really being profound, keeping the necessary illusion by various technical devices such as unnecessarily protracted sentences and an over-clipped grammar. Poetry, consequently, is made into a constantly expanding institution, embodying from period to period all the rapidly developing specialized forms of knowledge, enlarging itself by broadening the definition of poetry to include psychology, applied theories of music and painting, philosophy, physical science and so on. The poet himself feels obliged to appear as a sage; as Tennyson, when he became Poet Laureate, conscientiously sent himself to school again and made and kept to a weekly curriculum of studies, including science, foreign languages, mathematics, philosophy. Not only is the nature of the poet, in this view, expected to change in a scheme of constant and minute adjustment to history, but the nature of poetry itself is supposed to undergo historical evolution: keeping up with the times is a sign of its good behaviour and its worthiness to be incorporated among the material evidences of progress. Such an opinion of poetry is based on a view of civilization as modernist, as continuously developing in the direction of an absolute and perfect end--which it obviously is not. The poet who considers himself a modernist because he is successfully keeping up with his date is, however unaware he is of so being and whatever his antagonism to Tennyson, merely an earnest Tennysonian. A strong distinction must be drawn between poetry as something developing through civilization and as something developing organically by itself--not a minor branch of human endeavour but a complete and separate form of energy which is neither more nor less in the twentieth century A.D. than in the tenth century B.C., nor a different kind of energy now from what it was in Homeric times, but merely lodged in different, or _other_, persons. Civilization develops only in the sense that one thing follows another, not in the sense that things get progressively better or more harmonious because they follow. Poetry does develop in the sense that it is contemporaneous with civilization; but for this reason it has even to protect itself from civilization, to resist, to a certain extent, contemporaneous influences, since there is no merit in modernism for the sake of modernism, and since civilization must, in self-defence, believe in modernism for the sake of modernism. It is therefore always important to distinguish between what is historically new in poetry because the poet is contemporary with a civilization of a certain kind, and what is intrinsically new in poetry because the poet is a new and original individual, something more than a mere servant and interpreter of civilization.