X. “... persistent air?...” Y. “No, no: Persistence, and I mean the giggling air; I meant to talk about the everlasting life, Until you muddled me and made me stop.” Miss Stein’s tidy processes must also be distinguished from the deliberate untidying of language to give it more meaning, more history, more dramatic excitement, as in James Joyce’s _Ulysses_: The Quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with haste, quake, quack. Door closed. Cell. Day. They list. Three. They. I you he they. Come, mess. This needs only to be accurately read in the rather complicated context, to be tidied into its context, so to speak, to make obvious sense. Even the following poem by E. E. Cummings is neither pure nor abstract, but realistic, wilfully linked to history. life hurl my yes, crumbles hand (ful released conarefetti) ev eryflitter, inga, where mil (lions of aflickf) litter ing brightmillion ofS hurl; edindodg: ing whom are Eyes shy-dodge is bright cruMbshandful, quick-hurl edinwho Is flittercrumbs, fluttercrimbs are floatfallin,g; allwhere: a: crimflitterinish, is arefloatsis ingfallall! mil, shy, milbrightlions my (hurl flicker handful in) dodging are shybrigHteyes is crum bs(alll)if, ey, Es[2] It is an attempt to represent, in the manner of the early futurists, the book of life torn into a million fragments as small as confetti, the bread of life crumbled nervously under the disorganizing influence of shy bright eyes, bright like the million stars. A most romantic theme and a most romantic treatment, but Mr. Cummings was never apprenticed to the new barbarism; he is a freebooter. One way the modernist poet has of keeping romantically alive in this classicism, whether or not he goes as far as Gertrude Stein’s automatism, is by carefully avoiding a theme. When Mr. Allen Tate says, for instance, in his introduction to Hart Crane’s _White Buildings_ that Mr. Crane has not yet found a theme to match his poetic vision, he is really explaining that Mr. Crane is preserving his vision from a theme, that his vision is reacting romantically against contemporary classicism. Hart Crane’s poems reveal many of the qualities peculiar to enforced romantics: it is noticeable that Mr. Tate allies him with other enforced romantics--Poe, Rimbaud, Edith Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens--though Mr. Crane has sufficient dignity to be able to dispense with such literary support. Much of the intensity of his poetry--intensity often protracted into strain--is due to the conflict between discipline and originality. The result is a compromise in the mysticism of rhetoric: Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe. O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, Bequeath us to no earthly shore until Is answered in the vortex of our grave The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.