So it is that when Wordsworth and Coleridge were producing their best poetry the plain reader would have nothing to do with them but was reading dull writers such as Shenstone and Meikle, who are now mere names in literary history; when Keats and Shelley were writing their best he was reading Thomas Moore and Samuel Rogers; when he should have been reading the early Tennyson he was reading Mrs. Hemans and Martin Tupper; when he should have been reading Whitman he was reading Robert Montgomery and the later Tennyson. And so on to the present day: when even the plain reader trying to keep up with the poetry of his time will be more likely to choose a poet such as the American Carl Sandburg or the English John Drinkwater, belonging to a dead movement which has reached its limit and will expire with the death of its authors, than one belonging to a live movement (such as E. E. Cummings or John Crowe Ransom) which asks him to risk his critical judgement. Let us compare a poem of Carl Sandburg’s, who tried to create a democratic poetry in the spirit of the American Middle West by using free verse, slang and sentimental lower-class subjects, with a poem of John Crowe Ransom’s, who, without making a sensational appeal to the locality in which he lives or to a particular social class, yet has a colloquial dignity and grace which it is possible to call Southern and a quality in his poetry that is definitely aristocratic. Strangely enough, it is Sandburg whose work is in the natural course of events shelved among the dull relics of dead movements and Ransom, though his poems are a formal and careful evasion of violence, who represents poetic modernism to the plain reader--which is the same to him as sensationalism. Here is a poem of Carl Sandburg’s, then, especially designed to match the intelligence-level of the plain reader and present him with no allusions that may mystify him. MAMIE Mamie beat her head against the bars of a little Indian town and dreamed of romance and big things off somewhere the way the railroad trains all ran. She could see the smoke of the engines get lost down where the streaks of steel flashed in the sun and when the newspapers came in on the morning mail she knew there was a big Chicago far off, where all the trains ran. She got tired of the barber shop boys and the post office chatter and the church gossip and the old pieces the band played on the Fourth of July and Decoration Day. And sobbed at her fate and beat her head against the bars and was going to kill herself, When the thought came to her that if she was going to die she might as well die struggling for a clutch of romance among the streets of Chicago. She has a job now at six dollars a week in the basement of the Boston Store. And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is