regret that the day of the man of learning is over, especially at a time when so many ignorant poets and critics and reviewers discuss and decide emphatically on many matters wherein a little learning is not a dangerous thing. Chrif Error: assumption that these outer forms, prese & verse, are iralities, instad of the utterance Gses! CHAPTER IV PROSE THE NATURAL LANGUAGE OF THE LITERATURE WORDSWORTH believed that the language used by people in poetry should be that of the natural language of men under the influence of their feelings and that the diction of metrical poetry should differ in no wise from that of prose. Yet the only writers who use the natural diction of men are novelists, prose dramatists and short story writers, and, curiously enough, because they did not write verse, it has not often been suspected that these men were poets. Wordsworth's views are really proofs that poetry is found in prose, for the prose writers comply with his requirements of using in their compositions the natural conversation of men under the influence of natural feelings. They also comply with Wordsworth's definition of poetry, recording "emotions recollected in tranquillity." Hazlitt has ably summed up the influence of the French Revolution on Wordsworth. Our poet did away with mythological references, with tales about legendary characters. He wrote about the emotions of the common people and introduced no far-fetched metaphors, nor made pedantic allusions. Wordsworth, however, did not claim, as Coleridge thought he did, that the language of verse poetry must be that of ignorant people. Wordsworth never asserted that he wanted the poets to use the language of peasants, except when peasants were portrayed and represented as speaking. He simply protested against stilted, artificial language in verse poetry. He held the use of such language in verse poetry to be ridiculous, as it was in prose. He was not an exponent of prose poetry, even though he laid little stress on the importance of metre. As the authors of the article on Wordsworth in the Encyclopedia Britannica state, the farthest he went in defense of prose structure in poetry was to say that if the words in verse happened to be in the order of prose, they were not necessarily prosaic in the sense of unpoetic. He did not (unfortunately) try to eliminate metre in poetry. He no doubt agreed with Coleridge's own defense of meter in the Biographia Literaria. He did not write against his own theory, for he always employed metre and—except in some ballads—a diction that was even literary. Though both Wordsworth and Coleridge were not overawed by the necessity of metre in poetry, they believed in its use, and were opposed to prose poetry. Coleridge, however, wrote a prose poem The Wanderings of Cain and some of his essays are prose poetry. Coleridge also devoted an entire chapter in his Biographia Literaria to the defense of metre as a vehicle for poetry. He attributes the origin of metre to the fact that the mind makes a conscious effort to hold passion in check by fettering it with regular numbers. On the contrary, this conscious check is due to imitation of old examples, to fear in defying the critics, for the natural language of passion is irregular rhythm, and it is impatient of being confined in regular, artificial numbers. Coleridge thinks the effect of metre is "to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and the attention" by the continued excitement of surprise. I submit that metre often distracts the attention from the poem's real object, which is to depict ecstasy. Metre often diverts our ear to the singsong tone in which the emotions are couched. Instead of adding to the vivacity and susceptibility of the feelings it really makes us suspect that the poet is not sincere, for the man of emotions expresses them spontaneously and does not trick them out in pattern. Next, Coleridge assumes that because of custom, metre must have some property in common with poetry. This argument cannot stand when we take into consideration the innumerable emotional passages that have been written in prose. A custom is only a passing practice, and free verse writers have abandoned the custom of writing in metre and in many cases have produced good poetry. Lastly, our critic thinks that every poet is impelled "to seek unity by harmonious adjustment, and thus establishing the principle, that all the parts of an organized whole must be assimilated to the more important and essential parts." But why assume that there is no unity of harmonious adjustment in an emotional passage in prose? Or why identify such unity with a metrical pattern? Isn't a Psalm in the Bible a unity of harmonious adjustment? Even if the essential part of a poetic piece tends to assume a certain pattern it does not mean that the whole piece should be given a patterned form. Some day it will be recognized that a long composition recording different emotions is really unaesthetic in a uniform pattern. "As to the accents of words," says Bacon, in his Advancement of Learning, Book VI, Ch. I, "there is no necessity for taking notice of so trivial a thing; only it may be proper to intimate that these are observed with great exactness, whilst the accents of sentences are neglected; though it is nearly common to all mankind to sink the voice at the end of a period, to raise it in interrogation, and the like." This passage is the first attack in English on metre. It was Whitman who gave the death blow to metre. He brought poetry back to rhythmical prose, and is the greatest liberator poetry has ever had. He demonstrated that an entire volume might be written in rhythmical prose (with the lines broken up), and that the product could be the highest poetry. His Leaves of Grass ignored all the rules laid down in various books on poetics. Whitman has done more than most critics to convey to the world what poetry really is. "In my opinion," says Whitman, "the time has arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between prose and poetry. I say the latter is henceforth to win and maintain its character regardless of rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic, spondee, dactyl, &c., and that even if rhyme and those measurements continue to furnish the medium for inferior writers and themes (especially for persiflage and the comic, as there seems henceforward, to the perfect taste, something inevitably comic in rhyme, merely in itself, and anyhow), the truest and greatest Poetry (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable enough) can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion." We have long been laboring under the mischievous Aristotelian division of poetry into Epic, Dramatic and Lyric, and critics have exhausted themselves trying to determine which of these was the highest form of poetry. As a matter of fact, the epic poem was only the primitive author's method of writing a poetical novel centering around wars; or a later poet's imitation of that form. The dramatic poem was another way of telling a story without introducing much narration or description. Poetry does not inhere in an epic of Homer or a play of Sophocles by virtue of the form, but because of the emotions de |