Criticism has been so busy talking about criticism (criticism has been so philosophical, that is) that it has had little either relevant or helpful to say about poetry itself--not poetry as a philosophical abstraction but as _poems_ and as the poets, who are potential poems. Though objecting to the romantic disorganization in which there are ‘beauties’ instead of beauty, it has nevertheless had no absolute canon of beauty to offer to the classical poetry it has wished to inspire, but only an undifferentiated satire of beauties and a counsel to suppress the obvious because the obvious is often romantically, personally and therefore sentimentally beautiful. It has insisted that a fixed dogmatic abstract beauty is the only possible system for poetic perfection and yet has had nothing better to offer than a few elementary suggestions and clues such as that ‘golden lad’ is a beautiful classical phrase and ‘golden youth’ a beautiful romantic phrase (Hulme). “The thing has got so bad now”, wrote Hulme, “that a poem which is all dry and hard, a properly Classical poem, would not be considered poetry at all. They cannot see that accurate description is a legitimate object of verse.” Hulme was asking a forward-looking twentieth-century generation to arm itself against romanticism, an early nineteenth-century bogey, or against the Renaissance bogey itself. He wanted to oppose a sophisticated levity to the idiot-headed seriousness of romanticism, a classical fancy to a romantic imagination; but in practice the opposition was of a heavy, rigid, originally dull seriousness to a rather ingenuous sometimes successful often droll though perhaps eventually dull seriousness. “Wonder must cease to be wonder”, Hulme complained: but in the beginning while there is wonder there is always the chance of a surprise success in romanticism. In classicism, which sets out with a very limited, certain intention, there is never the chance of success in this sense. If romantic freakishness generally quiets down to triteness and is for this reason dull, classical freakishness is fixed and eternal from the outset; and thus eternally dull.