‘Groups’ may spring up in the old style around any poet; but in general the free-lance modernist who had by accident become popular or notorious and still retained a sense of personal dignity would shrink from being made a ‘_cher maître_’ as a grotesque position for him to occupy in a literary scene that he can only take casually. Indeed, as soon as any imitation is made of his work, and his style by imitation becomes a formula of mannerisms, he may be even inclined to change them to preserve his integrity. It is not, as Mr. Philip Guedalla suggests, that there is no English equivalent for ‘_cher maître_’, but merely that the modern English poet good enough to be one does not take his poetry like that. A certain sifting and grading of personalities and groups, however, does occur where modernism is a professional conscience rather than a personal trait: the modernist poetry-producing world has the look of a complicated hierarchy. The complication is increased by the efforts of professional modernists to enrol free-lance modernists in their socially purposive movement, and of pseudo-modernists to enrol themselves in it by literary forgery. In every modernist group the members are aware who is the Queen Bee and who are the drones of the _schwärmerei_. Eventually the parasitical members ambitious to become Queen Bees will desert to other hives and to other modes. They make a quick-change from one group to another, acquiring as they go a patchwork synthetic style that they hope to impose on general readers and critics as a large-scale exercise of originality, a contemporary grand manner. The aspirant has a much more difficult problem to face in the new poetic order than in the old. In the old it was sufficient for him to write well. Now he must not only write well, he must be original. A desperate hunt for originality ensues in which aspirants are driven for inspiration to foreign literatures, to old French, to eighteenth century quaintness, to Spanish, to Demotic Greek, to mediaeval Latin, to Chinese or Javanese or Aztec; to various low dialects--Bowery, Whitechapel, Chicago, journalese; to ancient religious writers, particularly the Early Fathers and Buddhists, and so on.