Science, poetry, religion--these three between them in-
clude a very large share of those values that distinguish
human life from animal existence. The Good, the True,
and the Beautiful, technique and end, efficient and final
causes, all are herein comprehended. Yet we tend to feel
today that they are yoked together with violence if at all.
A quarter of a century ago we thought we knew what the
proper relationship between them was: science was not
only the proper study but the true salvation of mankind;
poetry was a threatened, perhaps a dying relic of unsci-
entific ages; religion, for the well-informed, was safely
dead. Essays were written on the future of poetry in
which it was always asked, Can poetry survive in an age
of science? Professor I. A. Richards, the founder, as many
think, of the new criticism, spoke for his time when in
Science and Poetry he predicted that poetry might have
a future if it became "pure," by which he meant if it aban-
doned to science all its claims to dealing in knowledge
and truth and recognized that the only statements proper
to it are "pseudo-statements," the only language "emo-
tive."

Although poetry has become notably more complex
and obscure, and even, in a sense, pure, if by "pure" we
mean not explicitly didactic, yet the best modern poets

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