• Much of modern poetry is marked by a peculiarly harsh, unresolved complexity.  The historian of ‘modern poetry’ might date its rise in England somewhere between 1910 and 1920.

• T. S. Eliot wrote The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in 1915.  Fifty years after it was written this poem still delightfully shocked and surprised those finding it for the first time; it toppled over their inert notions of what a poem is, or should be.  Eliot’s originality partly arose from his being thoroughly bored with his contemporaries.  Ezra Pound, though admiring both Yeats and Hardy, felt a similar boredom, a boredom which drove him to restless and unceasing experiment.  The Imagist movement, in which Pound played a great part, reflected an impatience with conventional diction and metres.  Pound affected Yeats, whom he knew well, and critics rightly feel that around 1910, in Pound, Eliot, and Yeats, something new crystallizes.  Eliot’s use of allusion and concealed quotation enables him to set the present and past in perspective.

• In French poetry is found the basis of surrealism.  One of the first results of an attempt by post-symbolist poets to bring art and life together again was not a new simplicity and clarity but a new confusion.  Obscurity marks the works of poets like Rimbaud, who, unlike Mallarmé, does not know, or want to know, quite what he is doing.  He speaks in a trance like an inspired drunkard.  Rimbaud plunges poetry into life, and life into poetry once more, but at the cost of introducing into both a new element of bewildering disorder.  Rimbaud is the poet as rebel; not only against political or religious order and social conditions but also against the very nature of human life.  He helped to inspire the French Surrealist movement which, as its name suggests, seeks to transcend and destroy everyday reality.  Surrealists both sought to use words not merely to record existence but to key it up, for themselves and their readers, to a new pitch; they sought not merely to engage the reader’s attention but to alter his life.  By the power and richness of their language they hoped to overpower the reader, to drag him into their nets; it is a doctrine and a way of life and a means of persuasion that mattered with them, not the poem.  What interests Surrealists themselves is the delirium, richness, confusion, and terror of experience which the writing and reading of such texts can evoke.  Such ‘mad’ poets might claim that their ‘madness’ is a state which gives them deeper insight into reality than what is generally called ‘sanity’ does.

• Difficulty has its proper place in literature; our world, and our place in it, are increasingly hard to understand and the sense of that difficulty has been increasing for more than a hundred years.