Among other books written in the Islip period were two essays on contemporary poetry. I then held the view that there was not such a thing as poetry of constant value; I regarded it as a product of its period only having relevance in a limited context. I regarded all poetry, in a philosophic sense, as of equal merit, though admitting that at any given time pragmatic distinctions could be drawn between such poems as embodied the conflicts and syntheses of the time and were therefore charged with contemporary sagacity, and such as were literary hang-overs from a preceding period and were therefore inept. I was, in fact, finding only extrinsic values for poetry. I found psychological reasons why poems of a particular sort appealed to a particular class of reader, surviving even political, economic, and religious change. I published two other books. One was waste—a ballad-opera called _John Kemp’s Wager_. It marked the end of what I may call the folk-song period of my life. It was an artificial simple play for performance by village societies and has been once performed, in California. The newspaper cuttings that I was sent described it as delightfully English and quaint. A better book was _My Head, My Head_, a romance on the story of Elijah and the Shunamite woman. It was an ingenious attempt to repair the important omissions in the biblical story; but like all the other prose-books that I had written up to this time it failed in its chief object, which was to sell. During this period I was willing to undertake almost any writing job to bring in money. I wrote a series of rhymes for a big map-advertisement for Huntley & Palmer’s biscuits (I was paid, but the rhymes never appeared); and silly lyrics for a light opera, _Lord Clancarty_, for which I was not paid, because the opera was never staged; and translations from Dutch and German carols; and rhymes for children’s Christmas annuals; and edited three sixpenny pamphlets of verse for Benn’s popular series—selections from Skelton’s poems, and from my own, and a collection of the less familiar nursery rhymes. I did some verse-reviewing for the _Nation_ and _Athenæum_, but by 1925 I found it more and more difficult to be patient with dud books of poetry. And they all seemed to be dud now. I had agreed to collaborate with T. S. Eliot in a book about modernist poetry to which we were each to contribute essays, but the plan fell through; and later I was glad that it had.