Aristotle has described poetry as the universal in the concrete. The “new poets” give the individual in the concrete. Homer, Shakespeare, the true poets, plumb to the depths of the human heart; they voice ripened experience and enshrine mellow wisdom, and so appeal to all men of all times. Much of the new poetry ostentatiously disdains tradition and rejects the wisdom of the ages in discarding its dress. You may see the rouge on the cheek and the freckle on the nose, but as far as life and experience and heart are concerned, most of the new poetry is pitiably young and callous. Meticulous recording of disconnected and unrelated novelties is no adequate substitute for the warmth and depth of life crystallized by the ardent gaze of the true poet out of his experience. New poetry is contemporaneous with the invention and use of the Kodak and has all the responsibility and profundity of that instrument. Individualism has come to such a pass in modern art that everything in it is resolving itself into pure emotionalism, and that an emotionalism which does not belong to art at all. Degenerates are the products of civilization; they are decayed exotics. “The higher the organism, the more noisome the decay,” a science professor used to say when paying his respects to diseased metaphysics. As only a believer can blaspheme luridly, so when an artist goes wrong, he goes wrong hideously. A pistol in the hands of a marksman gone mad is more destructive than in the hands of a savage. Colors, sounds, shapes, fair words and gorgeous imaginings are instruments of degradation and death if they are a finer veneer over what is false. Individual vagaries and whims, no matter how unusual, will not have the permanence of art because they are based on no principles, but devised simply to startle. Degrade the appeal of beauty to a spinal thrill and your artist will pander to concupiscence. It is noteworthy that Homer’s worst lapse in story-telling takes place among the luxurious Phæacians, ancient prototypes of degeneracy. Homer may have felt justified artistically because he was depicting the non-Grecian world through whose monsters and marvels Odysseus was passing and making the first collection of sailors’ yarns. But Homer shocked even the pagan world and set an unhappy precedent. Lucian and Ovid, Petronius and Apuleius and the Byzantine eroticists made what was incidental in Homer their chief concern and practice. They perverted fiction into calculated suggestiveness.