The Literature of Ecstasy Part 8

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.

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 of Demosthenes's speeches. If Sidney said that he could not take up the ballad of Percy and Douglas without feeling his heart moved as by a trumpet, Dionysius says even more beautifully, "When I take up one of his speeches, I am entranced and am carried hither and thither, stirred now by one emotion, now by another. I feel distrust, anxiety, fear, disdain, hatred, pity, good-will, anger, jealousy. I am agitated by every pa.s.sion in turn that can sway the human heart, and am like those who are being initiated into wild mystic rites."

However, regularity of feet or metre in prose carried on to a great extent makes the prose artificial. The Romans occasionally indulged in it, but they generally used rhythmical prose, as the reader of Cicero and Livy will observe. Quintilian, who recognized that prose has often metrical feet that read like verse, thought it ugly and inelegant that an entire verse should appear in a prose composition. He says that he does not entertain "the idea that prose, which ought to have sweeping and fluent motion, should dawdle itself into dotage in measuring feet and weighing syllables. For this would be the part of a wretched creature, occupied on the infinitely little. Nor could one who exhausted himself in this care, have time for better things."

Probably we need not better reply than this to the high claims made for the French form known as polyphonic verse. Prose that is interspersed with metrical patterns is not natural.

The truth of the matter is that all the metrical features that are demanded of poetry belong to the ornamental requirements like metaphors, myths, rhetorical flourishes and all other gewgaws. There are always stages in civilization when man wants adornment for his speech.

Something of that mental state exists in us to-day. We bedeck and bedrape our poetry with trappings without which it is better off.

Artificialities appear even in comparatively modern prose. The prose of Milton is full of rhetoric and the great Burke had rhetorical characteristics that we call Asiatic. We are familiar with the euphuistic qualities of the Elizabethan prose, especially pervading John Lyly's novel _Euphues_ and Sidney's _Arcadia_.

In an excellent essay Plutarch shows that he understood that verse was largely natural to man in a certain stage of civilization, because all ornament was natural to him. In his essay on "Wherefore the Pythian Priestess now Ceases to Deliver Her Oracle in Verse," he gives the love of ornament as the real reason for the growth of metre as a form of literary expression.

Often the topic is broached whether men like Hardy and Meredith are greater as poets than as novelists. The question is not put properly. It should be, Do these writers cease being poets when they use the fetters of rhyme and metre, or are they with those fetters greater poets than they were in their novels. I have no intention of trying to answer these questions, though it is usually agreed that these writers are greater in their novels than in their verse, but the point is that they are poets whether they use prose or verse as their medium.

Some authors get more ecstasy into their work when they write in prose than in verse, as readers of the novels and verse poems of d.i.c.kens, George Eliot and Thackeray are aware. Other authors are successful in crystallizing their ecstasy whether they write in prose or verse.

Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Sh.e.l.ley, Scott, Emerson, Poe, James Thomson, B. V., Hardy, Meredith, Symons, Hugo, De Musset, Goethe and Heine, are examples of masters of the literature of ecstasy in both prose and verse. Other verse poets have not at all succeeded nor tried to succeed in writing ecstasy in ordinary prose. The authors who have given us ecstasy only in prose but have not tried to do so at all in verse are too numerous to mention.

I believe that poetry will again return to the natural language of prose. Critics are taking an entirely different stand toward rhythm, admitting that the poets have the right to vary their measures, create new rhythm and not be held in bondage to old verse forms. The day is disappearing when a man like Hegel could say that a production not in metre is not poetry. A sane att.i.tude towards the free use of rhythms by poets has been given us in a _New Study of English Poetry_ by Henry Newbolt. Liberal critics are helping the poets break their shackles; the following pa.s.sage from a review of Newbolt's book, by J. Middleton Murry is worth quoting:

Great Poets have always been those who believed that poetry was by nature the worthiest vessel of the highest arguments of which the soul of man is capable. Yet a poetic theory such as this seems bound to include great prose, and not merely the prose which can most easily be a.s.similated to the conditions of poetry, such as Plato's _Republic_, or Milton's _Areopagitica_, but the prose of the great novelists. Surely the colloquial prose of Tchekov's _Cherry Orchard_ has as good claim to be called poetry as _The Essay on Man_, _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ as _The Ring and the Book_, _The Possessed_ as _Phedre_. Where are we to call a halt in the inevitable progress by which the kinds of literary art merge into one? If we insist that rhythm is essential to poetry, we are in danger of confusing the accident with the essence, and of fastening upon what will have to be in the last a.n.a.lysis a merely formal difference. The difference in such must be substantial and essential _aspects of Literature_.[122:A]

FOOTNOTES:

[117:A] Spingarn's _Creative Criticism_ and Erskine's _The Kinds of Poetry_, two excellent brochures in aesthetic criticism, take a similar view point.

[119:A] For a history of French free verse see _Mercure De France_, March 15, 1921. Premiers Poetes Du Vers Libre by edouard Dujardin.

[122:A] Pa.s.sages of a similar import will be found by Professor George M. Harper in the preface to his _John Morley and Other Essays_, in Richard Aldington's "The Art of Poetry," _The Dial_, August, 1920, and the preface to F. S. Flint's _Otherworld_.

CHAPTER VII

MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS AS POETRY WHEN WRITTEN WITH ECSTASY

Our views of poetry, or the literature of ecstasy, illuminate many dark crannies in one of the most unfathomable caverns of aesthetic speculation; speculation of the connection between poetry and morals, form and matter, art for art's sake and didacticism. It has been often asked whether poetry should deal with moral subjects, sociological questions, and philosophical ideas. The question disappears when we regard literature of ecstasy in prose as poetry, for all ideas are dealt with in prose and some may be ecstatically treated. If poetry is an atmosphere that suffuses literature, it may bathe most various ideas.

Emotional treatment of the ideas gives us literature of ecstasy or poetry. If the natural language of ecstasy is prose, we certainly do not wish to see a train of philosophical, moral or sociological views treated in verse. To this extent the old critic was right who did not want poetry (a long composition in verse, as he understood it) to deal with ethics or science.

The question is then not really whether poetry should be concerned with moral, sociological or psychological themes, for these themes always have poetry in them, and an emotional treatment of them brings the poetry into prominence. Ideas are the substance of poetry and nearly all ideas are moral, sociological or psychological. Even scientific facts and metaphysical utterances may be so stated by a writer as to show the latent poetry. The two famous pa.s.sages in _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ beginning "I open my scuttle at night" and "I am an acme of things accomplished and an encloser of things to be" are emotional statements of the facts of the infinity of the universe and of the evolution of man, respectively; Whitman brought out the poetry in a philosophical and in a scientific idea.

Moral views may be imaginatively treated and be poetry. The theme of _Great Expectations_ is a sermon against pride and sn.o.bbery, and the emotional treatment, especially by force of example, makes part of the book poetry. Portrayals of hypocrites, for instance, so truthfully and movingly artistic as to arouse an ecstatic state in the reader, become poetry. Hence Tartuffe and Pecksniff are poetical portraits, even when drawn in prose.

Poetry was supposed to appeal to the imagination, prose to the intellect; poetry was presumed to be dictated by the heart, prose by the mind; fancy was thought to hold sway in poetry, logic in prose. But nevertheless, the great English poets like Shakespeare, Browning, Sh.e.l.ley, Wordsworth, Whitman, gave us much poetry that was produced by the intellect, weighed by the mind, and governed by logic. Any intellectual and even moral performance may be elevated into poetry, when emotionally and ecstatically presented. And philosophers like Plato, Pascal, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have demonstrated this.

Our definition of poetry throws much light on the subject of the relations of politics and morals, of social and philosophical problems to poetry. Poets should instruct, while delighting, is the contention of one group. They ought merely to express beauty and emotions, is the emphatic demand of another cla.s.s. I doubt if there has ever been a great poet who hasn't done both of these things. If a poet is to teach he must teach something; he must express ideas, and ideas mean thoughts about life, and these in turn refer to the relations of man to himself, to one another, to the opposite s.e.x, to society, to the universe, to nature. But it is while doing this that he must give us beauty and emotion.

When a prose writer is purely didactic without any emotional or aesthetic appeal he is no poet. It is manifestly absurd also for an author to give in metre didactic works which could be better written in prose. To this extent the disciples of art for art's sake are right, that the poet should not give us unecstatic political, philosophical or moral lessons in metre. If, as I believe, our emotions may be expressed in prose or free verse probably more poetically than even in metre, it is surely inadvisable to drive home a prosaic idea in verse, and especially at great length. Yet this has often been done. Browning gave us an effective harangue against spiritualism in _Mr. Sludge, "The Medium,"_ in blank verse, Byron proved a good critic of society in _Don Juan_, in Ottava Rima metre, Sh.e.l.ley preached moral reforms in the _Revolt of Islam_, in the Spenserian stanza. Two of the best poems of the nineteenth century, among the masterpieces of their authors, are Swinburne's _Hertha_, and Browning's _Rabbi Ben Ezra_, and they are both ecstatically didactic.

But the future poets will not spin out their ideas in metre at great length. The short verse poem embodying an idea will always be with us, but I doubt if we will have, or at least ought to have, philosophical or moral works, extending into hundreds or thousands of lines of regular verse.

John Addington Symonds has in his _Essays Speculative and Suggestive_ taken two of the most famous dicta in English literature regarding the function of poetry in relation to form and matter, and given us a sane viewpoint. He a.n.a.lyzes Arnold's statement that poetry is a criticism of life, and Pater's a.s.sumption that all art, including poetry, aspires towards the condition of music which thus in his opinion becomes the true type or measure of consummate art. Symonds shuns both the didacticism which Arnold's view encourages, and the worship of form implied in Pater's statement; though it should be said that Pater in his essay on "Style" urges that, after all, subject matter is the deciding factor in determining great art. As Symonds says, the poet gives us rather a revelation than a criticism of life, a presentment according to his faculty for observing and displaying it; he is more a reporter and a seer than a judge. Poets take their final rank by matter and not by form. Though Symonds mentions slurringly a great poet like Baudelaire, still the following lines should be carefully pondered by many of our versifiers: "The carving of cherry-stones in verse, the turning of triolets and rondeaux, the seeking after sound and color without heed for sense, is all foredoomed to final failure." Poetry appeals to the imaginative reason, and must embody thought and emotion. As Symonds remarks, Pater's discrimination between these two is fanciful.