“Have you not heard yet, anywhere, death-bells ringing For Love and poor Romance? Biologists And bolshevists are ringing them like mad-- So loud that Love, we’re told, will soon be lost With dodos, dinosaurs, and pterodactyls.” Specifically, a feeling is abroad that poetry is at some kind of crisis or turning-point, and there are even predictions that poetry of a sort that the past would recognise as such cannot continue much longer to be produced. The poetry of T. S. Eliot has been praised for its seizing of just this aspect of the modern situation, the sense of frustration, of insignificance. “The passions which swept through the once major poets,” writes Mr. Krutch, “no longer awaken any profound response, and only in the bleak, tortuous complexities of a T. S. Eliot does [the present age] find its moods given adequate expression.” Love-making carried on with an accompanying sense of its futility and ridiculousness, an acquaintance with art and poetry which serves only to confirm misgivings as to their relevancy for us to-day, the employment of religious symbols to arouse a poor mirthless mockery--in such experiences our young intellectuals find mirrored the age and body of their time. The cryptic character of the writing, the sometimes arbitrary connection between one image and the next, the casual allusions to one person’s recondite reading, are all indications of the contemporary sense of the individual’s isolation. The broken rhythms, the fragmentariness of the scenes or movements, the deliberate foregoing of any rational principle of organisation, reflect the feeling of the fragmentariness of life itself, the modern inability to effect any kind of integration of experience. And this, we are told by some, is the only kind of poetry which an honest and sensitive mind in an age like ours can be expected to produce.