A Survey of Modernist Poetry by Laura Riding

THE refusal of the reading public to spend time on contemporary poetry can to a great extent be excused when we recall the decrepitude to which poetry was reduced by the death of the great Victorians and the survival of too many of the small ones. By domesticating itself in order to be received into the homes of the ordinary reading public and by allowing its teeth to be drawn so that it would no longer frighten, poetry had grown so tame, so dull, that it ceased to compete with other forms of social entertainment, especially with the new religion of sport. Callow or learned echoes of accepted poetry have now become as unattractive to the plain reader as the poetry he would classify as dangerous; and he does not realize that the alarming ‘new' poetry with which he is at present surrounded is at least acting as a deterrent against the production of old-fashioned trash. For modernist poetry, if it is nothing else, is an ironic criticism of false literary survivals.

The feebleness with which poetry survived the poets who had made it feeble caused a general depression in the market-interest of all poetry except for academic or devotional purposes. To choose between such lines of John Drinkwater's as: