may claim Mr. T.S.  Eliot—­a poet of uncommon merit and unmistakably in the great line—­whose agonizing labours seem to have been eased somewhat by the comfortable ministrations of a black and grinning muse.  Midwifery, to be sure, seems an odd occupation for a lady whom one pictures rather in the role of a flapper:  but a midwife was what the poet needed, and in that capacity she has served him.  Apparently it is only by adopting a demurely irreverent attitude, by being primly insolent, and by playing the devil with the instrument of Shakespeare and Milton that Mr. Eliot is able occasionally to deliver himself of one of those complicated and remarkable imaginings of his:  apparently it is only in language of an exquisite purity so far as material goes, but twisted and ragged out of easy recognition, that these nurslings can be swathed.  As for surprise, that, presumably, is an emotion which the author of Ara Vos Prec is not unwilling to provoke.  Be that as it may, Mr. Eliot is about the best of our living poets, and, like Stravinsky, he is as much a product of the Jazz movement as so good an artist can be of any.

In literature Jazz manifests itself both formally and in content.  Formally its distinctive characteristic is the familiar one—­syncopation.  It has given us a ragtime literature which flouts traditional rhythms and sequences and grammar and logic.  In verse its products—­rhythms which are often indistinguishable from prose rhythms and collocations of words to which sometimes is assignable no exact intellectual significance—­are by now familiar to all who read.  Eliot is too personal to be typical of anything, and the student who would get a fair idea of Jazz poetry would do better to spend half an hour with a volume of Cocteau or Cendrars.  In prose I think Mr. Joyce will serve as a, perhaps, not very good example:  I choose him because he is probably better known to readers than any other writer who affects similar methods.  In his later publications Mr. Joyce does deliberately go to work to break up the traditional sentence, throwing overboard sequence, syntax, and, indeed, most of those conventions which men habitually employ for the exchange of precise ideas.  Effectually, and with a will, he rags the literary instrument:  unluckily, this will has at its service talents which though genuine are moderate only.  A writer of greater gifts, Virginia Woolf, has lately developed a taste for playing tricks with traditional constructions.  Certainly she “leaves out” with the boldest of them:  here is syncopation if you like it.  I am not sure that I do.  At least, I doubt whether the concentration gained by her new style for An Unwritten Novel and Monday or Tuesday makes up for the loss of those exquisite but old-fashioned qualities which make The Mark on the Wall a masterpiece of English prose.  But, indeed, I do not think of Mrs. Woolf as belonging properly to the movement; she is not imbued with that spirit which inspires the