This paper sees 20th C. poetry in general, and British and North
American contemporary poetry more specifically, not as a single,
homogeneous tradition, but as split into two different traditions
corresponding to two very different attitudes towards meaning, the
romantic-symbolist and the modern-materialist. Consideration of this
split and of anthropologist Dan Sperber's view of symbolic behaviour
as an activity rather than a code helps illuminate one of I. H. Finlay's
most effective object poems.
