The ‘freakishness’ and abnormality of feeling with which the modernist poet is often charged, it needs to be explained, are not due to the fact that this is not an age for poetry and that therefore to write poetry at all is a literary affectation. The trouble is rather that ordinary modern life is full of the stock-feelings and situations with which traditional poetry has continually fed popular sentiments; that the commonplaces of everyday speech are merely the relics of past poetry; so that the only way for a modern poet to have an original feeling or experience that may eventually become literature is to have it outside of literature. It is the general reading public, indeed, which gets its excitement from literature and literary feelings instead of from life. To appreciate this fully it must be realized that it is always the poets who are the real psychologists, that it is they who break down antiquated literary definitions of people’s feelings and make them or try to make them self-conscious about formerly ignored or obscure mental processes; for which an entirely new vocabulary has to be invented. The appearance of freakishness generally means: poetry is not in a “poetical” period, it is in a psychological period. It is not trying to say “Things often felt but ne’er so well expressed” but to discover what it is we are really feeling. One of the first modernist poets to feel the need of a clearness and accuracy in feelings and their expression so minute, so more than scientific, as to make of poetry a higher sort of psychology, was Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Catholic poet writing in the ’eighties. We call him a modernist in virtue of his extraordinary strictness in the use of words and the unconventional notation he used in setting them down so that _they had to be understood as he meant them to be, or understood not at all_ (this is the crux of the whole question of the intelligibility of ‘difficult’ poetry). Hopkins cannot be accused of trying to antagonize the reading public. In 1883 he wrote about the typographical means he used in order to explain an unfamiliar metre and an unfamiliar grammar: “There must be some marks. Either I must invent a notation throughout, as in music, or else I must only mark where the reader is likely to mistake, and for the present this is what I shall do.” In 1885 he wrote again: “This is my difficulty, what marks to use and when to use them: they are so much needed and yet so objectionable. About punctuation my mind is clear: I can give a rule for everything I write myself, and even for other people, though they might not agree with me perhaps.” These lines from a sonnet written in his peculiar metre will show to what an extent he is a modernist.