The most serious flaw in poetic modernism has been its attachment to originality. The modernist poet has not been able to forsake originality however directly it might contradict the classical idea of discipline; and the effect of discipline has therefore only been to make originality more original. As originality increased and as modernist poetry consequently became more and more romantic, the contradiction between it and modernist criticism was intensified. Criticism became more dogmatic and unreal, poetry more eccentric and chaotic. Classicism and originality could only be reconciled in the invention of an original type, were this possible, of a form entirely new, peculiar, particular, uncommon, and yet universal, general, common; when once invented, as old as the hills. But obviously the invention of an original type in personal embodiments can get no further than an earnest caricature of the ordinary, as in Joyce’s Leopold Blum, or T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and other low types; no further certainly in mechanical embodiments. Originality becomes an attack on a degenerated ordinary. The problem was further complicated by the insistence (as in Hulme) on the ‘direct communication’ by which originality was to make itself effective; direct communication referring to an immediate ideal intelligibility. But since language had been tainted by false experiences, much of the energy of this originality had to be devoted to an attack on the ordinary language of communication; and direct communication, like the original type, could get no further than an earnest caricature of ordinary language. This is from Mr. Eliot’s most recent stage: DUSTY: Do you know London well, Mr. Krumpacker? KLIPSTEIN: No, we have never been here before. KRUMPACKER: We hit this town last night for the first time. KLIPSTEIN: And I certainly hope it won’t be the last time. DORIS: You like London, Mr. Klipstein? KRUMPACKER: Do we like London? Do we like London! Do we like London!! Eh, what Klip? KLIPSTEIN: Say, Miss--er--uh! London’s swell. We like London fine. KRUMPACKER: Perfectly slick. DUSTY: Why don’t you come and live here then? But caricature is romantic. Miss Edith Sitwell’s poetry is perhaps the clearest instance of the romantic caricature of language that critical classicism is obliged to take under its wing. Another aspect of the same general flaw is the incompatibility of the ‘things’ which were supposed to be revealed in the direct communication (‘things’ in which apparently the first principle inheres) with the talent of the artist to see things ‘as no one else sees them’. The barbaric absolute, the divine source of things, wherever it has prevailed naturally, has always been marked by a penetrating obviousness. The pyramids are penetratingly obvious, so much so that they nearly make the absolute synonymous with obviousness.