This brings us to the crucial complication in the adjustments to be made between poetry itself and the reader of poetry, who is unable to have a free and straightforward personal intimacy with a poem but is continually haunted by the idea of the presence of the poet in the poem. Between the reader and the poem therefore there is this embarrassment caused by the reader’s awareness of the poet. He is not at his ease with the poem: it is never entirely his own--he reads the poem with the uncomfortable feeling that the poet’s eyes are on him and that he will be expected to say something when he is finished. The reader cannot get over the idea that the poet had designs on him in writing the poem, to which he must respond. With traditional poetry the reader is less embarrassed because, although he is aware of the poet in a formal way, he is not made particularly self-conscious by him. He knows what to expect, since traditional poetry is formed with an eye to its serviceability as reading matter. We may compare traditional poetry in this sense with the conservative, well-appointed restaurant where the customer is placed in a soft light, the waiters address him in a respectful monotone and he is left to himself to eat. Modern poetry of the dead-movement sort, of which Imagism is a complete example, bears a resemblance to the ‘artistic’ tea-room where the customer finds himself besieged by orange curtains, Japanese prints, painted furniture, art-china instead of the plain white service of the ordinary restaurant, and conversational waitresses in smocks who give the personal touch with a cultured accent. As a result, the plain eater goes back to his corner restaurant and the tea-room becomes a dead movement. _Modernist_ as distinct from _modern_ poetry is, at its most uncompromising, neither the corner restaurant nor the tea-room. It seems inaccessible to the plain reader: the approach to it is like the front of a private residence and he is afraid that he is expected to lunch personally with the poet. So in this case again he goes back to the corner restaurant where he can at least reduce the personality of the waiters to a minimum. Actually, if the plain reader could conquer his initial self-consciousness before it he would find an interior in which it should be possible to be on completely unembarrassed and impersonal terms with poetry: he would find himself alone with it. But this is only theoretically possible. For the plain reader does not really want to be left all alone with poetry. The mental ghosts, which only poets are supposed to have natural commerce with, assail him. The real discomfort to the reader in modernist poetry is the absence of the poet as his protector from the imaginative terrors lurking in it.