Language itself is an accepted code: and if the poet is really to be the man who cannot accept what others do, he ought to begin squarely at the beginning and have nothing to do with their conventional jargon. But let the poet begin squarely at the beginning in order to discover whether there is anything to accept and the cry will be immediately raised: “Language is an accepted code.” It is easy in any period to look back with satisfaction on the growth of language and, for instance, to accuse the early nineteenth century of dullness and conservatism for being so slow to recognize the services to the refreshment of poetry rendered by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. But it is natural for every period to regard itself as the final stage of everything that has come before it, so that it can only imagine new poets, of an originality equal to that of Wordsworth and others in their own day, as writing now exactly as they wrote then. The same is true in music: the charge of freakishness has been brought by critics in their time against Debussy, Wagner and even Brahms. Literary critics who bring charges of freakishness against modernist poets find it possible to tolerate modernism in contemporary music; as conservative musical critics will not be so hard on modernism in literature--the proprietary interest in their medium is not threatened in either case. In the midst of this conflict stands the plain reader, the timid victim of orthodox criticism on the one hand, and unorthodox poetry on the other (unorthodox criticism overlooks him entirely, which is perhaps the most severe affront he has to bear). His attitude toward poetry has, therefore, to be one of self-defence. He must be cautious in his choice of what he reads. He must not make a fool of himself by reading anything in which he may be called on to rely on his own critical opinion. He must not read anything which will be a waste of time, anything not likely to last for a long time, not destined to be a classic. Forced to be on his guard, he will be inclined to emphasize the value of the ‘practical’ things which are not poetry, such as time in the quantitative, financial sense; also to develop a shrewd sense of the ‘practical’ value of poetry: he will avoid new poetry about which no final judgement has been made, whatever its emotional appeal may be--poetry that seems too different from the poetry that has lasted to be a good investment, poetry likely to prove a dead movement. His poem must not only be plain, it must correspond with what he accepts, by reputation, as classics. And to a certain extent he is right in this, for there is a great deal of waste material left behind by dead movements in poetry; but only to a certain extent, for a great many really bad poems also survive as classics because of the plain reader’s literary conservatism: he will prefer an unoriginal but undisturbing poem to an original but disturbing one.