ecstasy or emotion, what impassioned ideas there are in the work. Free verse may or may not have a cadence all its own, but one feels that those who advocate free verse need not try to prove that it does and must possess a cadence peculiar to itself. Free verse may have great poetic value even though it lacks a unique cadence. Free verse rose into prominence lately because poets wanted to be freed from the bonds of metre. They should not encumber themselves with the shackles of a new prosody. Let us illustrate our point: we shall take a few lines from a great prose poem by Lafcadio Hearn and arrange them in free verse. It is from the essay called "The Eternal Haunter" in the volume Exotics and Retrospectives. The haunter is evidently ancestral memory or the spirit of life in the past. Ancient her beauty As leaves in the frost of autumn; But none shall touch with his lips It is seen that this prose passage in the tree verse transformance has the cadences which were present before. It is still poetical, as it was in the original version as well. It really matters little if Hearn had written it as it now stands. It is a question of personal preference with the poet, in what form he wishes to write. Walter P. Eaton, in an article in the Atlantic Monthly for October, 1919, considers the free verse form different from prose. He took a passage from Pater's Renaissance and arranged it in free verse form, and then a passage from Sandburg's free verse and arranged it in prose, and tried unsuccessfully to show that the Pater passage did not become free verse, and that the Sandburg passage did not become good prose. His mistake was in trying to take a passage from Sandburg that had a patterned form, and in arranging the Pater passage into lines that were too brief. But Professor Lowes has taken passages from Pater, Hewlett, Fiona Macleod, Conrad and George Meredith and printed them as free verse, and they truly read like free verse poems. The votaries of free verse demand a special cadence, but there is hardly any of it in Masters's poems in the Spoon River Anthology which could have been printed as prose passages. They would have been just as good and poetical as they are in free verse, but Masters has the right to make any arrangement he wanted. Ecstasy is more important than cadence, and he has ecstasy. The following passage from Roosevelt's essay on History as Literature is poetry by virtue of its ecstasy and visualizing effect, though printed in prose form. Roosevelt might have arranged it in the long lines of irregular lengths like those of Whitman into which it fits better than it would into lines of brief, irregular length. But its poetry does not depend upon the rhythms which are in the original prose. It is only one of the few cases where Roosevelt succeeds in being a poet, for he was rather the orator who swayed by rhetoric many of the worst of popular prejudices. The true historian will bring the past before our eyes as if it were the present . . Gorgeous in our sight will rise the splendor of dead cities, And the might of the elder empires of which the very ruins crumbled to dust ages ago; Along ancient trade-routes, across the world's waste spaces, its caravans shall move; And the admirals of uncharted seas shall furrow the ocean with their lonely prows, Beyond the dim centuries we shall see the banners float above armed hosts. We shall see conquerors riding forward to victories that have changed the course of time. We shall listen to prophecies of forgotten seers. Ours shall be the dreams of dreamers who dreamed greatly, Who saw in their vision peaks so lofty That never have they been reached By the sons and daughters of men. Dead poets shall sing to us the deeds of men of might Dr. Andrews in his Writing and Reading of Verse has also given us illustrations of rhythmic prose that he has resolved into free verse. Like Professor Patterson, "he rightly refuses to recognize free verse as a distinct species of verse, holding it to have an affinity at least to prose.* He notes that the free verse advocates have not really defined special laws of free verse. He also recommends the would-be practitioners of free verse to study the prose rhythms of men like Pater and De Quincey. Professor Corson, the Browning scholar, wrote to Walt Whitman that be believed that impassioned prose would be the medium in which the poetry of the future would be written, and that he considered the Leaves of Grass one of * Spingarn's Creative Criticism and Erskine's The Kinds of Poetry, two excellent brochures in æsthetic criticism, take a similar view point. the harbingers. The vogue of free verse, which is but impassioned prose, shows that his prophecy is coming true. In England Matthew Arnold and Walter Henley used it. Edward Carpenter had been writing it as a result of Whitman's influence, in Towards Democracy in 1883. In America Horace Traubel, long before the free verse vogue started, had been writing in his The Conservator free verse poems. No one paid attention to these even when some of them were collected in Optimos in 1910, except a few disciples. Richard Hovey, Ernest Crosby, and Stephen Crane had also been writing free verse after Whitman before the year 1900. About 1912 an impetus was given to free verse by the poets of the new poetic era which set in and which Untermeyer calls the New Era in American Poetry. Most of the contemporary free verse poets began writing simultaneously. Nearly all of our modern free verse poets are admittedly indebted to Whitman; Louis Untermeyer names Whitman as the leading influence on modern American poetry. Let us also be thankful that Whitman did not write about the "technique of free verse,” about "cadence," "strophe” and "return." Whitman is without a doubt the father of free verse in America and England to-day. He did not claim to have originated it, since he found a form of it in the prose poetry of the Bible and Ossian. It was also used by Milton and Blake and in German by Goethe and Heine. As Bliss Perry also shows, The Lily and the Bee by Warren, the author of Ten Thousand a Year, was written in free verse, before Whitman. Tupper also used it. Free verse was adopted in France and Belgium as a result of Whitman's influence. America owes nothing to French free verse which was usually rhymed and corresponds to the Pindaric Ode founded by Cowley in the middle of the seventeenth century.* Dionysius of Halicarnassus was one of the few ancient critics who brought the boundaries of prose and poetry close. His work On Literary Composition contains two chapters on the importance of rhythm, which he considers an important element in prose as well as in verse, and he is especially impressed by the rhythms of Thucydides, Plato and Demosthenes. At the conclusion of this work, which has been translated by W. Rhys Roberts, are two chapters entitled "How Prose Can Resemble Verse," and "How Verse Can Resemble Prose." He wants prose not to be cast in metre or rhythm but simply to appear rhythmical and metrical; the metres and rhythms must be unobstrusively introduced. In this he follows Aristotle's Rhetoric which says prose should have rhythm but of not too marked a character. Dionysius especially shows Demosthenes's great care in the matter of rhythm, and instances as examples of artistic finish among the Greeks the fact that Isocrates worked ten years on his Panegyrics. After having shown how prose may resemble verse he points out how verse resembles prose. When the clauses and sense do not coincide with the metrical line but are carried over for completion in another line, the result is prosaic. That is what makes our English blank verse so much like prose. Dionysius erred however in not emphasizing the importance of the ecstatic element in making prose and verse resemble each other. He over-valued the use of rhythm in prose, but he was after all swayed by the ecstasy of the writer. He tells of the influence upon him of reading one *For a history of French free verse see Mercure De France, March 15, 1921. Premiers Poètés Du Vers Libre by Edouard Dujardin. |