In the second class belong poets like Mr. Yeats who, observing that his old poetical robes have worn rather shabby, acquires a new outfit. But the old romantic weaknesses are not so easily discarded: even when he writes of ‘Lois Fuller’s Chinese Dancers’--a high-brow Vaudeville turn--instead of Eire and the ancient ways, And the Red Rose upon the Rood of Time. Such are the shifts to which poets have been driven in trying to cope with civilization and in rejecting or keeping up with, from an imagined necessity of action, the social requirements that seem to be laid upon poetry. In the resulting confusion one thing at least is clear, that in modernist poetry, however it has been weakened or perverted by its race with civilization, is to be found the best and undoubtedly the most enduring contemporary poetry. This is not because historical modernism is in itself an excellence, but because the best poets happen to be modernists: whether they are deliberately so or not, they can be called modernist if only because they are good, and because what is good always seems advanced. _Modernist_, indeed, should describe a quality in poetry which has nothing to do with the date or with responding to civilization. Poetry to which _modernist_ in this sense could be fully applied would derive its excellence neither from its reacting against civilization, by satiric or actual primitivism; nor from its proved ability to keep up with or keep ahead of civilization. It would not, however, ignore its contemporaneous universe, for the reason that it would not be stupid and that it would have a sense of humour--the most intelligent attitude toward history is not to take one’s own date too seriously. There would occur evidences of time in such poetry; but always its modernism would lie in its independence, in its relying on none of the traditional devices of poetry-making in the past nor on any of the artificial effects to be got by using the atmosphere of contemporary life and knowledge to startle or to give reality. If, in such poetry, a topical institution or person or object should occur, it would be only because it made an image more accurately suited to the particular requirements of the poem than another less recent one. Most of all, such poetry would be characterized by a lack of strain, by an intelligent ease. Not only would its references have a simplicity and naturalness no matter how difficult, that is, no matter how highly developed aside from references, such poetry was--not only would it not have to rely on references; it would not, either, have to rely on modern short-story material, such as Mr. Pound, for example, has incorporated in one of his poems: Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia