romance and big things and real dreams that never go smash. Perhaps this poem will show why the plain reader prefers bad contemporary poetry to good contemporary poetry: the former can give him as much innocent enjoyment as a good short story or his newspaper or an up-to-date jazz orchestra, the latter, because it is good yet too novel for any of the ordinary tests for a Classic to apply to it, demands an effort of criticism which robs him of his power of enjoying it. Poetry, like fashions in clothes, has to be ‘accepted’ before the man in the street will patronize it. Next to the permanently ‘accepted’ literature, the plain reader places literature of dead movements of his own time, literature that does not have to be accepted. ‘Modern’ poetry means to him poetry that will pass; he has a good-humoured tolerance of it because he does not have to take it seriously. ‘Modernist’ poetry is his way of describing the contemporary poetry that perplexes him and that he is obliged to take seriously without knowing whether it is to be accepted or not. The cautiousness of the plain reader’s opinion creates an intermediary stage between himself and this poetry: the literary critic. However, such public authority is usually slower-acting and slower-witted than private taste. For, thinking the plain reader more stupid than he really is, the literary critic is in his turn cautious in what he recommends to him, being anxious not to earn his disapproval. Therefore much modernist poetry has been confined to limited editions for connoisseurs whose private taste is not dependent on the literary critic; which further antagonizes the plain reader, since whatever is patronized by a _few_ seems self-condemned as a high-brow performance for a snobbish cult. So the plain reader gets the impression that this poetry was never meant to be common literature and so is only too glad to leave it alone; and it never reaches him except in pieces torn out of their context by the literary critic, for ridicule, to justify his ignoring them. This vicious circle repeats itself when the modernist poet, left without any public but the highly trained literary connoisseur, does not hesitate to embody in his poems remote literary references which are unintelligible to a wider public and which directly antagonize it. The following is an example of the sort of poetry which, because it is too good, has to be temporarily brushed aside as a literary novelty. CAPTAIN CARPENTER Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime Put on his pistols and went riding out But had got wellnigh nowhere at that time Till he fell in with ladies in a rout. It was a pretty lady and all her train That played with him so sweetly but before An hour she’d taken a sword with all her main And twined him of his nose forever more.