The only excuse to be made for those who once found H.D. ‘incomprehensible’ is that her work was so thin, so poor, that its emptiness seemed ‘perfection’, its insipidity to be concealing a ‘secret’, its superficiality so ‘glacial’ that it created a false ‘classical’ atmosphere. She was never able, in her temporary immortality, to reach a real climax in any of her poems. I can almost follow the note where it touched this slender tree and the next answered-- and the next. Shall I let myself be caught in my own light? shall I let myself be broken in my own heat? or shall I cleft the rock as of old and break my fire with its surface? All that they told was a story of feeble personal indecision; and her immortality came to an end so soon that her bluff was never called. All dead movements are focussed on the problem of style. To the Imagists style meant the ‘use of the language of common speech’, but in a very careful way, as a paint-box. Language in poetry should not be treated as if it were a paint-box, or the poem as if it were something to be hung on the wall, so to speak. The reader should enter the life of the poem and submit himself to its conditions in order to know it as it really is; instead of making it enter his life as a symbol having no private reality, only the reality it gets by reflection from his world. Style may be defined as that old-fashioned element of sympathy with the reader which makes it possible for the poem to be used as an illustration to the text of the reader’s experience; and much modernist poetry may be said to be literally without style, at least in so far as it is possible for poetry to make a radical change in a tradition within the memory of that tradition. So the modernist poet does not have to issue a programme declaring his intentions toward the reader or to issue an announcement of tactics. He does not have to call himself an individualist (as the Imagist poet did) or a mystic (as the poet of the Anglo-Irish dead movement did) or a naturalist (as the poet of the Georgian dead movement did). He does not have to describe or docket himself for the reader, because the important part of poetry is now not the personality of the poet as embodied in a poem, which is its style, but the personality of the poem itself, that is, its quality of independence from both the reader and the poet, once the poet has separated it from his personality by making it complete--a new and self-explanatory creature.