Eliot had set out his own ideas about 'the new (the really new) work of art' in his essay 'Trad-ition and the Individual Talent', and the use of the word 'modern' rather than 'new' in the title of The Faber Book of Modern Verse made it sound just a little different and also avoided the word 'modernist', which Eliot disliked in the context of poetry, yet still suggested a distinctive up-to-dateness
Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they
felt about it,
But they knew that it was modern.
Eliot had set out his own ideas about 'the new (the really new) work of art' in his essay 'Trad-ition and the Individual Talent', and the use of the word 'modern' rather than 'new' in the title of The Faber Book of Modern Verse made it sound just a little different and also avoided the word 'modernist', which Eliot disliked in the context of poetry, yet still suggested a distinctive up-to-dateness
Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they
felt about it,
But they knew that it was modern.