I waited for the train at Coventry;
I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge,
To watch the three tall spires; and there I shaped
The city’s ancient legend into this:—

In “Mechanophilus—in the time of the first railways” he frankly romanticizes:

Now first we stand and understand,
And sunder false from true,
And handle boldly with the hand,
And see and shape and do.
Dash back that ocean with a pier,
Strow yonder mountain flat,
A railway there, a tunnel here,
Mix we this Zone with that....
As we surpass our fathers’ skill,
Our sons will shame our own;
A thousand things are hidden still
And not a hundred known....

Browning was rather more courageous; he first introduced the train as a commonplace into poetry, but through the back door, in what was known as serio-comic verse. The lines are from Christmas-Eve and Easter-day:

A tune was born in my head last week
Out of the thump-thump and shriek-shriek
Of the train, as I came by it, up from Manchester;
And when, next week, I take it back again,
My head will sing to the engine’s clack again
While it only makes my neighbour’s haunches stir.

By the use of rhymes like ‘back again’ and ‘engines clack again’, ‘Manchester’ and ‘haunches stir’, he is saying in effect that a train is no proper subject for true poetical feelings; that as it is a part of modern life we must include it in our poems but in the low style proper to it. Emily Dickinson was perhaps the first to confess to a feeling of personal affection for the train as such:

I love to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And pause to feed itself at tanks;
And then prodigious, step
Around a pile of mountains
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads....
And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop—docile and omnipotent—
At its own stable door.

To John Davidson it was an appealing creature, too, although more terrible; in no way comic. His Song of the Train begins:

A monster taught
To come to hand
Amain,
As swift as thought
Across the land
The train.
... O’er bosky dens
By marsh and mead,
Forest and fens
Embodied speed
Is clanked and hurled....

In a poem of Mr. Robert Nichols we find the train treated with more modern nonchalance. The Express: Hereford to London begins:

On sways the tilting train:
We feel the carriage bluffly sideways blown,
We see the chill shower brighten on the pane,
We hear the high wind through the lantern moan,
We three borne ever through the wind and rain,
We three who meet here not to meet again,
We three poor faring fools who sit alone.

But toward the end there is a romantic lapse to excuse the liberties taken:

But the giant Train begins a confident song
“Why be so meek, so proud, when both are wrong.”

Sacheverell Sitwell can write even more casually of the train. For romantic lapses like the following in At Breakfast:

A railway engine ran across the field
Galloping like a swift horse down the rails.
As it came quicker the window-panes rattled,
The roof shook side to side: all its beams trembled,
Thundering hoofs were upon us—glass chariots.

are not even real lapses like Mr. Nichols’ but a half-satiric “Look: modernist though I am, I can still be romantic about old-fashioned romantic subjects like the railway train.” It is now not a ‘monster’ but a charming early-Victorian objet de vertu under a glass dome. We find Miss Marianne Moore describing expanding bookcases and books printed on india-paper in a serious poem, without self-consciousness:

the vast indestructible necropolis
of composite Yawman-Erbe separable units;
the steel, the oak, the glass, the Poor Richard publications
containing the public secrets of efficiency
on “paper so thin that one thousand four hundred and
twenty pages make one inch.”

Without self-consciousness? Perhaps that is too much to say when so short a space of years separate poetry of this sort from the once-advanced poetry of, say, Richard Le Gallienne, a ‘decadent’ of the ’nineties still alive and at present living in the same city as Miss Moore, like her a literary critic; a city where there must be large backward sections of the reading public to whom Mr. Le Gallienne is still an advanced writer because he has, perhaps, written familiarly of the Devil and the sweets of sin.

But is it necessary for the poet to come to the point, after a long history of gradually acclimatizing his verse to what were once considered unpoetical subjects, where he can, with Miss Moore, bring himself to insert fourteen unrevised and consecutive words straight from a newspaper advertisement into his poem, and put them into quotation marks as well? Though a feat of poetic self-martyrdom, doubtless, and perhaps the logical conclusion of giving civilization what it wants—verse actually interpretative of what is called ‘the poetry of modern business’—it is bad for both poetry and business: the quotation would have been much more effective left in the original setting to compose the daily synthetic advertisement-poem of the morning newspaper.

True modernist poetry can appear equally at all stages of historical development from Wordsworth to Miss Moore. And it does appear when the poet forgets what is the correct literary conduct demanded of him in relation to contemporary institutions (with civilization speaking through criticism) and can write a poem having the power of survival in spite of its disregarding these demands; a poem of purity—of a certain old-fashionedness even, but not an old-fashionedness of reaction against the time to archaism, or of retreat to nature and the primitive passions. All poetry that deserves to endure is at once old-fashioned and modernist. How much of modernist poetry is merely up-to-date conduct-poetry, the poetry of conversion to the last-minute salvationism of civilization, and how much is poetry in need of no conversion, but working out its own salvation by itself, is a difficult question to settle offhand. The proportions vary with individuals. With Mr. Pound the former sort predominates greatly, one would say; with Cummings, though he is more ‘daring’ than Mr. Pound, there is much less of this than at first sight appears; with Mr. Archibald Macleish, an ambitious imitator of Cummings, much more.

The great danger in any discussion of modernist poetry which may reach the plain reader is that in pointing out how many of its qualities are inspired by necessity, sincerity or truthfulness, these qualities may endear themselves to him not because of necessity, sincerity or truthfulness but only because he can understand them as up-to-date; the danger, in fact, that the plain reader may fall in love with the up-to-dateness of this poetry. In this case, with modernist poetry seen and applauded as a part of the movement of civilization, the demands made upon it as such would become intensified. A world of plain readers hungering for up-to-date poetry would turn poetry into one of the gross industries. There is such a great gap between Victorian poetry and the poetry of just before the War, and again between this poetry and advanced modern poetry, that the converted plain reader might fail to see that the theories of 1860 or 1910 or 1927 have nothing to do with the essential goodness of poetry, though much to do with its up-to-dateness. Would not, it may be asked, a hunger for essential goodness in poetry also turn it into one of the gross industries? Perhaps; on the other hand perhaps not, since the reader’s capacity for essential goodness is to his capacity for up-to-dateness as the capacity for writing essentially good poetry to the capacity for writing up-to-date poetry.