At the outset we encounter the Crocean view of all art, including poetry, as expression merely, and conversely of all expression as art. But leaving the confusions of Signor Croce to be dealt with by others,[46] we are warranted in assuming, I think, that, generally and typically, the poet desires communication with other persons,--conceivably only one other person, or persons of the future, but at any rate communication and not merely self-expression. Otherwise, he wouldn’t publish or circulate or read his poems, as generally and typically poets do. The theory of Laura Riding and Robert Graves[47] that the poet publishes (or “externalises”) only out of consideration for the rights of the poem, which, like physical offspring, has attained an independent status with a life of its own, is a naïve and superfluous bit of mystification, sufficiently answered by the query, “Why then sign one’s name?”--and I have not remarked any unusually wide return to the practice of anonymity. And one is led to wonder, as one turns the pages of our more advanced periodicals, what possible readers some of these poets are addressing. After a moderate success in comprehending, let us say, such diverse productions as those of the mediæval mystics, the wits of the Roman Empire and the Restoration, the English metaphysical poets, and the symbolist group in France, and after a period of conscientious schooling in the pronouncements of this newest movement, it is disconcerting to find oneself completely balked by the innocent-appearing contents of the latest anthology of verse. Among the ten possible but improbable interpretations of some poem, it seems somehow less than a sporting chance that the one you finally choose as the least implausible will be what was intended. Take, for instance, this poem of Mr. Wallace Stevens, which I select not as an example of that writer’s often delightful connoisseurship in verse, but as fairly representative of this decline in what has been called “communicative efficacy.” ANECDOTE OF THE JAR[48] I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was grey and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.