This objection is connected with another, that of obscurity. To quote a recent pronouncement upon ‘The Waste Land’ from Mr. Middleton Murry: ‘The reader is compelled, in the mere effort to understand, to adopt an attitude of intellectual suspicion, which makes impossible the communication of feeling. The work offends against the most elementary canon of good writing: that the immediate effect should be unambiguous.’ Consider first this canon. What would happen, if we pressed it, to Shakespeare’s greatest sonnets or to _Hamlet_? The truth is that very much of the best poetry is necessarily ambiguous in its immediate effect. Even the most careful and responsive reader must reread and do hard work before the poem forms itself clearly and unambiguously in his mind. An original poem, as much as a new branch of mathematics, compels the mind which receives it to grow, and this takes time. Anyone who upon reflection asserts the contrary for his own case must be either a demigod or dishonest; probably Mr. Murray was in haste. His remarks show that he has failed in his attempt to read the poem, and they reveal, in part, the reason for his failure—namely, his own overintellectual approach. To read it successfully he would have to discontinue his present self-mystifications. The critical question in all cases is whether the poem is worth the trouble it entails. For ‘The Waste Land’ this is considerable. There is Miss Weston’s _From Ritual to Romance_ to read, and its ‘astral’ trimmings to be discarded—they have nothing to do with Mr. Eliot’s poem. There is Canto xxvi of the _Purgatorio_ to be studied—the relevance of the close of that canto to the whole of Mr. Eliot’s work must be insisted upon. It illuminates his persistent concern with sex, the problem of our generation, as religion was the problem of the last. There is the central position of Tiresias in the poem to be puzzled out—the cryptic form of the note which Mr. Eliot writes on this point is just a little tiresome. It is a way of underlining the fact that the poem is concerned with many aspects of the one fact of sex, a hint that is perhaps neither indispensable nor entirely successful.