inescapable for many years ("objective correlative", "dissociation of sensibilities" etc.) meant that poetry in general could not be discussed without mentioning him or quoting him. So, when he says "I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written", he directs us to himself and to his peers.

No wonder then, that sage-like William Carlos William began to distrust the movement and its figureheads, even his old friend Pound. He was one of the few to remain in America and defy the allure of Europe with its potential for indulgence and immersal in the past. He disliked the way the Anglo-American brigade had moved poetry "back to the schoolroom". Williams' disciples such as Allen Ginsberg took it upon themselves to write in a style that was as 'free' as early modernist writing but, how ever wrapped up Whitman-like in the self, was always plain and clearly comprehensible. E. E. Cummings, outside his conceptual 'concete' poetry experiments also writes in this innocent, often startlingly beautiful style. They do not follow Wordsworth's unconvincing 'English of the people' manner but rather the language of thoughts and of the mind: they keep away from obscurity and abstraction and in that sense they are less modernist. Yet they are clearly derived from the tradition that Yeats had begun. The successors to modernism whose poetry has been the most convincing and beautiful have been Larkin, Auden, Betjeman and not David Jones and those who taken the baton of indirectness and cross-reference. At some point, laying bare the psyche in the manner that modernism does leaves us nothing but the internal wiring of a single brain. We see a world of disparate thoughts, things, and ideas without the connection that explain them. We are left with confusion. And yet, is that not what Eliot looks for in Four Quartets when he talks of that which is "Not heard, because not looked for / But heard, half-heard, in the stillness / Between two waves of the sea"? Perhaps, but it is precisely what Williams rejects in saying "No ideas but in things" and "No ideas but in the truth" in Paterson.

The reason modernism both succeeds and fails is because it attempts to describe non- things, the indescribable. Therefore, if you don't 'get' it, it cannot be described to you. My friend in the bookshop could not be assisted in his reading of Finnegans Wake, and no one can explain Pound's Cantos to me. Eliot once replied to a student who asked, "what do you mean by the line, 'Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree'?" with the response "I mean, Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree." Beyond the insolent joke of the thing, there is a truth to this. There is no explanation. There can be none. Modernism leaves us lost, and only the arrogant would deny it. Ulysses was never and will never fully explicable regardless of how many notes are written about it. It is also why I have never quite believed that Lawrence and Conrad are true modernists. They allow the audience not to be geniuses. Pound's Cantos drove a talented friend of mine from modern literature entirely, and she decided from that moment to study nothing after approximately 1600. Who can blame her? Modernism is an élite society that reflects badly on the rest of twentieth century literature. Some of us will never be allowed in as an equal. But even scraping the surface and immersing just slightly in the madness is an intense and powerful experience. It has beauty, but it is the beauty of the pylon stood high above a field of flowers. It is the power of the new, the unquestionable, the unquestioned. Had this been the first literature, no one would have written another word - not because it it is best but because it makes you feel insignificant. Then again, as the excesses of the modernists show, humility is no bad things.