a mere dot; because society allows less and less space for poetry in its organisation. The only way that this dot on the time-chart can provide itself with artificial dignity and space is through historical depth; if its significance in a particular period is no greater than the size of a dot on the period’s time-chart, then to make itself an authoritative expression of this period it must extend this dot into the past, it must make a historical straight line of it. Poetry becomes the tradition of poetry. The tradition of poetry, or rather of the art of poetry, then, is the formal organization which the modernist poet finds himself serving as an affiliated member. He must not only have a personal capacity for poetry; that is merely an apprentice certificate. He must also have a master’s sense of the historical experience of poetry--of its past functions and usefulness, its present fitness and possibilities. He must have a science of the ‘values’ of poetry, a scale of bad and good, false and true, ephemeral and lasting; a theory of the tradition of poetry in which successive period-poetries are historically judged either favourably or unfavourably and in which his own period-poetry is carefully adjusted to satisfy the values which the tradition is believed to be continuously evolving. As this tradition is seen as a logical historical development, these values, in their most recent statement, are considered, if observed, sufficient to produce the proper poetic expression of the age. So the poet has no longer to make adjustment to his social environment, as the hero-celebrating bard of the _Beowulf_ time or the religious poet of ancient Egypt had, but critical adjustments to a special tradition of poetic values; and to his own period only an indirect adjustment through the past, the past seen as the poetry of the past narrowing down to the poetry of the present.