Chapter 6 BLANK VERSE AND FREE VERSE AS FORMS OF PROSE

The unrhymed iambic pentameter known as blank verse is really a form of free verse; it is a modified form of the unrhymed classical measure. It made its appearance in Italy in the early part of the sixteenth century, and was used by Ariosto in his comedies, except that he employed a final additional unaccented syllable, making eleven syllables in each line. Surrey, who used it in his translation of two books of the ?neid, imported it from the Italians. It was called by the Italians versi sciolti, "untied or free verse." It was, then, the old classical measure with more freedom.

In his essay, Blank Verse, John Addington Symonds dwells especially on the plasticity and variety of blank verse, which he says it has more than any other national metre. It may be used for the commonplace and the sublime, the tragic and the comic, etc. It does not have to consist of five iambuses only, but other feet may be substituted almost at the caprice of the poet. This, however, practically amounts to saying that blank verse is after all a great deal like prose; indeed, it may be arranged like modern free verse with great ease. Its plasticity and variety are due to the fact that its artificial requirements are less than those of most other metres. It was a fortunate day for English drama and poetry when Marlowe, Shakespeare and Milton, following in the footsteps of Surrey's translation of two books of the ?neid, and Sackville's and Norton's play, Gorboduc, made blank verse fashionable. The writers really brought poetry back into prose. For blank verse is but a restricted prose, because there is as often as not no natural pause at the end of the line, and because other feet may be substituted for the iambus.

One of the reasons why English verse poetry excels French is because blank verse, a more natural medium than the rhymed Alexandrines, became the chief vehicle for poetry.

In fact, the blank verse of the later Elizabethan dramatists is really prose, for it is less rhythmical than that of Shakespeare. Blank verse was said to have degenerated with them. It is also said to be prosaic as used by Wordsworth. These poets, however, are merely less rhythmical than the alleged masters of blank verse. All blank verse is as near prose as any metrical medium that has been hitherto introduced. Bernard Shaw said he found it easier than prose. It appears very often in prose without the writer being aware of it. Dickens had a tendency, as also did Ruskin, to drop unconsciously into blank verse in his prose.

The great English blank verse poets and nearly all the poets of England in the nineteenth century used this medium, and are really our supreme prose poets.

The experiment of arranging blank verse in the form of prose and of putting prose in the metre of blank verse has been often tried with success. I have no intention of using this means of showing that blank verse is really a more modulated prose. Any passage of blank verse can naturally also be put into modern free verse, into the free rhythms of Whitman, for example.

The lovers of blank verse imagine, however, that its beauty is partly derived from the existence of a pause at the end of the fifth foot and because the next line begins with a capital letter. As a matter of fact, there is no particular virtue in having that pause, and the next line need not begin with a capital letter, and should be continued as of the same line. For the real pauses are, after all, not in these artificial places but where our natural speech and punctuation marks dictate them.

The virtues of blank verse are the virtues of rhythmic prose, which is still freer and more natural than blank verse, just as blank verse is preferable to the heroic couplet.

Our English poets who write in blank verse would have done even better to use prose, rhythmical or unrhythmical. To us moderns there is something of a distortion in chopping up good prose into lines of five feet, each beginning with a capital letter. The more beautiful and natural medium is prose, for blank verse is but a confined prose. It is not fair or right to make characters speak in this fettered prose. It is absurd to state that their speeches become poetry only because of this fettered prose. Every great passage in Shakespeare in blank verse would have continued to be poetry in regular prose. We observe that the great prose passages of Shakespeare are poetry even though not in blank verse. English poetry should free itself from the bondage of blank verse, and use prose. However, next to free verse blank verse is the best medium that English poetry has yet found.

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 manuscripts 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 impassioned 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 encumber themselves with the shackles of a new prosody.

Let us illustrate 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 passage 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 passage from Pater's Renaissance and arranged it in free verse form, and then a passage from Sandburg's free verse and arranged it in prose, and tried unsuccessfully to show that the Pater passage did not become free verse, and that the Sandburg passage did not become good prose. His mistake was in trying to take a passage from Sandburg that had a patterned form, and in arranging the Pater passage into lines that were too brief. But Professor Lowes has taken passages 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 passages. 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 passage 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 spaces, 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 illustrations 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 practitioners 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 impassioned prose would be the medium in which the poetry of the future would be written, and that he considered the Leaves of Grass one of the harbingers. The vogue of free verse, which is but impassioned 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 Halicarnassus 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 entitled "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 unobstrusively 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 passion 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 Dickens, George Eliot and Thackeray are aware. Other authors are successful in crystallizing their ecstasy whether they write in prose or verse. Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, 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 attitude 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 passage 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 assimilated 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 analysis a merely formal difference. The difference in such must be substantial and essential aspects of Literature.[122-A]

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FOOTNOTES:

[117-A] Spingarn's Creative Criticism and Erskine's The Kinds of Poetry, two excellent brochures in ?sthetic criticism, take a similar view point.

[119-A] For a history of French free verse see Mercure De France, March 15, 1921. Premiers Poètés Du Vers Libre by édouard Dujardin.

[122-A] Passages 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.

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