary_ personal consciousness--that of the poet or reader--attempting to connect itself with a long-term impersonal consciousness, an evolving professional sense. Yet it is easier to do this now than formerly, since poetry, which was once an all-embracing human activity, has been narrowed down by the specialization of other general activities, such as religion and the arts and sciences, into a technical branch of culture of the most limited kind. It has been changed from a ‘humanity’ into an ‘art’; it has attempted to discipline itself with a professionalized criticism which was not needed in the time of the balladists or in primitive societies where poetry went hand in hand with magical religion. Modern civilization seems to demand that the poet should justify himself not only by writing poems but furthermore by proving with each poem the contemporary legitimacy of poetry itself--the professional authority of the term ‘poet’ in fact. And though in a few rare cases the poet may succeed even now in writing by nature without historical or professional effort, he is in general too conscious of the forced professionalization of poetry to be able to avoid justifying himself and his work professionally, that is, critically, as a point of honour. Yet if he does admit poetry to be only one of the specialized, professionalized activities of his period, like music, painting, radiology, aerostatics, the cinema, modern tennis or morbid psychology, he must see it as a very small patch on the time-chart,