With a knot in his bosom And a bee in his brains, He goes full of pictures Around the flat lanes. Even supposing a reader or a critic were able to make a just valuation of an existent sympathy between two particular contemporary poets: how is he to make a satisfactory definition of the relation between the work of either of these two poets, or both, and that of a poet in an entirely different walk of modernism, the work, for example, of Mr. Osbert Sitwell? The following is from Mr. Sitwell’s _English Gothic_: The souls of bishops, shut in stone By masons, rest in quietude As flies in amber. They atone Each buzzing long-dead platitude. Above, where flutter angel-wings Caught in the organ’s rolling loom, Hang in the air, like jugglers’ rings, Dim quatrefoils of coloured gloom. Tall arches rise to imitate The jaws of Jonah’s whale. Up flows The chant. Thin spinsters sibilate Beneath a full-blown Gothic rose. Could the reader or critic be expected to have the courage or presence of mind to say that mere contemporaneousness was an insufficient basis for making critical comparisons between poets; that Mr. Sitwell and Mr. Ransom or Mr. Sitwell and Mr. Davidson were so separated by locality, nationality and formative tradition as to belong, so to speak, to entirely different ‘periods’? Suppose that, the problem of Mr. Sitwell, Mr. Ransom and Mr. Davidson having been settled, a new element of confusion were introduced by quoting from Mr. T. S. Eliot’s ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Service’ the following lines as being perplexingly similar to Mr. Sitwell’s _English Gothic_: A painter of the Umbrian school Designed upon a gesso ground The nimbus of the Baptized God. The wilderness is cracked and browned But through the water pale and thin Still shine the unoffending feet And there above the painter set The Father and the Paraclete The sable presbyters approach The avenue of penitence; The young are red and pustular Clutching piaculative pence. Suppose, it being possible to determine from the date of publication of the volumes in which these poems appeared the date of their writing and the degrees of intimacy between these two poets at the time of their respective writings--suppose these poems are set down as an example of contemporary sympathy? Especially as Mr. Eliot is a transplanted American now for a long time acclimatized to literary England? What, however, is to be said when we come upon lines in Mr. Eliot’s work which do not show him writing in a certain way out of contemporary sympathy with Mr. Osbert Sitwell, but writing simply and originally as Mr. Eliot? As in the following lines: Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin; And breastless creatures underground Leaned backward with a lipless grin ...