The comic technique is devoted to a contrast between Imperial America and Imperial Rome in general conversational style. The mind, in being democratized, runs the theme, has grown large, complicated, vulgar and dead. The poet’s clownishness consists in swift and showy acrobatic turns from present-day vulgar sophistication to the comparative simplicity of classical manners and from classical civilization on the other hand to twentieth-century vocabularistic vulgarity. A snobbish prejudice in favour of classical phrasing is the special privilege in which this poet indulges himself. The Latin verse from Catullus reads: “And may he when dead grow more and more famous, nor may the spider spinning its fine thread from above ... (make a web upon the forgotten name of Allius).” The quotation, somewhat forced in its application we must confess, is from an elegy on the death of Allius, a friend who has helped Catullus in his intrigues by providing him and his Lesbia with a rendezvous at the house of a mistress of his own: for which Catullus thanks him in all frankness and simplicity. The vultures occur in this poem of Catullus’: and “hitting on all thirty-two”—an advertisement for a tooth-paste—is probably an ironic comment in the style of Catullus’ ironic comment on the fine teeth of his friend Egnatius. Prospero is the symbol of learning, which did not become, until advanced times, humanitarian and democratic, commercialized and vulgar. The element of humour in this poem is not entirely sincere because the prejudice is somewhat too dogmatic, the poet failing to identify himself with both subjects of the contrast. He was not willing, that is, to be the complete clown and has thus very nearly left himself on his head.

The bourgeois character of common convictions and of human progress in the popular sense does indeed inspire in the modernist generation a temperamental antagonism to old-fashioned democratic civilization. In pseudo-modernist types this antagonism is inclined to manifest itself in a social, political or literary gospel of pessimism. Genuine professional modernism inclines rather toward the two extremes of radicalism and conservatism, or aristocraticness and rough-neckedness; not so much out of militant opposition to bourgeois liberalism as out of peripatetic avoidance of a crowded thoroughfare—bourgeois liberalism, being a position of compromise between all extremes, is the breeding place of settled, personally secure convictions. At the extremes instead of convictions there is a border-sense, a well-poised mental hysteria, a direct exposure to time: there is the far-driven boundary-line of humour: there is, in both, the callous haughtiness of indifference to danger, of a more acute technique of self-preservation. The mind, human nature, poetry, are at their best when they combine the elements of both roughness and gentleness; and this is not a politician’s trick or a philosopher’s trick or a sentimentalist’s trick, but a clown’s trick.

The only flaw in humour of the modernist poet is his failure to include the bourgeois in his intellectual scale. It is, we might say, the only turn missing in his clownish repertory. Indeed James Joyce has suggested that Shakespeare’s greatness lay in his power to play the bourgeois impersonally, but as a bourgeois, without having a bourgeois dummy to kick or yet slapping his own face:

Death, a common bourgeois conviction, is the only progressive liberal subject which the modernist poet sometimes treats without prejudice. One contemporary poet actually writes of it:

But even with Death the modernist poet is in the main not quite at his clownish best because of his awareness of its bourgeois applications: it is very difficult to deal with Death and, considering its history, not treat it as a religious conviction—to treat it as a dead-earnest joke. A similar difficulty exists with Love, the twin bourgeois conviction to Death. In Love even the most modernist of modernist poets is bourgeois. He is narrowly idealistic and therefore incapable, except in rare cases, of making it another dead-earnest joke: The clown in this feat is afraid of not landing on his legs. The most he trusts himself to is a few ribald high jumps.