Apart from faults of taste ... affectations such as where the hills are ‘as a stallion stalwart very-violet-sweet’ or some perversion of human feeling, as, for instance, the “nostrils’ relish of incense along the sanctuary side”, or “the Holy Ghost with warm breast and with ah! bright wings”, which repel my sympathy more than do all the rude shocks of his purely artistic wantonness--apart from these there are faults of style which the reader must have courage to face. For these blemishes are of such quality and magnitude as to deny him even a hearing from those who love a continuous literary decorum. Why cannot what Dr. Bridges calls a fault of taste, an affectation, in the description of hills as ‘a stallion stalwart very-violet-sweet’ be, with the proper sympathy for Hopkins’ enthusiasm, appreciated as a phrase reconciling the two seemingly opposed qualities of mountains, their male, animal-like roughness and strength and at the same time their ethereal quality under soft light for which the violet in the gentle eye of the horse makes exactly the proper association? What Dr. Bridges and other upholders of ‘literary decorum’ object to most in a poet is not as a matter of fact either “faults of taste” or “faults of style” (in Hopkins supposedly consisting chiefly in the clipping of grammar to suit the heavily stressed metre) but a daring that makes the poet socially rather than artistically objectionable. As a reviewer in the _Times’ Literary Supplement_ states the grievance against modernist poetry: It is as if its object were to express that element only in the poet’s nature by virtue of which he feels himself an alien in the universe, or at least an alien from what he takes to be the universe acknowledged by the rest of mankind. But the truth is that ‘the rest of mankind’ is for the most part totally unaware of the universe and constantly depends on the poet to give it a second-hand sense of the universe through language. Because this language has been accepted ready-made by “the rest of mankind” without understanding the reasons for it, it becomes, by ‘progress’, stereotyped and loses its meaning; and the poet is called upon again to remind people what the universe really looks and feels like, that is, what language means. If he does this conscientiously he must use language in a fresh way or even, if the poetical language has grown too stale and there are few pioneers before him, invent new language. But, if he does, he will be certain to antagonize for a while those who keep asking poetry to do their more difficult thinking for them; for they have a proprietary affection for the old language, however meaningless it may have become, and do not realize that it must be brought up to date or, if need be, entirely recast if poetry is to do its job properly. How irate they become can be seen from a further statement by the same reviewer.