Mr. Pound shares with Miss Lowell this immersion in the “literary”--he is intensely aware of the literary past, rifles it for odds and ends of colour, atmosphere, and attitude, is perpetually adding bright new bits, from such sources, to his Joseph’s coat: but if a traditionalist in this, a curio-hunter, he is an experimentalist in prosody; he has come far from the sentimental literary affectedness of his early work and at his best has written lyrics of a singular beauty and transparent clarity. The psychological factor has from time to time intrigued him, moreover, and we see him as a kind of link between the colourists and such poets as Mr. T. S. Eliot, Mr. Alfred Kreymborg, and Mr. Wallace Stevens. These poets are alike in achieving, by a kind of alchemy, the lyric in terms of the analytic: introspection is made to shine, to the subtly seen is given a delicate air of false simplicity. Mr. Stevens is closest to the colourists. His drift has been away from the analytic and towards the mere capture of a “tone.” Mr. Kreymborg is a melodist and a mathematician. He takes a pleasure in making of his poems and plays charming diagrams of the emotions. Mr. Eliot has more of an eye for the sharp dramatic gesture, more of an ear for the trenchant dramatic phrase--he looks now at Laforgue, now at John Webster. His technical skill is remarkable, his perception of effect is precise, his range narrow, perhaps increasingly narrow. Even so rapid and superficial a survey cannot but impress us with the essential anarchy of this poetic community. Lawlessness has seemed at times to be the prevailing note; no poetic principle has remained unchallenged, and we have only to look in the less prosperous suburbs and corners of this city to see to what lengths the bolder rebels, whether of the “Others” group or elsewhere, have gone. Ugliness and shapelessness have had their adherents among those whom æsthetic fatigue had rendered momentarily insensitive to the well-shaped; the fragmentary has had its adherents among those whom cynicism had rendered incapable of any service, too prolonged, to one idea. But the fetichists of the ugly and the fragmentary have exerted, none the less, a wholesome and fructifying influence. Whatever we feel about the ephemerality of the specifically ugly or fragmentary, we cannot escape a feeling that these, almost as importantly as the new realism or the new colourism, have enlarged what we might term the general “poetic consciousness” of the time. If there was a moment when the vogue of the disordered seemed to threaten, or predict, a widespread and rapid poetic decadence, that moment is safely past. The tendency is now in the other direction, and not the least interesting sign is the fact that many of the former apostles of the disordered are to-day experimenting with the things they yesterday despised--rhyme, metre, and the architecture of theme.