A Study of Poetry, Bliss Perry [books to read to improve english .txt] 📗

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“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.

That fragile, transient fashions of expression have their own evanescent type of beauty no one who knows the history of Euphuism will deny. And much of the New Verse is Euphuistic, not merely in its self-conscious cleverness, its delightful toying with words and phrases for their own sake, its search of novel cadences and curves, but also in its naive pleasure in rediscovering and parodying what the ancients had discovered long before. “Polyphonic prose,” for instance, as announced and illustrated by Mr. Paul Fort and Miss Amy Lowell, is prose that makes use of all the “voices” of poetry,—viz. metre, vers libre, assonances, alliteration, rhyme and return. “Metrical verse,” says Miss Lowell in the Preface to Can Grande’s Castle, “has one set of laws, cadenced verse another; ‘polyphonic prose’ can go from one to the other in the same poem with no sense of incongruity…. I finally decided to base my form upon the long, flowing cadence of oratorical prose. The variations permitted to this cadence enable the poet to change the more readily into those of vers libre, or even to take the regular beat of metre, should such a marked time seem advisable…. Rhyme is employed to give a richness of effect, to heighten the musical feeling of a passage, but … the rhymes should seldom come at the ends of the cadences…. Return in ‘polyphonic prose’ is usually achieved by the recurrence of a dominant thought or image, coming in irregularly and in varying words, but still giving the spherical effect which I have frequently spoken of as imperative in all poetry.”

Now every one of these devices is at least as old as Isocrates. It was in this very fashion that Euphues and his Friends delighted to serve and return their choicest tennis balls of Elizabethan phrase. But little De Quincey could pull out the various stops of polyphonic prose even more cleverly than John Lyly; and if one will read the admirable description of St. Mark’s in Can Grandel�s Castle, and then re-read Ruskin’s description of St. Mark’s, he will find that the Victorian’s orchestration of many-voiced prose does not suffer by comparison.

Yet though it is true enough of the arts, as Chaucer wrote suavely long ago, that “There nys no newe thing that is not olde,” we must remember that the arts are always profiting by their naive rediscoveries. It is more important that the thing should seem new than that it should really be new, and the fresh sense of untried possibilities, the feeling that much land remains to be possessed, has given our contemporaries the spirits and the satisfactions of the pioneer. What matters it that a few antiquaries can trace on old maps the very rivers and harbors which the New Verse believed itself to be exploring for the first time? Poetry does not live by antiquarianism, but by the passionate conviction that all things are made new through the creative imagination.

 

“Have the elder races halted?

Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?

We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,

Pioneers! O pioneers!”