A great deal of poetry written to-day, in fact, must be understood as a reaction against the demands made on it by civilized society, an unfortunate waste of energy in defiance that is often trivial and insincere. Reaction against civilization in a dogmatic sense is found in nearly all modernist poets, from affected modernists to more or less genuine modernists. It has, indeed, been one of the refinements of contemporary poetry to react against the refinements of civilization which poetry has generally been expected to cultivate. Even such a sentimentalist as Rupert Brooke mentioned love and sea-sickness in the same breath: The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick My cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew I must think hard of something, or be sick; And could think hard of only one thing--_you_! ... Do I forget you? Retchings twist and tie me, Old meat, good meals, brown gobbets, up I throw. Do I remember? Acrid return and slimy, The sobs and slobber of a last year’s woe.... The War provoked in poetry both genuine and affected examples of reaction against heroics. These lines of Wilfred Owen’s describe with painful literalness a man dying from poison-gas: ... If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin, If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs Bitten as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues.... Or we find close juxtapositions of elegance and vulgarity in the same poem, the poet’s low-brow satire of his own elegance. This is a familiar device in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, as: The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess, Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door. which is fine writing, immediately followed by: When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said-- I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself, HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart. He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth. To the demand for romantic progressiveness there is a reaction of utterly hopeless and unpurposed pessimism, as in Miss Nancy Cunard’s _Parallax_, an imitation of T. S. Eliot: In the rooms A sombre carpet broods, stagnates beneath deliberate steps. Here drag a foot, there a foot, drop sighs, look round for nothing, shiver. Sunday creeps in silence Under suspended smoke And curdles defiant in unreal sleep. The gas-fire puffs, consumes, ticks out its minor chords-- And at the door I guess the arrested knuckles of the one-time friend One foot on the stair delaying, that turns again.