THE refusal of the reading public to spend time on contemporary poetry can to a great extent be excused when we recall the decrepitude to which poetry was reduced by the death of the great Victorians and the survival of too many of the small ones. By domesticating itself in order to be received into the homes of the ordinary reading public and by allowing its teeth to be drawn so that it would no longer frighten, poetry had grown so tame, so dull, that it ceased to compete with other forms of social entertainment, especially with the new religion of sport. Callow or learned echoes of accepted poetry have now become as unattractive to the plain reader as the poetry he would classify as dangerous; and he does not realize that the alarming ‘new’ poetry with which he is at present surrounded is at least acting as a deterrent against the production of old-fashioned trash. For modernist poetry, if it is nothing else, is an ironic criticism of false literary survivals. The feebleness with which poetry survived the poets who had made it feeble caused a general depression in the market-interest of all poetry except for academic or devotional purposes. To choose between such lines of John Drinkwater’s as: O fool, o only great In pride unhallowed, O most blind of heart. Confusion but more dark confusion bred, Grief nurtured grief, I cried aloud and said, “Through trackless ways the soul of man is hurled, No sign upon the forehead of the skies, No beacon, and no chart Are given to him, and the inscrutable world But mocks his scars and fills his mouth with dust.” and of Marianne Moore’s (_To a Steam Roller_) as: The illustration is nothing to you without the application. You lack half wit. You crush all particles down into close conformity, and then walk back and forth on them. Sparkling chips of rock are crushed down to the level of the parent block. Were not “impersonal judgment in aesthetic matters a physical impossibility,” you might fairly achieve it. As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one’s attending you, but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.