The modernist poet therefore has an exaggerated preoccupation with criticism. He has a professional conscience forced on him by the encroachments and pressure of new period activities; and this is understandable. When the prestige of any organization is curtailed--the army or navy for example--a greater internal discipline, morality and study of tactics results, a greater sophistication and up-to-date-ness. In poetry this discipline means the avoidance of all the wrongly-conceived habits and tactics of the past: poetry becomes so sophisticated that it seems to know at last how it should be written and written at the very moment. The more definitely activities like religion, science, psychology and philosophy, which once existed in poetry as loose sentiment, are specialized and confined to their proper departmental technique, the more pure and sharp the technique of poetry itself seems bound to become. It ceases to be civilized in the sense of becoming more and more cultured with loose sentiment; everything in it is particular and strict. It is, indeed, as if poetry were beginning as at the beginning; using all its civilized sophistications to inaugurate a carefully calculated, censored primitiveness. This new primitive stage, however, has been implied rather than reached in contemporary poetry. There is an increased strictness and experimenting in the construction of the poem, and an increased consciousness of what a poem should not be. But, so far, critical self-consciousness has been only a negative element in the making of poetry. It might seem that the atmosphere it has created would at least make it easier for those who are poets by nature to write well, by removing the temptation to write badly. But on the contrary it hampers them with the consideration of all the poets who have ever written or may be writing or may ever write--not only in the English language but in all languages of the world under every possible social organization. It invents a communal poetic mind which sits over the individual poet whenever he writes; it binds him with the necessity of writing correctly in extension of the tradition, the world-tradition of poetry; and so makes poetry internally an even narrower period activity than it is forced to be by outside influences. In consequence the modernist generation is already over before its time, having counted itself out and swallowed itself up by its very efficiency--a true ‘lost generation’. Already, its most ‘correct’ writers, such as T. S. Eliot, have become classics over the heads of the plain reader, having solved the problem of taste, or period-fashion, so strictly and accurately by themselves and having been so critically severe with themselves beforehand, that their ‘acceptance’ by contemporary or future plain readers has been made superfluous. Creation and critical judgement being made one act, a work has no future history with readers; it is ended when it is ended.