The old world of poetry, however, is going on at the same time; the old institutions are still officially and indeed numerically predominant; though it is not too much to say that no single poet of any real distinction since the death of Charles Doughty believes fervently in them or even pays them homage. The lack of narrow school-room purposiveness shown by modernist poets is actually as offensive to the survivors of the aggressively ungodly school and their followers as to the true believers: the anthologies and poets’ corners in public periodicals are strictly censored both against abstruseness of conviction and against ungodliness. The public that enjoys the simple ruralities of W. H. Davies’: A Rainbow and a Cuckoo! Lord! How rich and great the times are now! is unaware that he has written even such naughty lines as: Lord, I say nothing; I profess No faith in thee nor Christ thy Son: in which he mildly idealizes Christ the Man, as opposed to Christ the God; still less of his modernism, which is a genuine modernism, though of rare occurrence in his recent work, as in the poem beginning: I took my oath I would enquire Without affection, hate or wrath Into the death of Ada Wright. So help me God, I took that oath and describing without reticence or sentimentality how the coroner’s jury condoned a child-murder, how the mother gave evidence: It was a love-child, she explained, And laughed for our intelligence. and how the emaciated corpse, that had but one eye shut and the other half-open, “seemed a knowing little child”. Though Mr. Davies consented to omit this poem from his _Collected Poems_, he wrote it, nevertheless; a poem that could not possibly have been written even at the end of last century. The raising of the barriers of monotony by modernism has encouraged imitative or feeble poets, who in the eighteenth century would have been happy in formal submission to them, to adventure into all the new fields now opened to them with great audacity of subject and form. Some of these-poets are more self-confident than others, and hence call more attention to themselves; and the confusion of the modern poetic scene is increased by the failure of even the specialized poetry-reading public to distinguish genuine poetry like a not inconsiderable part of Messrs. Eliot, Cummings and Miss Sitwell from the spurious individuality of, say, Dr. William Carlos Williams. It is possible at once to recognize a writer like Mr. Harold Acton as a Sitwellite by his borrowed stage-properties, or Miss Cunard as an Eliotite in the same way. But Dr. Carlos Williams is not quite so clumsy. This is from a poem, _Struggle of Wings_: ... the string from the windowshade has a noose at the bottom, a noose? or a ring--bound with white cord, knotted around the circumference designedly in a design And all there is is won