Picasso (turning to look back, with a smile), Brague (brown cotton), Gertrude Stein (opening the doors of a cabinet of MSS.), Tzara (grinning), André Germain (blocking the door), Van der Pyl (speaking of St. Cloud) ... the Prince of Dahomi, Clive Bell (dressed); ... James and Nora Joyce (in a taxi at the Place de l’Étoile); McAlmon, Antheil Bryher, H.D. and dear Ezra (Pound) who took me to talk with Léger; and finally Adrienne Monnier--these were my six weeks in Paris. To such a poetry and such an atmosphere who would not prefer an unassuming authentic piece of contemporary writing no more ‘new’ than ‘old’? Say, Mr. Prewett’s: Seeing my love but lately come And unexpecting she should be found I trembled, I was dumb And fell upon the ground; Her only thus in distance to see Was to me pain so profound I fell down in an agony.... Free-lance modernists do not make ‘individuality’ their object: their object is to write each poem in the most fitting way. But the sum of their work has individuality because of their natural variousness; like the individuality of the handwriting of all independent-minded men or women, however clearly and conventionally they form their actual letters. The only legitimate use of the word ‘style’ in poetry is as the personal handwriting in which it is written; if it can be easily imitated or defined as a formula it should be immediately suspect to the poets themselves. To professional modernists individuality is the earnest of a varied social purposiveness. To pseudo-modernists individuality is the earnest of a narrow literary purposiveness. In this they are not dissimilar from those eighteenth-century poets whose sole object was to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the period. In practice this conforming individualism means an imitation, studiously concealed, merely of the eccentricities of poetry that is really individual.