Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet.

But we moderns are impatient and destructive.

Two evils, monstrous either one apart, Possessed me, and were long and loath at going: A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart, And in the wood the furious winter blowing.

And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.

Now between the meanings of words and their sounds there is ordinarily no discoverable relation except one of accident; and it is therefore miraculous, to the mystic, when words which make sense can also make a uniform objective structure of accents and rhymes.

Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.

And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.