Literary internationalism--the incorporation of foreign tongues and atmospheres--is still another method of civilizing and enlarging poetry. French is perhaps the most common language introduced to this end, with Italian and Spanish closely following. Mr. Eliot not only makes free use of French side by side with English; he has written poems entirely in French. An even greater enlargement is made by an abnormal cultivation of the classics, especially of the more remote classics. Some poets are able to maintain a sense of balance and dignity in this cultivation, if only because they are good scholars. But it can easily become absurd, as in the poetry of Mr. Ezra Pound. In a single volume of his, _Lustra_, occur literary references to Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, Provençale and Chinese literature--some of these incorrectly given. Mr. Eliot, who is a more serious scholar, has references in _The Waste Land_ to Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, German and Sanskrit. The English classics quoted or referred to are not now the stock-classics to which Victorian and post-Victorian poets paid tribute, not Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, but others known only to the cognoscenti--Peele, Kyd, Lyly, the less familiar Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell, Dryden, Swift, Darley, Beddoes; making the succession of English poetry wear a more varied look. The same enlargement is made with the Greek, Latin, Italian and French poets. Sympathy with low life and the use of the vocabulary of low life in modernist poetry, besides their simpler burlesque rôle, are both an earnest of romantic progressiveness and of literary refinement. For, if it would put aside previous literary affectations and yet not turn into a crude instrument of reaction, it must have elegances of its own; and among the few unexploited elegances left to poetry is an affectation of the vocabulary of low life. Wordsworth’s theories on the use of the language of simple men were, in a conservative way, a similar counter-elegance. Modernist poets, however, surpass Wordsworth in literary slumming. Whereas Wordsworth wrote: And now the same strong voice more near Said cordially, “My Friend, what cheer? Rough doings these! as God’s my judge, The sky owes somebody a grudge! We’ve had in half an hour or less A twelve month’s terror and distress!” T. S. Eliot writes, as already shown, unexpurgated and unsentimentalized cockney, and E. E. Cummings: .... some guys talk big about Lundun Burlin an gay Paree an some guys claims der never was nutn like Nooer Leans Shikahgo Sain Looey Noo York an San Fran dictaphones wireless subways vacuum cleaners pianolas funnygraphs skyscrapers an safety razors sall right in its way kiddo but as fer I gimme de good ole daze....