In another essay, "What Was Modern Poetry?" I spent almost all the time on what I called imagism—not the movement called Des Imagistes, but, much more broadly, the many and recurrent movements in modernist poetry that had in common a wish to exalt the senses, especially the sense of sight, at the expense of the mind. Indeed, these movements, like some movements in philosophy (and not in the branch of aesthetics alone), found themselves impelled, by the necessities of rhetoric if by nothing more serious, to a contempt for mind, and since this contempt for mind in general had to include of necessity the mind that was being contemptuous, not to mention the mind that was writing the poems that exalted the senses at the mind's expense, some contradiction was always involved, though it was not always acknowledged. For to proclaim, as the first Imagists did, that one must do away with "Cosmic Poetry" is to proclaim that one must do away with metaphysics, which is, however, a metaphysical decision; and as Owen Barfield says, "It is a failing common to a good many contemporary metaphysical theories that they can be applied to all things except themselves but that, when so applied, they extinguish themselves."