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beyond the incoherent abuse and inchoate adoration which have become his daily breakfast-food—merits in fact the doffing of many kelleys; that insofar as he is one of history's greatest advertisers he is an extradrdinarily useful bore, much like a rivetter which whatever you may say asserts the progress of a skyscraper; whereas that insofar as he is responsible for the overpasting of an at least attractive manifesto, "Ezra Pound," with an at least pedantic war-cry, "Vorticism," he deserves to be drawn and quartered by the incomparably trite brush of the great and the only and the Wyndham and the Lewis—if only as an adjectival garnish to that nounlike effigy of our hero by his friend The Hieratic Buster. Let us therefore mention the fact, For it stems to us worthy of notice—that at no moment do T. S. Eliot and E. P. propaganda simultaneously inhabit our consciousness.

Second, we like that not any of Poems' fifty-one pages fails to impress us with an overwhelming sense of technique. By technique we do not mean a great many things, including: anything static, a school, a noun, a slogan, a formula, These Three For Instant Beauty, Ars Est Celare, Hasn't Scratched Yet, Professor Woodberry, Grape Nuts. By technique we do mean one thing: the alert hatred of normality which, through the lips of a tactile and cohesive adventure, asserts that nobody in general and some one in particular is incorrigibly and actually alive. This some one is, it would seem, the extremely great artist: or, he who prefers above everything and within everything the unique dimension of intensity, which it amuses him to substitute in us for the comforting and comfortable furniture of reality. If we examine the means through which this substitution is allowed by Mr. Eliot to happen in his reader, we find that they include: a vocabulary almost brutally tuned to attain distinctness; an extraordinarily tight orchestration of the shapes of sound; the delicate and careful murderings—almost invariably interpreted, internally as well as terminally, through near-thyme and rhyme—of established tempos by oral rhythms. Here is an example of Eliot's tuning: