Perhaps more than anything else characteristic modernist poetry is a declaration of the independence of the poem. This means first of all a change in the poet’s attitude toward the poem: a new sense has arisen of the poem’s rights comparable with the new sense in modern times of the independence of the child, and a new respect for the originality of the poem as for the originality of the child. One no longer tries to keep a child in its place by suppressing its personality or laughing down its strange questions, so that it turns into a rather dull and ineffective edition of the parent; and modernist poetry is likewise freeing the poem of stringent nursery rules and, instead of telling it exactly what to do, is encouraging it to do things, even queer things, by itself. The poet pledges himself to take them seriously on the principle that the poem, being a new and mysterious form of life in comparison with himself, has more to teach him than he it. It is a popular superstition that the poet is the child. It is not the poet, but the poem: the most that the poet can do is to be a wise, experimenting parent. Experiment, however, may be interpreted in two ways. In the first sense it is a delicate and constantly alert state of expectancy directed towards the discovery of something of which some slight clue has been given; and system in it means only the constant shifting and adjustment of the experimenter as the unknown thing becomes more and more known: system is the readiness to change system. The important thing in the whole process is the initial clue, or, in old-fashioned language, the inspiration. The real scientist should have an equal power of genius with the poet, with the difference that the scientist is inspired to discover things which already are (his results are facts), while the poet is inspired to discover things which are made by his discovery of them (his results are not statements about things already known to exist, or knowledge, but truths, things which existed before only as potential truth). Experiment in the second sense is the use of a system for its own sake and brings about, whether in science or poetry, no results but those possible to the system. As it is only the scientific genius who is capable of using experiment in the first of these senses, and as the personnel of science must be necessarily far more numerous than that of poetry, experiment in the second sense is the general method of the labouring, as against the inventive, side of science, perhaps properly so.