It would be an over-simplification, but somewhere near the heart of the matter, to say that the presence we are most aware of in the poetry of to-day is not Walt Whitman, but Thomas Hardy--his desolating irony, at least, if not his artistic and personal elevation. These younger poets accept, but coldly and without enthusiasm, the account which contemporary science offers of the universe and of the human make-up, and they are as hostile to the glowing affirmations of the great romantics as they are to the evasions and tepidity of the Victorians. Perhaps this is but an inversion, a different guise, of that restless and changeable temper which we call romanticism, but to me at least its emergence seems to be more significant than were any of the varied energies released by the last poetic movement. This new spirit is not more characteristic of poetry, of course, than of other expressions of the age. To some extent, though less here than abroad, it is an after-effect of the war--the inability of nervous organisations overstrained by the excitements of those years to respond to normal stimuli. It may be briefly described as a despair of achieving any reading of life in its totality which will be tolerable in the light of all we know and feel. “In the course of a few centuries,” writes Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch in _The Modern Temper_, “[man’s] knowledge, and hence the universe of which he finds himself an inhabitant, has been completely revolutionised, but his instincts and his emotions have remained, relatively at least, unchanged. He is still, as he always was, adjusted to the orderly, purposeful, humanised world which all peoples unburdened by experience have figured to themselves, but that world no longer exists.” This modern sense of frustration differs from states of disillusion or pessimism experienced in the past in two respects. It is, for one thing, more widespread, producing a considerable body of poetry of sheer negation, turning some writers to mere elaboration of surfaces and appearances, and making itself felt as an undercurrent, now cynical, now passionate, in much writing which seems superficially to be almost free of philosophical implications. And secondly, this spirit of denial is a more positive and uncompromising thing than we have known in the past. Not only is it unable to effect any synthesis of its intelligence and its emotional promptings; it has come to believe that such a synthesis is in the nature of things impossible. It grows “more and more likely,” continues Mr. Krutch, “that [man] must remain an ethical animal in a universe which contains no ethical element.” His dilemma is that he cannot either feel as his intelligence bids him or think as his emotions would have him. Even the highest of the personal emotions, love itself, which had somehow eluded the cold touch of nineteenth-century science, has not been able to withstand the psycho-analysis of the twentieth. “Have you not heard,” asks the lady in _Cavender’s House_,