To assert that modern verse is needlessly obscure is not to range oneself alongside those who regard Kipling and Mr. Masefield as the standard by which their successors should’ infallibly be judged. Nor is it to be in the (position of the dear old don who, in the early ’thirties, interviewed me for a scholarship, which I did not obtain, at one of the Oxford colleges.

Your answers have so far been fairly satisfactory,’ he said, ‘but have you read any modern poetry?’

The name Eliot’ was trembling on my lips, and would have been uttered had he not bereft me temporarily of speech by adding : Tennyson or Swinburne, for example?’

To come nearer home, I do not share myself the contempt for the poetry pf the ‘Georgians’ that is so fashionable to-day. Gibson, Brooke, Abercrombie, Drinkwater, de la Mare, Blunden, Davies and the rest wrote excellent simple verse on simple subjects. The poets of the ’thirties, and even more, the poets writing since the war, keep to simple subjects, often extremely naive subjects, but wrap them up in a modern, fashionable ‘poetic diction’ which they claim to have been invented by Hopkins, Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Joyce. This claim needs looking into.

The Marxist poets in Britain fell, of course, between two stools. They tried to equate an ingenuous code of politics with the expression in verse of the complexities of the modern world. Their needless obscurity was intended to cover up the confusions they inevitably ran into. They styled themselves the followers of Eliot, until the elder poet (in the comic words of John Strachey) ‘encouraged no doubt by the 1922-9 period of capitalist recovery, left the despair of the Waste Land behind him and took up the position of a highly intellectual reactionary.’ Thenceforward, Mr. Eliot was a ‘pedant,’ to borrow a diatribe from Louis MacNeice.