A somewhat petulant English college friend of my brother’s once remarked that Britons make the best policemen the world has ever witnessed. I agree with him. It is silly to go into a puckersnatch because some brass-button-minded nincompoop in Kensington flies off the handle and speaks openly about our United States prize poems. This Mr. Jepson—“Anyone who has heard Mr. J. read Homer and discourse on Catullus would recognize his fitness as a judge and respecter of poetry”—this is Ezra!—this champion of the right is not half a fool. His epithets and phrases—slip-shod, rank bad workmanship of a man who has shirked his job, lumbering fakement, cumbrous artificiality, maundering dribble, rancid as Ben Hur—are in the main well-merited. And besides, he comes out with one fairly lipped cornet blast: the only distinctive U. S. contributions to the arts have been ragtime and buck-dancing. Nothing is good save the new. If a thing have novelty it stands intrinsically beside every other work of artistic excellence. If it have not that, no loveliness or heroic proportion or grand manner will save it. It will not be saved above all by an attenuated intellectuality. But all U. S. verse is not bad according to Mr. J., there is T. S. Eliot and his, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. But our prize poems are especially to be damned not because of superficial bad workmanship, but because they are rehash, repetition—just as Eliot’s more exquisite work is rehash, repetition in another way of Verlaine, Beaudelaire, Maeterlinck,—conscious or unconscious,—just as there were Pound’s early paraphrases from Yeats and his constant later cribbing from the renaissance, Provence and the modern French: Men content with the connotations of their masters. It is convenient to have fixed standards of comparison: All antiquity! And there is always some everlasting Polonius of Kensington forever to rate highly his eternal Eliot. It is because Eliot is a subtle conformist. It tickles the palate of this archbishop of procurers to a lecherous antiquity to hold up Prufrock as a New World type. Prufrock, the nibbler at sophistication, endemic in every capital, the not quite (because he refuses to turn his back), is “the soul of that modern land,” the United States! Blue undershirts, Upon a line, It is not secessary to say to you Anything about it— I cannot question Eliot’s observation. Prufrock is a masterly portrait of the man just below the summit, but the type is universal; the model in his case might be Mr. J. No. The New World is Montezuma or since he was stoned to death in a parley, Guatemozin who had the city of Mexico levelled over him before he was taken.