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ides represented a stage elaborate and sophisticated. And while every so often in the history of poetry has arisen a great figure, or group of great figures, and while it is by no means certain that those figures are progressively "greater" each than the last (it might be argued quite the other way), yet it is incontestable that in a certain sense the stream of genuine poetry, in proportion as man has extended his experience, whether outward or inward, has constantly widened. The process is one of accretion. What the first poet says, what he renders "conscious" cannot, obviously, be repeated word for word by the second poet: the second poet, uhhappily, will find certain areas already explored, and he must choose between making good his claim to those areas by making finer use of them than was made by his predecessor, and finding new areas of his own. And here we come to the matter of "sensibility." For these areas are the areas of potential awareness; and in the shadowy struggle between poet and poet, for possession of this or that area, sensibility is the only weapon. The first poet found it sufficient to say "tree": but the second poet was compelled to be more specific.

And this necessity to be more specific has been the lot of the poet ever since, a necessity which becomes always more tyrannous. Poets now come into a world in which, at first glance, it would seem that the areas of potential awareness have been all but exhausted. Tract after tract has been explored, exploited, rendered commonplace, "traditionalized." Old elements, it is true, can be re-combined to give new effects, to yield areas which are, in fact, new; but can that process go on indefinitely? It would seem that there must be some limit. One may also derive a temporary hope from the variability of "environment" (in its richest and most complete psychological sense) since that may well be considered ambivalent with sensibility. But temporary, surely, that hope must be when we observe with what amazing rapidity all the forces of society tend towards a levelling, a uniformity, of environment—by law, by education, by tradition, by language, and finally by the inheritance of the art itself, the inherited poetic consciousness, which would seem to be rather terrifyingly complete.

How complete this is, this exhaustion of the areas of potential awareness, is made clear to us by the extraordinary, the ever-increasing number of excellent poets who, despite their excellence, produce poetry which we call "commonplace," poetry too repetitively in the