Part 8 (1/2)
Blank verse was in disfavor in the eighteenth century and was regarded as prose. We may smile at Samuel Johnson's remark upon it in his _Life of Roscommon_, but on reflection we find that he was, after all, right.
”Blank verse, left merely to its numbers, has little operation either on ear or mind; it can hardly support itself without bold figures and striking images. A poem frigidly didactic, without rhyme, is so near prose that the reader only scorns it for pretending to be verse.” He argues, either write prose or rhyme, but choose no intermediate measure.
The free verse of modern times, the revival of which is due to Walt Whitman, is really the oldest form in which poetry was expressed. It existed along with parallelism among the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Hebrews, among the Hindoos and the Anglo-Saxons. It is rhythmical prose, arranged so as to call attention to the rhythm. It is not a third medium for expression, next to prose and the regular verse-forms. The lines do not return upon themselves, that is, there is no repeat any more than in rhythmical prose.
In its present form in English it dates from Aelfric's _Lives of the Saints_, about 1000 A.D.
Free verse has come to stay, and numbers many able poets among its devotees. It is more natural than rhymed or metrical verse, which, however, it will not wholly displace. The ma.n.u.scripts of many poets who used conventional metres show that the original form of composition was free verse. The detractors of free verse need not think they bring a valid argument against it when they arrange free verse in prose form, and, vice versa, chop up prose sentences into brief lines beginning with a capital, and ask what is the difference between the two. It is admitted there is none. It matters not if the poet wishes to arrange his composition in free verse forms to call attention to the rhythm, or to print it as prose. It is immaterial if you call _vers libre_ rhythmical prose or a distinct verse form. The poetry is independent of any ordering of the lines. Neither of the resulting products loses or gains in poetical attributes by the objector's turning prose into free verse, or free verse into prose. The question is, how much ecstasy or emotion, what impa.s.sioned 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 enc.u.mber themselves with the shackles of a new prosody.
Let us ill.u.s.trate 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 the heart of man, Yet ever waxing fairer, Forever remaining young.
Mortals wither in time As leaves in the frost of autumn; But time only brightens the glow And the bloom of her endless youth.
All men have loved her But none shall touch with his lips Even the hem of her garment.
It is seen that this prose pa.s.sage in the free 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 pa.s.sage from Pater's _Renaissance_ and arranged it in free verse form, and then a pa.s.sage from Sandburg's free verse and arranged it in prose, and tried unsuccessfully to show that the Pater pa.s.sage did not become free verse, and that the Sandburg pa.s.sage did not become good prose.
His mistake was in trying to take a pa.s.sage from Sandburg that had a patterned form, and in arranging the Pater pa.s.sage into lines that were too brief. But Professor Lowes has taken pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sages. 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 pa.s.sage 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 s.p.a.ces, 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 And the love and the beauty of women.
Dr. Andrews in his _Writing and Reading of Verse_ has also given us ill.u.s.trations 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.[117:A] He notes that the free verse advocates have not really defined special laws of free verse. He also recommends the would-be pract.i.tioners 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 impa.s.sioned prose would be the medium in which the poetry of the future would be written, and that he considered the _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ one of the harbingers. The vogue of free verse, which is but impa.s.sioned 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.[119:A]
Dionysius of Halicarna.s.sus 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 ent.i.tled ”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 un.o.bstrusively 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.