In the first place this is a ballad, and the plain reader will insist that a ballad in the old style like _Chevy Chace_, or _Sir Patrick Spens_, or the Robin Hood Ballads may be imitated by a modern hand, but imitated with an affected simplicity like that of _The Schooner Hesperus_ or of _The Ancient Mariner_. _Captain Carpenter_ makes use of an old ballad metre and of an archaic vocabulary; the poet even goes so far as to imitate the typography of the first ballads set down in print, by omitting all incidental punctuation. But this is not enough for the plain reader: the poet has committed the unforgivable modernist sin of allowing the audience to have more than one possible reaction to a single poem. Indeed to such a poem as this a variety of reactions are possible; and it is the balance of these various possible reactions that should form the reader’s critical attitude toward the poem. But the ordinary reader does not want to have a critical attitude, only a simple pleasure or pain reaction. He does not want to understand poetry so much as to have poetical feelings. He wants to know definitely whether he is to laugh or cry over Captain Carpenter’s story and if he is not given a satisfactory clue he naturally doubts the sincerity of the poet, he becomes suspicious of his seriousness and leaves him alone. The plain reader makes two general categories for poetry; the realistic (the true), which is supposed to put the raw poetry of life felt dumbly by him into a literary form, a register of the nobler sentiments of practical life; and the non-realistic or romantic (the untrue), which covers his life of fantasia and desires, the world that he is morally obliged to treat as unreal. Now this particular poem is based on an interplay between these two worlds in which fact and fancy have equal value as truth. Captain Carpenter is both the realistic hero or knight-errant, who is bit by bit shorn of his strength until there is nothing left but his hollow boasts, and the fairy-tale hero who is actually reduced bit by bit to a tongue; and the double meaning has to be kept in mind throughout. The ordinary psychology, therefore, of the reader trained to look for a single reaction in himself is upset, and modernist poetry becomes the nightmare from which he tries to protect his sanity.