the barrage of old-fashioned poetry Toldridge sent to him helped to refine his views. In response to one such poem he wrote: It would be an excellent thing if you could gradually work out of the idea that this kind of stilted & artificial language is “poetical” in any way; for truly, it is not. It is a drag & hindrance on real poetic feeling & expression, because real poetry means spontaneous expression in the simplest & most poignantly vital living language. The great object of the poet is to get rid of the cumbrous & the emptily quaint, & buckle down to the plain, the direct, & the vital—the
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