There has been, we see, a short and very concentrated period of carefully disciplined and self-conscious poetry. It has been followed by a pause in which no poetry of any certainty is appearing at all, an embarrassed pause after an arduous and erudite stock-taking. The next stage is not clear. But it is not impossible that there will be a resumption of less eccentric, less strained, more critically unconscious poetry, purified however by this experience of historical effort. In the period just passing no new era was begun. A climax was merely reached in criticism by a combination of sophistication and a desire for a new enlightened primitiveness. Wherever attempts at sheer newness in poetry were made they merely ended in dead movements. Yet the new feeling in criticism did achieve something. It is true in the more extreme cases that by turning into a critical philosophization of itself, poetry ceased to be poetry: it became poetically introspective philosophy. But this was perhaps necessary before poetry could be normal without being vulgar, and deal naturally with truth without being trite. The abstract nature of poetry in this time became more important than the poetic nature of the poet; the poet tried to write something better than poetry, that is, the poetry of poetry. This laboratory phase, this complex interrelation of metaphysics and psychology blighted the creative processes wherever it was the predominant influence in the actual moments of writing. Compare the highly organized nature of Mr. Eliot’s criticism in its present stage with the gradual disintegration of his poetry since the _Waste Land_. The poem, indeed, gained a certain degree of freedom by the weakening of the personal relationship between it and its creator, but this freedom was, on the other hand, compromised by the forced relation of the poem to the historical period to which it accidentally belonged. The time-element was made the foundation of composition, and any poem which could not be related to its period could not be said to have any immediate critical value, and critical value was the only value by which poetry could become current. The only virtue in this critical tyranny has been to make the world in general more conscious of poetry in a specialized sense and more conversant with its processes and problems.