Of wealthy lustre was the banquet-room Fill’d with pervading brilliance and perfume: Before each lucid pannel fuming stood A censer fed with myrrh and spiced wood, Each by a sacred tripod held aloft, Whose slender feet wide-swerved upon the soft Wool-woofèd carpets: fifty wreaths of smoke From fifty censers their light voyage took To the high roof, still mimick’d as they rose Along the mirror’d walls by twin-clouds odourous. (from _Lamia_). The combined pressure of romantic progressiveness, intellectual advancement, knowledge-expansion and change-processes against which contemporary poetry has tried to protect itself by showing that it can bear this pressure and still survive, has driven it to make a tremendous and sometimes a strained effort at over-matching its age. In many instances, loaded with learned vanities and sophistications, it does not, it must be confessed, succeed in keeping its head above water. Much of this enlargement has been accomplished by incorporating in poetry the modern science of anthropology, which is really a new synthetic mythology composed of many mythologies. Not content with Tritons and Galleons and neo-Keatsian or neo-Elizabethan writing, many, as Mr. Eliot, for instance, have borrowed extensively from Sir James Frazer’s comparative study of primitive myths. When Sacheverell Sitwell writes of Alexander: He is dreaming what he planned and never conquered: Time, that summer afternoon, burns slow, And one more chance is given him On a battlefield, or warm, slow bank of flowers, While a reaper on the hillside kills his fair-haired prisoners.... the reference to fair-haired prisoners is not only to the cutting down of the yellow grain but also to the ancient harvest-field custom, related by Sir James Frazer, of binding fair-haired or red-haired men in the corn-straw and killing them ritually as representatives of the corn-god.