The contemporary poetic scene, then, appears to the interested but perplexed reader a chaotic conglomerate of free-lance originality or group originality; a restless multitude of types, imitation of types, antithesis and synthesis of types. Variety is the most characteristic general feature of contemporary poetry, and variety means quantity: it not only encourages poets themselves to experiment freely, it encourages a great many people who are not poets in literary competition. Although it was comparatively easier in periods where a single poetical type prevailed for people who were not poets to write poetry, there are undoubtedly more people who are not poets writing poetry at the present time than ever before, though proportionately fewer find publishers. Even when one has cut out of critical consideration the quantities of backward verse directly imitative of Keats or Tennyson or Oscar Wilde or Swinburne or Francis Thompson or Whitman; of ordinary adolescent verse of distinguishable male and female varieties; there still remains an enormous quantity of miscellaneous verse to be sorted. Criticism (even advanced criticism), reared for centuries on the faith of the technical and philosophical consistency of poetry (a faith continuously derived and revised from Aristotle), cannot cope with poetry in quantity; as it could a hundred years ago, when the possible varieties of poetical composition were countable on the fingers and the most daring were either imitations of Chaucer, Ossian or Spenser, or affectations of country simplicity or of childishness. Criticism in the simplest literary scenes has never been able to recognize who are the authentic contemporary poets and how much of each poet is authentic. To-day, having either fallen in arrear of its age or dashed ahead of its age into vague philosophical formulas, it is not even as sure as it once was who are the innovators of any particular type, and who are the copyists, or to what extent striking resemblances are attributable to unconscious contemporary sympathy; or, in the case of imitations of the Chinese or Japanese or American Indian, how close these imitations are to their originals. The following are lines from the work of two poets, Donald Davidson and John Crowe Ransom, between whom a fairly conscious contemporary sympathy exists, without callow imitation on either side. Here’s one Phineas Out for a walk, Tired of skulls And bones that talk.... There’s a palimpsest In a puff of spring, But Phineas looks At the blossoming, Transfigures road Into new corpuscles, Elucidates bush With a bound of muscles. and Now what can he want, The vagrant, the lout, Who leers in the parson’s face, Lolls with tongue out? Nothing that you have, Men with a motor car; God keep you your high hats And fine things you are!