But when poetry began to lose caste among other cultural activities by its diversification of professional method and manners, modernist criticism found it convenient to attack this apparent lack of professional coherence as romantic, to insist on the traditional character of Poetry as an _art_, to reintroduce barbaric (or ‘classical’) time by emphasizing the element of contemporaneousness in composition. When all other activities, particularly those classified as scientific, were developing carefully relative time-senses, poetry now attempted to stabilize itself by reverting to an absolute time-sense. A relative time-sense in poetry was critically condemned as vulgar, unprofessional, extravagant, because much that was vulgar, falsely poetic and personally extravagant could in fact smuggle itself into poetry under the guise of relativity. It seemed to criticism hopeless and silly to attempt to repair the dignity of poetry by demanding greater personal integrity in the poet. The only practicable remedy seemed to be the declaration of an absolute which should bring about immediate--if artificial--order and uniformity. For this, however, an intellectual time-effort was necessary in workmanship which stultified or deformed this workmanship. The absoluteness or barbarism of the modern poet was an unhappy strained product of sophistications. It is one thing to observe historically that at such and such a period an idea of humanity, time and art, each consolidated as a mass, prevailed, and that a peculiarly fixed kind of perfection, as in Egyptian art, appeared in this period. But it is another thing to try to give such an idea of consolidation artificially to poetry: that it is creating not poetry but historical criticism. Such an attempt to submerge all separate poetic faculties in a single professional communism would by its simplicity be naturally pleasing to criticism; but the more simple in theory, the more complicated in practice. In a natural classical period the elaborate complexity of the personal poetic faculty--at any time nearly insoluble--becomes soluble because the demands made on it for conformity are superficial, formal, ritualistic. The poetic faculty does not only have to betray its complexity in an artificially classical period. The poetic faculty itself is called upon to invent the rituals by which it is to become formalized; to do the impossible, in other words--to invent simplicity with complexity. Which explains why there is more eccentric variety in this modernist classicism than ever appeared in romanticism. The early nineteenth-century poets wrote so similarly principally because, in spite of their individualistic propensities and their private purposes or passions, they were historically one in reacting against the same sort of classicism, and were never, moreover, able to get beyond serving this reaction; modernism, in the early nineteenth century, meant reaction. Modernism in the early twentieth century has