Stripped of its imitated antiqueness, the substance of all this could be given simply as follows: “It would be false to identify the Christ of the sentimentalists with the Christ of the Gospels. So far from being a meek or effeminate character He strikes us as a very _manly_ man, and His disciples, fishermen and others, must have reverenced Him for His manly qualities as much as for His spiritual teaching. His action in driving the money-changers from the Temple with a scourge of cords is a proof of this. So is His courageous action when confronted by the soldiers of the High Priest sent to arrest Him--He mockingly enquired why they had not dared arrest Him previously when He walked about freely in the city of Jerusalem, and consented to offer no resistance only if His disciples were allowed to escape. The Last Supper was surely a very different scene from the Church Sacrament derived from it, where a full-fed priest condescendingly officiates; it was a banquet of friends of which the Dearest Friend was Our Saviour.” Here we see that the poeticalization has in fact weakened the historical argument. By using the ballad setting Mr. Pound has made the fishermen of Galilee into North-country sailors of the Patrick Spens tradition and given them sentiments more proper to the left wing of the Y.M.C.A. The extravagant use of metaphor and simile in poetry is thus seen to be governed by the necessity of making a poem of this sort equal the prose summary which really is dictating it. This practice is founded on two fallacies, one of which follows from the other: the first, that the poet is not saying what he means but something _like_ what he means in prettier language than he uses to himself about it; the second, from which the first is deduced, that the ideas of truth in which poetry deals are not agreeable in themselves but that a distinction is to be made by the poet between what is pretty and not pretty, poetical and not poetical. When, therefore, bare, undressed ideas are found in poetry instead of the rhetorical devices by which poets try to ‘put over’ their ideas, such poetry is naturally accused of being didactic. Another way of saying this is that the poet has cut off all his communications. As a matter of fact all that has happened is that he has made the poem out of the poem itself: its final form is identical in terms with its preliminary form in the poet’s mind, uncorrupted by hints to the reader, familiar asides to make it less terrifying, and flattering conceits to enliven, to entertain and to display the poet’s virtuosity. But it is almost impossible for a poet who does really mean what he says to make the critic-reader believe that he does: the more he means what he says and the more earnest he is to make this clear, the more he will be thought to be concealing his meaning in clever evasions called ‘obscurity’.