To the demand for deep thinking the reaction is a frivolousness like Mr. Wallace Stevens’: La--la! The cat is in the violets And the awnings are let down. The cat should not be where she is And the awnings are too brown, Emphatically so. The reaction to the demand that poetry shall combine all arts and sciences into a master-art is an excuse for poetry devoted to the praise of either silliness or simpleness, as in Mr. Witter Bynner’s: I’m a-building my house On a mountain so high, A good place to wait For my love to come by. Go ’way now, all of you, Leave me alone On the peacefullest mountain Ever was known. or A.E.’s: Cloistered amid these austere rocks, A brooding seer, I watched an hour Close to the earth, lost to all else, The marvel of a tiny flower. To all of these demands and to this last demand particularly, there exists also a more complex reaction. Much contemporary poetry not only snaps its fingers at civilization; it further elaborates its superior attitude toward it by proving that it can not only keep up with civilization but even get ahead of it. For civilization grows so vain that it does, in effect, tell poetry that it cannot keep up with it, that it must disappear in the old sense of an interpretation and mirror of life. Cock-a-hoop scientists like Mr. J. B. S. Haldane write that “not until our poets are once more drawn from the educated classes (I speak as a scientist), will they appeal to the average man by showing him the beauty in his own life”. There are poets who take this challenge seriously and even resume Tennyson’s curriculum where he left off. Alfred Noyes, although neither mature nor serious, has written a long narrative poem _The Torch Bearers_ to celebrate the progress of science from its beginnings to its present days. Patronizing of modern musical theory appears in the poetry of W. J. Turner, of modern painting theory in that of Edith Sitwell and Sacheverell Sitwell, of psychological theory in that of Herbert Read and Archibald Macleish, of modern sex-engrossment in that of D. H. Lawrence, of philosophical theory in that of Conrad Aiken and T. S. Eliot, of encyclopedic learning in that of Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot--and so on and so on. This reaction inspires not only an emulative display of modernist learning and subjects, but also a cultivation of fine-writing to prove that this generation can beat the most cunning Elizabethan, Romantic Revivalist or Victorian at his own game. The task it sets itself is to be advanced and yet elegant: mere low-browness being considered too primitive a reaction. The following is an example of Sacheverell Sitwell’s fine-writing. He is doing what John Fletcher might be doing were he alive now: taking liberties with blank verse and imagery under the influence of modern painting and music, while still remaining recognizably a late-Elizabethan dramatist: