A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

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_.