The sense of modernism is further perverted by the existence of a middle position between the conservative flank and the radical flank--the intelligent, plain-man point of view. This middle view, this middle population, we might say, is the prop and advocate of civilization; and the idea of civilization as a steady human progress does not exclude the idea of a modernist, _historically_ forward poetry. A possible rapprochement exists, therefore, between this middle population, to whom poetry is just one of the many instruments of progress, and that type of contemporary poetical writing which advertises itself by its historical progressiveness. It is difficult, in attempting to make clear some of the aspects of genuine poetic modernism, to avoid appealing to the progressiveness of this middle population, that is, making poetry a historical branch of civilization, and to avoid likewise the appearance of condoning that perverted modernism which takes advantage of a false idea of ‘advance’ to justify feeble eccentricity. The real task is, in fact, not to explain modernism in poetry but to separate false modernism, or faith in history, from genuine modernism, or faith in the immediate, the _new_ doings of poems (or poets or poetry) as not necessarily derived from history. Modernist poetry as such should mean no more than fresh poetry, more poetry, poetry based on honest invention rather than on conscientious imitation of the time-spirit. But honest invention and affectation of originality can both be confused in the single term ‘modernism’. Francis Thompson, in his essay on Coleridge, complained that “the charge of affectation has been hurled in turn at the outset of their careers against Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson and Browning. Wordsworth wrote simple diction and his simplicity was termed affected; Shelley gorgeous diction and his gorgeousness was affected; Keats rich diction and his richness was affected; Tennyson cunning diction and his cunning was affected; Browning rugged diction and his ruggedness was affected. Why Coleridge was called affected passes the wit of man, except it be that he did not write like Pope or the elegant Mr. Rogers--or, indeed, that all critical tradition would be outraged if a mere recent poet were not labelled with the epithetic made and provided for him by wise critical precedent.” Now Thompson, who was writing to defend his own poems against the charge, was a somewhat affected writer himself, and it suited him to hint that the very fact that a poet is called ‘affected’ or ‘modernist’ is a proof of his genuineness; he did not, therefore, stop to enquire how many of these charges of affectation were justified at the outset of the careers of the poets concerned. As a matter of fact, Shelley is the only one of them who can be fairly exculpated of the charge, because the only one who was free of the authorship ambition: his political and philosophical enthusiasms, which