When examined, _Captain Carpenter_ reads innocently enough. There are a few literary echoes of the old ballads, such as the use of _twined_ for ‘robbed’ and _jangling_ for ‘making a discordant noise’, but for the most part they are very familiar archaisms. There are also references to the old ballads, typically eighteenth century words like _rout_ for ‘dance’, Victorian expressions like _with gentle apology and touch refined_, and unmistakably modern usages like _the shinny part, like any tub_. But this mixture of styles is only an amiable satire of styles (the same sort of satire more violently employed in prose by James Joyce in the second part of his _Ulysses_ against successive period styles) which only adds to the charm of Captain Carpenter’s character, thus seen as a legendary figure of many successive ages. But the chief feeling against the poem would be that Captain Carpenter is not an easily defined or felt subject, neither a particular historical figure nor yet a complete allegory. He confounds the emotions of the reader instead of simplifying them and provides no answer to the one question which the reader will ask himself: “Who or what, particularly, is Captain Carpenter?” The chief condition the reader makes about the poetry he reads is that it shall not be difficult. For if it is difficult it means that he must think in unaccustomed ways, and thinking to the plain reader, beyond the range necessary for the practical purposes of living, is unsettling and dangerous; he is afraid of his own mind. The poet is expected to respect this fear in the plain reader if only because he himself is supposed to have a mind much more obsessed with imaginative terrors. The difference is that the poet is on intimate terms with these terrors or mental ghosts; but how intimate the plain reader is unwilling to recognize. A certain convention has existed until recently restraining the poet from troubling the public with the more unsettling forms of thought, which are vaguely known to be involved in the making of poetry but not supposed to be evident in the reading of poetry. Caliban, for example, is just such a mental ghost of Shakespeare’s. But by giving him a physical personality in a drama (‘to airy nothing, a local habitation and a name’) he makes him a fairy-story character, more realistic, less real. The modernist poet at his best neither conceals his private mind nor sends Calibans or Hamlets out upon the stage while he remains behind the scenes. His mind, if we may so put it, puts in a personal appearance; and it is the shock of this contact that the plain reader cannot bear. CHAPTER V MODERNIST POETRY AND DEAD MOVEMENTS