Mr. Max Eastman, in his charming book, _The Enjoyment of Poetry_, lays stress on the fact that poetry is not primarily the registering of emotions but the expression of keen realizations. A mathematical concept may arouse an emotion, but the poet makes the actual emotion transmissible by his selective power in picking out the focal point of the experience by which it is aroused. If poetry is essentially realization of life, then we have no longer any excuse for asking our poets to share our doctrinal views before we consent to read them. On the contrary, we should be more anxious to read Mrs. Meynell than Mr. Gibson, if we are modernists, for Mr. Gibson may, conceivably, not be able to tell us anything we have not already felt. Mrs. Meynell, on the other hand, can inform our feelings with fresh aspects of experience, and she does so abundantly. Her Catholicism is not mediaevalism, but, in so far as it is translatable into her poetry it is simply a vocabulary for the expression of certain emotional realizations of life which we modernists find it very hard to express because we do not have the necessary vocabulary. What can be more modern than the doctrine of the immanence of God and his abode in man, that much-discussed "social gospel?" Yet the following poem, not in spite of but through its Catholic terminology, heightens our realization of brotherhood and dependence one upon another. It is entitled _The Unknown God_: One of the crowd went up, And knelt before the Paten and the Cup, Received the Lord, returned in peace, and prayed Close to my side; then in my heart I said: "O Christ, in this man's life-- This stranger who is Thine--in all his strife, All his felicity, his good and ill, In the assaulted stronghold of his will, "I do confess Thee here, Alive within this life; I know Thee near Within this lonely conscience, closed away Within this brother's solitary day. "Christ in his unknown heart, His intellect unknown--this love, this art, This battle and this peace, this destiny That I shall never know, look upon me! "Christ in his numbered breath, Christ in his beating heart and in his death, Christ in his mystery! From that secret place And from that separate dwelling, give me grace." The spectacle of a general communion again gives Mrs. Meynell inspiration for a poem whose last two stanzas apply equally as well to the secular, evolutionary view of salvation as they do to the ecclesiastical view, and whose last stanza is most suggestive in the light it throws upon the puzzling discrepancy between the littleness of man and the unlimited material vast in which he finds himself a floating speck: I saw this people as a field of flowers, Each grown at such a price The sum of unimaginable powers Did no more than suffice.