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CHAPTER XIX

FREE VERSE OR VERS LIBRE

The history of every art shows periods of revolt from conventionalities, from standards, and even from laws. Critical wars have been waged over poetic diction, verse forms have been worn out by the poets and dropped from use, and rhythms which one age eyed askance as innovations, another has later scorned as dully old-fashioned. At present the poets are engaged in one more of these quarrels over formthis time as to how much form is necessary, or, in fact, whether any is necessary at all.

This recent development of free verse is a natural reaction following the kind of poetry written between 1880 and 1910. The successors of Tennyson and Swinburne constituted a group of poets of as high a degree of technical skill in difficult fixed rhythms and meters as any period can show. A radical change in type was to be expected. And this prosodic revolt is made more prominent by the fact that along with it has developed a revolt toward an absolute realism in point of view and in diction. The adherents of the old and of the new schools belabor one another with words.

One side claims that fixed forms are monotonous, and that all possibilities of further development in them have been exhausted; the other side claims that vers libre is utterly without art, that it is the refuge of the lazy poet. Both sides present as proof of their points the most execrable examples of the type they wish to villify; when one writer condemns all vers libre by quoting some silly eccentricity, a vers librist retorts with "Mary had a little lamb."

It seems hardly necessary for the present author to defend fixed verse from the charge of obviousness and monotony

of rhythm after he has written a book on its infinite possibilities and subtle variations. And on the other hand, though much free verse is the result of mere laziness, or crudeness of technique, to condemn the type indiscriminately means to deny a place in poetic art to forms highly developed by Arnold, Patmore, Henley, Whitman, Blake, and the translators of the Psalter. Both the fixed and the free types of verse will undoubtedly go on existing side by side, and as new singers arise they will discover new capabilities in both for embodying the new aspects of life they have to present.

Whether the poet chooses a fixed or a free manner of expression will depend upon his mood or upon his habitual way of thought. The notion that free verse is a more natural form of expression, and therefore easier to write than fixed verse is, I think, a fallacy. The difficulty in composition which free verse presents is that it does not force the poet to contemplate his thought with an intensity which brings out its fullest possibilities, and which at the same time rejects its superfluous fringes. Great free verse can be written only by a mind capable of concentration and of self-criticism. The danger of too much freedom is that poetry may easily become the mere jotting down of very casual thoughts in haphazard rhythm. The first form in which an idea comes to a poet is just the material for a poem; if he allows himself complete freedom of expression he is tempted to leave the thought undeveloped, so that he does not bring out all the poetry and feeling the theme really can inspire in him. A comparison of some of Emerson's poems with the first drafts of them in his notebooks, makes an interesting study in the development of a poetic idea through the requirement of form. Here is a passage from Seashore, which is improved in both rhythm and thought:

Was ever couch so magnificent as mine? Lie down on my warm ledges and learn that a very little hut is all you need. I have made this architecture superfluous, and it is paltry beside mine.

Was ever couch magnificent as mine

Lie down on the warm rock-ledges and there learn
A little hut suffices like a town.

I make your sculptured architecture vain,
Vain beside mine. I drive my wedges home,

And carve the coastwise mountain into caves.

A great deal of recent work seems to me to be merely hints and suggestions, first drafts, that would not appear so trivial if the poets had developed the significance of these hints. The beginner in poetic composition will find the demands of rigid form an actual help to his development. In the process of fulfilling the requirements of fixed meters and rime schemes he will turn over in mind many phrases for the expression of his thought, and when he has acquired a facility he will find a way to use the best of these phrases. Arnold, Henley, Patmore and Whitman wrote in the fixed forms before they tried free rhythms; and the young poet had better learn to sail his boat in the sheltered harbors of the quatrain or sonnet before he ventures out in the treacherous sea of vers libre. I do not wish to argue that the forms of fixed verse are necessary for the development of poetic thought, but that some kind of form is. Free verse is a most musical vehicle for the expression of the poet's feeling, as Arnold, Henley and Whitman have shown; but with these masters there were always in view certain standards guiding their changes in rhythm.

The metrist, however, finds a greater difficulty in formulating principles for free verse than he does for the fixed types, because the very nature of free verse makes its form a matter which varies with each individual poem. In no other type of expression is the truism, that form must be in perfect correspondence with thought, quite so true. But poets and readers and critics rarely agree as to whether in any given case this perfect accord has been attained. The metrist can merely give a few hints to the vers librist, scarcely anything that may be called principles. The poets

themselves who, like Miss Amy Lowell and Mr. John Gould Fletcher, have written of their art form, insist that there are laws guiding free verse rhythms, but they are extremely vague about these laws and do not commit themselves by exact statements and pointed illustrations.

In the fifth chapter of this book, in which we discussed the differences between prose, rhythmical prose, free verse and fixed verse, a distinction was drawn between free verse that is irregular in meter only, and free verse that is irregular in both meter and rhythm. Verse that is free from a fixed metrical norm and that may also be free from rime we may call the Arnold type of vers libre-a type which developed from the English Pindaric ode and from imitated choruses of the Greek dramatists. This kind of vers libre Milton used for the famous choruses in Samson Agonistes, Arnold in half a dozen of his best known poems, Patmore in his Angel in the House, and Henley in Hawthorne and Lavender. Verse that is free from a fixed meter and from a definite rhythmical pattern we may call the Whitman type of vers libre. This type, as was shown in chapter five, is, except for the manner of printing, identical with rhythmical prose, from which, in fact, it apparently developed. This is the free verse of the English Psalter, McPherson's Ossian, Blake's prophetic books, Henley's London Voluntaries, and most of Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

This distinction in type of vers libre according to the degree of freedom which it follows, is not especially important except for the fact that the Arnold type is close enough to fixed verse to maintain the struggle between the phrasing and the underlying established rhythm-the struggle of forces which brings about variety in all kinds of fixed verse; the Whitman type, being practically the same as rhythmical prose, gains its variety through changes in the rhythm itself. The modern vers librists write in either type, according to the degree of freedom they desire. Two of the finest poems of the type which holds to an

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