A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry

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But if we turn the pages of any collection of English poetry, say the
_Golden Treasury_ or the _Oxford Book of English Verse_, we find something
very different from this ideal embodiment of each poetic emotion in a form
delicately moulded to the particular species of emotion revealed. We
discover that precisely similar stanzaic patterns--like similar metrical
patterns--are often used to express diametrically opposite feelings,--let
us say, joy and sorrow, doubt and exultation, victory and defeat. The
"common metre" of English hymnology is thus seen to be a rough mould into
which almost any kind of religious emotion may be poured. If "trochaic"
measures do not always trip it on a light fantastic toe, neither do
"iambic" measures always pace sedately. Doubtless there is a certain
general fitness, in various stanza forms, for this or that poetic purpose:
the stanzas employed by English or Scotch balladry are admittedly
excellent for story-telling; Spenser's favorite stanza is unrivalled
for painting dream-pictures and rendering dream-music, but less available
for pure narration; Chaucer's seven-line stanza, so delicately balanced
upon that fourth, pivotal line, can paint a picture and tell a story too;
Byron's _ottava rima_ has a devil-may-care jauntiness, borrowed, it is
true, from his Italian models, but perfectly fitted to Byron's own mood;
the rhymed couplets of Pope sting and glitter like his antitheses, and the
couplets of Dryden have their "resonance like a great bronze coin thrown
down on marble"; each great artist in English verse, in short, chooses by
instinct the general stanza form best suited to his particular purpose,
and then moulds its details with whatever cunning he may possess. But the
significant point is this: "stanzaic law" makes for uniformity, for the
endless repetition of the chosen pattern, which must still be recognized
as a pattern, however subtly the artist modulates his details; and in
adjusting the infinitely varied material of thought and feeling, phrase
and image, picture and story to the fixed stanzaic design, there are bound
to be gaps and patches, stretchings and foldings of the thought-stuff,--
for even as in humble tailor-craft, this many-colored coat of poetry must
be cut according to the cloth as well as according to the pattern. How
many pages of even the _Oxford Book of English Verse_ are free from some
touch of feebleness, of redundancy, of constraint due to the remorseless
requirements of the stanza? The line must be filled out, whether or not
the thought is quite full enough for it; rhyme must match rhyme, even if
the thought becomes as far-fetched as the rhyming word; the stanza, in
short, demands one kind of perfection as a constantly repeated musical
design, as beauty of form; and another kind of perfection as the
expression of human emotion. Sometimes these two perfections of "form" and
"significance" are miraculously wedded, stanza after stanza, and we have
our "Ode to a Nightingale," or "Ode to Autumn" as the result. (And perhaps
the best, even in this kind, are but shadows, when compared with the
absolute union of truth and beauty as the poetic idea first took rhythmic
form in the brain of the poet.)

Yet more often lovers of poetry must content themselves, not with such
"dictates of nature" as these poems, but with approximations. Each
stanzaic form has its conveniences, its "fatal facility," its natural
fitness for singing a song or telling a story or turning a thought over
and over into music. Intellectual readers will always like the
epigrammatic "snap" of the couplet, and Spenser will remain, largely
because of his choice of stanza, the "poet's poet." Perhaps
the very necessity of fitting rhymes together stimulates as much poetic
activity as it discourages; for many poets have testified that the delight
of rhyming adds energy to the imagination. If, as Shelley said, "the mind
in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an
inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness," why may it not be the
breath of rhyme, as well as any other form of rhythmic energy, which
quickens its drooping flame? And few poets, furthermore, will admit that
they are really in bondage to their stanzas. They love to dance in these
fetters, and even when wearing the same fetters as another poet, they
nevertheless invent movements of their own, so that Mr. Masefield's
"Chaucerian" stanzas are really not so much Chaucer's as Masefield's.

Each Ulysses makes and bends his own bow, after all; it is only the
unsuccessful suitors for the honors of poetic craftsmanship who complain
of its difficulties. Something of our contemporary impatience with fixed
stanzaic forms is due perhaps to the failure to recognize that the greater
poets succeed in making over every kind of poetic pattern in the act of
employing it, just as a Chopin minuet differs from a Liszt minuet,
although both composers are using the same fundamental form of dance
music. We must allow for the infinite variety of creative intention,
technique and result. The true defence of rhyme and stanza against the
arguments of extreme advocates of free verse is to point out that
rhyme and stanza are natural structural devices for securing certain
effects. There are various types of bridges for crossing different kinds
of streams; no one type of bridge is always and everywhere the best. To do
away with rhyme and stanza is to renounce some modes of poetic beauty; it
is to resolve that there shall be one less way of crossing the stream. An
advocate of freedom in the arts may well admit that the artist may bridge
his particular stream in any way he can,--or he may ford it or swim it or
go over in an airplane if he chooses. But some method must be found of
getting his ideas and emotions "across" into the mind and feelings of the
readers of his poetry. If this can adequately be accomplished without
recourse to rhyme and stanza, very well; there is _Paradise Lost_, for
instance, and _Hamlet_. But here we are driven back again upon the
countless varieties of artistic intention and craftsmanship and effect.
Each method--and there are as many methods as there are poets and far
more, for craftsmen like Milton and Tennyson try hundreds of methods in
their time--is only a medium through which the artist is endeavoring to
attain a special result. It is one way--only one, and perhaps not the best
way--of trying to cross the stream.

_4. Free Verse_

Recalling now the discussion of the rhythms of prose in the previous
chapter, and remembering that rhyme and stanza are special forms of
reinforcing the impulse of rhythm, what shall be said of free verse? It
belongs, unquestionably, in that "neutral zone" which some readers, in Dr.
Patterson's phrase, instinctively appropriate as "prose experience," and
others as "verse experience." It renounces metre--or rather endeavors to
renounce it, for it does not always succeed. It professes to do away with
rhyme and stanza, although it may play cunningly upon the sounds of like
and unlike words, and it may arrange phrases into poetic paragraphs,
which, aided by the art of typography, secure a kind of stanzaic effect.
It cannot, however, do away with the element of rhythm, with ordered time.
The moment free verse ceases to be felt as rhythmical, it ceases to be
felt as poetry. This is admitted by its advocates and its opponents
alike. The real question at issue then, is the manner in which free verse
may secure the effects of rhythmic unity and variety, without, on the one
hand, resorting to the obvious rhythms of prose, or on the other hand,
without repeating the recognized patterns of verse. There are many
competent critics who maintain with Edith Wyatt that "on an earth where
there is nothing to wear but clothes, nothing to eat but food, there is
also nothing to read but prose and poetry." "According to the results of
our experiments," testifies Dr. Patterson, "there is no psychological
meaning to claims for a third _genre_ between regular verse and prose,
except in the sense of a jumping back and forth from one side of the fence
to the other."
[Footnote: _The Rhythm of Prose_, p. 77.]
And in the preface to his second edition, after having listened to Miss
Amy Lowell's readings of free verse, Dr. Patterson remarks: "What is
achieved, as a rule, in Miss Lowell's case, is emotional prose,
emphatically phrased, excellent and moving. _Spaced prose_, we may call
it."

Now "spaced prose" is a useful expression, inasmuch as it calls attention
to the careful emphasis and balance of phrases which up so much of the
rhetorical structure of free verse, and it also serves to remind us of the
part which typography plays in "spacing" these phrases, and stressing for
the eye their curves and "returns." But we are all agreed that
typographical appeals to the eye are infinitely deceptive in blurring the
distinction between verse and prose, and that the trained ear must be the
only arbiter as to poetical and pseudo-poetical effects. Ask a lover of
Walt Whitman whether "spaced prose" is the right label for "Out of the
Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and he will scoff at you. He will maintain that
following the example of the rich broken rhythms of the English Bible, the
example of Ossian, Blake, and many another European experimenter during
the Romantic epoch, Whitman really succeeded in elaborating a mode of
poetical expression, nearer for the most part to recitative than to
aria, yet neither pure declamation nor pure song: a unique embodiment of
passionate feeling, a veritable "neutral zone," which refuses to let
itself be annexed to either "prose" or "verse" as those terms are
ordinarily understood, but for which "free verse" is precisely the right
expression. _Leaves of Grass_ (1855) remains the most interesting of all
experiments with free verse, written as it was by an artist whose natural
rhythmical endowment was extraordinary, and whose technical curiosity and
patience in modulating his tonal effects was unwearied by failures and
undiscouraged by popular neglect. But the case for free verse does not,
after all, stand or fall with Walt Whitman. His was merely the most
powerful poetic personality among the countless artificers who have
endeavored to produce rhythmic and tonal beauty through new structural
devices.

Readers who are familiar with the experiments of contemporary poets will
easily recognize four prevalent types of "free verse":

(a) Sometimes what is printed as "free verse" is nothing but prose
disguised by the art of typography, i.e. judged by the ear, it is made up
wholly of the rhythms of prose.

(b) Sometimes the prose rhythms predominate, without excluding a mixture
of the recognized rhythms of verse.

(c) Sometimes verse rhythms predominate, and even fixed metrical feet are
allowed to appear here and there.

(d) Sometimes verse rhythms and metres are used exclusively, although in
new combinations which disguise or break up the metrical pattern.

A parody by F. P. A. in _The Conning Tower_ affords a convenient
illustration of the "a" type:

ADD SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY

Peoria, Ill., Jan. 24.--The Spoon River levee, which protected thousands
of acres of farm land below Havana, Ill., fifty-five miles south of here,
broke this morning.

A score or more of families fled to higher ground. The towns of Havana,
Lewiston and Duncan Mills are isolated. Two dozen head of cattle are
reported drowned on the farm of John Himpshell, near Havana.--Associated
Press dispatch.

Edgar Lee Masters wrote a lot of things
About me and the people who
Inhabited my banks.
All of them, all are sleeping on the hill.
Herbert Marshall, Amelia Garrick, Enoch Dunlap,
Ida Frickey, Alfred Moir, Archibald Highbie and the rest.
Me he gave no thought to--
Unless, perhaps, to think that I, too, was asleep.
Those people on the hill, I thought,
Have grown famous;
But nobody writes about me.
I was only a river, you know,
But I had my pride,
So one January day I overflowed my banks;
It wasn't much of a flood, Mr. Masters,
But it put me on the front page
And in the late dispatches
Of the Associated Press.

It is clear that the quoted words of the Associated Press dispatch from
Peoria are pure prose, devoid of rhythmical pattern, devoted to a plain
statement of fact. So it is with the imaginary speech of the River. Not
until the borrowed fourth line:

"All of them, all are sleeping on the hill,"

do we catch the rhythm (and even the metre) of verse, and F. P. A. is
here imitating Mr. Masters's way of introducing a strongly rhythmical and
even metrical line into a passage otherwise flatly "prosaic" in its
time-intervals. But "free verse" adopts many other cadences of English
prose besides this "formless" structure which goes with matter-of-fact
statement. It also reproduces the neat, polished, perhaps epigrammatic
sentence which crystallizes a fact or a generalization; the more emotional
and "moving" period resulting from heightened feeling, and finally the
frankly imitative and ornamented cadences of descriptive and highly
impassioned prose. Let us take some illustrations from Sidney Lanier's
_Poem Outlines_, a posthumously published collection of some of his
sketches for poems, "jotted in pencil on the backs of envelopes, on the
margins of musical programmes, or little torn scraps of paper."

"The United States in two hundred years
has made Emerson out of a witch-burner."

This is polished, graphic prose. Here is an equally graphic, but more
impassioned sentence, with the staccato rhythm and the alliterative
emphasis of good angry speech:

_To the Politicians_

"You are servants. Your thoughts are the thoughts of cooks curious to
skim perquisites from every pan, your quarrels are the quarrels of
scullions who fight for the privilege of cleaning the pot with most
leavings in it, your committees sit upon the landings of back-stairs,
and your quarrels are the quarrels of kitchens."

But in the following passage, apparently a first draft for some lines in
_Hymns of the Marshes_, Lanier takes a strongly rhythmical, heavily
punctuated type of prose, as if he were writing a Collect:

"The courses of the wind, and the shifts thereof, as also what way the
clouds go; and that which is happening a long way off; and the full face
of the sun; and the bow of the Milky Way from end to end; as also the
small, the life of the fiddler-crab, and the household of the marsh-hen;
and more, the translation of black ooze into green blade of marsh-grass,
which is as if filth bred heaven: This a man seeth upon the marsh."

In that rhapsody of the marsh there is no recognizable metrical scheme, in
spite of the plainly marked rhythm, but in the following symbolic sketch
the imitation of the horse's ambling introduces an element of regular
metre:

"Ambling, ambling round the ring,
Round the ring of daily duty,
Leap, Circus-rider, man, through the paper hoop of death,
--Ah, lightest thou, beyond death, on this same slow-ambling,
padded horse of life."

And finally, in such fragments as the following, Lanier uses a regular
metre of "English verse"--it is true with a highly irregular third line--

"And then
A gentle violin mated with the flute,
And both flew off into a wood of harmony,
Two doves of tone."

It is clear that an artist in words, in jotting down thoughts and images
as they first emerge, may instinctively use language which is subtly
blended of verse and prose, like many rhapsodical passages in the private
journals of Thoreau and Emerson. When duly elaborated, these passages
usually become, in the hands of the greater artists, either one thing or
the other, i.e. unmistakable prose or unmistakable verse. But it remains
true, I think, that there is another artistic instinct which impels
certain poets to blend the types in the endeavor to reach a new and hybrid
beauty.
[Footnote: Some examples of recent verse are printed in the "Notes and
Illustrations" for this chapter.]

Take these illustrations of the "b" type--i.e. prose rhythms predominant,
with some admixture of the rhythms of verse:

"I hear footsteps over my head all night.
They come and go. Again they come and again they go all night.
They come one eternity in four paces and they go one eternity in four
paces, and between the coming and the going there is Silence and Night
and the Infinite.
For infinite are the nine feet of a prison cell, and endless is the
march of him who walks between the yellow brick wall and the red iron
gate, thinking things that cannot be chained and cannot be locked, but
that wander far away in the sunlit world, in their wild pilgrimage
after destined goals.
Throughout the restless night I hear the footsteps over my head.
Who walks? I do not know. It is the phantom of the jail, the sleepless
brain, a man, the man, the Walker.
One--two--three--four; four paces and the wall."
[Footnote: From Giovanitti's "The Walker."]

Or take this:

"Jerusalem a handful of ashes blown by the wind, extinct,
The Crusaders' streams of shadowy midnight troops sped with the sunrise,
Amadis, Tancred, utterly gone, Charlemagne, Roland, Oliver gone,
Palmerin, ogre, departed, vanish'd the turrets that Usk from its waters
reflected,
Arthur vanish'd with all his knights, Merlin and Lancelot and Galahad,
all gone, dissolv'd utterly like an exhalation;
Pass'd! Pass'd! for us, forever pass'd, that once so mighty world, now
void, inanimate, phantom world,
Embroider'd, dazzling, foreign world, with all its gorgeous legends,
myths,
Its kings and castles proud, its priests and warlike lords and courtly
dames,
Pass'd to its charnel vault, coffin'd with crown and armor on,
Blazon'd with Shakspere's purple page,
And dirged by Tennyson's sweet sad rhyme."
[Footnote: Whitman, "Song of the Exposition."]

Here are examples of the "c" type--i.e. predominant verse rhythms, with
occasional emphasis upon metrical feet:

"Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight?
Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?
List to the yarn, as my grandmother's father the sailor told it to me.

"Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,)
His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and
never was, and never will be;
Along the lower'd eve he came horribly raking us.

* * * * *
"Our frigate takes fire,
The other asks if we demand quarter?
If our colors are struck and the fighting done?

"Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain,
_We have not struck_, he composedly cries, _we have just begun our part
of the fighting_.

* * * * *

"One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are
sinking.

"Serene stands the little captain,
He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low,
His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns.
Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us."
[Footnote: Whitman. "Song of Myself."]

Read William Blake's description of the Bastille, in his recently printed
poem on "The French Revolution":

"'Seest thou yonder dark castle, that moated around, keeps this city of
Paris in awe?
Go, command yonder tower, saying: "Bastille, depart! and take thy
shadowy course;
Overstep the dark river, thou terrible tower, and get thee up into the
country ten miles.
And thou black southern prison, move along the dusky road to Versailles;
there
Frown on the gardens--and, if it obey and depart, then the King will
disband
This war-breathing army; but, if it refuse, let the Nation's Assembly
thence learn
That this army of terrors, that prison of horrors, are the bands of the
murmuring kingdom."'

"Like the morning star arising above the black waves, when a shipwrecked
soul sighs for morning,
Thro' the ranks, silent, walk'd the Ambassador back to the Nation's
Assembly, and told
The unwelcome message. Silent they heard; then a thunder roll'd round
loud and louder;
Like pillars of ancient halls and ruins of times remote, they sat.
Like a voice from the dim pillars Mirabeau rose; the thunders subsided
away;
A rushing of wings around him was heard as he brighten'd, and cried out
aloud:
'Where is the General of the Nation?' The walls re-echo'd: 'Where is the
General of the Nation?'"

And here are passages made up exclusively of the rhythms and metres of
verse, in broken or disguised patterns ("d" type):

"Under a stagnant sky,
Gloom out of gloom uncoiling into gloom,
The River, jaded and forlorn,
Welters and wanders wearily--wretchedly--on;
Yet in and out among the ribs
Of the old skeleton bridge, as in the piles
Of some dead lake-built city, full of skulls,
Worm-worn, rat-riddled, mouldy with memories,
Lingers to babble, to a broken tune
(Once, O the unvoiced music of my heart!)
So melancholy a soliloquy
It sounds as it might tell
The secret of the unending grief-in-grain,
The terror of Time and Change and Death,
That wastes this floating, transitory world."
[Footnote: W. E. Henley, "To James McNeill Whistler." ]

Or take this:

"They see the ferry
On the broad, clay-laden
Lone Chorasmian stream;--thereon,
With snort and strain,
Two horses, strongly swimming, tow
The ferry-boat, with woven ropes
To either bow
Firm-harness'd by the mane; a chief,
With shout and shaken spear,
Stands at the prow, and guides them; but astern
The cowering merchants in long robes
Sit pale beside their wealth
Of silk-bales and of balsam-drops,
Of gold and ivory,
Of turquoise-earth and amethyst,
Jasper and chalcedony,
And milk-barr'd onyx-stones.
The loaded boat swings groaning
In the yellow eddies;
The Gods behold them."
[Footnote: Arnold, "The Strayed Reveller."]

_5. Discovery and Rediscovery_

It is not pretended that the four types of free verse which have been
illustrated are marked by clear-cut generic differences. They shade into
one another. But they are all based upon a common sensitiveness to the
effects of rhythmic prose, a common restlessness under what is felt to be
the restraint of metre and rhyme, and a common endeavor to break down the
conventional barrier which separates the characteristic beauty of prose
speech from the characteristic beauty of verse. In this endeavor to
obliterate boundary lines, to secure in one art the effects hitherto
supposed to be the peculiar property of another, free verse is only one
more evidence of the widespread "confusion of the genres" which marks
contemporary artistic effort. It is possible, with the classicists, to
condemn outright this blurring of values.
[Footnote: See, for instance, Irving Babbitt, _The New Laokoon_. Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1910.]
One may legitimately maintain, with Edith Wyatt, that the traditional
methods of English verse are to the true artist not oppressions but
liberations. She calls it "a fallacious idea that all individual and all
realistic expression in poetry is annulled by the presence of distinctive
musical discernment, by the movement of rhyme with its keen heightening of
the impulse of rhythm, by the word-shadows of assonance, by harmonies,
overtones and the still beat of ordered time, subconsciously perceived but
precise as the sense of the symphony leader's flying baton. To readers, to
writers for whom the tonal quality of every language is an intrinsic value
these faculties of poetry serve not at all as cramping oppressions, but as
great liberations for the communication of truth."
[Footnote: _New Republic_, August 24, 1918.]
But many practitioners of free verse would reply that this is not a matter
for theorizing, but of individual preference, and that in their endeavor
to communicate new modes of feeling, new aspects of beauty, they have a
right to the use of new forms, even if those new forms be compounded out
of the wreck of old ones. This argument for freedom of experiment is
unanswerable; the true test of its validity lies in the results secured.
That free verse has now and then succeeded in creating lovely flowering
hybrids seems to me as indubitable as the magical tricks which Mr. Burbank
has played with flowers and fruits. But the smiling Dame Nature sets her
inexorable limits to "Burbanking"; she allows it to go about so far, and
no farther. Freakish free verse, like freakish plants and animals, gets
punished by sterility. Some of the "imagist" verse patterns are uniquely
and intricately beautiful. Wrought in a medium which is neither wholly
verse nor wholly prose, but which borrows some of the beauty peculiar to
each art, they are their own excuse for being. And nevertheless they may
not prove fertile. It may be that they have been produced by "pushing a
medium farther than it will go."

It must be admitted, furthermore, that a great deal of contemporary free
verse has been written by persons with an obviously incomplete command
over the resources of expression. Max Eastman has called it "Lazy Verse,"
the product of "aboriginal indolence"; and he adds this significant
distinction, "In all arts it is the tendency of those who are ungrown to
confuse the expression of intense feeling with the intense expression of
feeling--which last is all the world will long listen to." Shakspere,
Milton, Keats are masters of concentrated, intensest expression: their
verse, at its best, is structural as an oak. Those of us who have read
with keen momentary enjoyment thousands of pages of the "New Verse,"
are frequently surprised to find how little of it stamps itself upon the
memory. Intense feeling has gone into these formless forms, very
certainly, but the medium soaks up the feeling like blotting-paper. In
order to live, poetry must be plastic, a stark embodiment of emotion, and
not a solution of emotion.

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