How Many Monkeys Are You?

[Recent Poem.]

THE lines of unevenly printed prose quoted above constitute a fairly typical example of the current counterfeit which you and I are asked to accept as poetry. My sense of justice toward the Modernists, or the Imagists, or, if you must have it so, the vers-librists, has guided me to select a specimen which, though innocent of rhyme, is yet endowed with some degree of reason.

I can promise you a round half-dozen ‘poems’ devoid of both those characteristics if you will search the pages of one month’s magazines. Not long since, a cheap weekly inadvertently printed some imagist verse backwards, without impairing either the sense or the movement! He who would gather an anthology of meaningless, metreless, rhymeless poetry should, however, confine his quest to the periodicals for which the news-stand receives twenty-five cents or more. The gods have reserved for the library tables of the cultured few the beauties of our new poetry. The reading public which enjoys the pseudo-scientific instruction and throbbing fiction of the ten-cent magazine still labors under the childish impression that rag-time rhythm is the first essential of true poetry. A redblooded Westerner of this second class wrote to the editor of a magazine of the first class withdrawing his name from the subscription list. ‘ Your poetry,’ he remarked, ‘is rotten. If you would only listen to reason and try to learn how to make a magazine; but you Easterners know it all, so hell! what’s the use?’

He failed to appreciate the æsthetic value of ‘verse’ without verses. Now, since one Horace wrote concerning the Ars Poetica, the verse has been considered the correct poetical unit. Horace called it versus, which term he derived from the infinitive vertere. This, according to my lexicon, means ‘to turn,’ or, ‘to turn around.’ Thus when the oldfashioned writer had chosen the road which his verse should travel, he set out thereon, at a predetermined cadence, till he had proceeded for a predetermined number of feet. Thereupon he ‘turned around’ to repeat the performance.

Poets of the newer order are trammeled in no such arbitrary way. Not only does their muse rush past the dead-line of the final foot, but, having with impunity turned round in the midst of a prepositional phrase, she goes, the second time, not half-way to the mark. The resulting lines may be read; they cannot be recited.

But let us return to our monkeys — granting, for the moment, that metronomic rhythm and merry rhyme do not constitute poetry. As our modern poet, wearing his hair cut short, has discarded his flowing black tie in favor of the civilian cravat, so, too, he treats his subject in unaffected style. The development of a given idea varies with the temperament, or the environment, of the individual. I, for example, might have written, —

[this sacrifices one foot, or rather, one syllable, but we will make that up in the next line]

Although this is my first essay as an Imagist, I admit that I rather like it. Of course, my third pig is less a philosopher than monkey number three, but that is a pardonable failing. If I name the parody ‘The Sty,’ does it not give you as much inspiration as the original, which was called by its perpetrator ‘The Tree’?

One of the initiate, who considers sword-blades and poppy-seeds a poetic combination, tells us that the modern poet, 1916 model, ‘is never tired of finding colors in a dust-heap, and shouting about them.’ Why, then, should I not search for pearls in the pig-pen? Perhaps, after all, it is but an exemplification of to-day’s much-vaunted efficiency, that the poet can descend from his tree-top contemplation of the clouds to a curbstone study of the gutter.

In this way we are taught to ‘ employ the exact and not the decorative word,’ for of such are true images created. The reader receives an impression — of something; even as one has an impression of something on first puzzling over the topsy-turvy Nude Descending a Staircase. But as the layman fails to differentiate between the nude and the staircase, so in the new poetry the unsophisticated are prone to see an ugly image blurred beyond beauty by incongruously exact words that obey no laws of perspective.

To achieve this result the creators of vers libre use a grammar that is all their own. Some one has not inaptly drawn a comparison between the unconnected nouns of recent verse and the following itemization of South African exports: —

In truth, it seems that the Imagist, having lightly dispensed with verbs, does now omit the conjunctions. If soon the article should disappear, who would guarantee the permanence of the noun?

Yet we are a young nation, and if the evolutionary liberties of our even younger literature extend poetic license till the poem consists of punctuation marks alone, there may be thus created an ultra-epic destined to outlive Kultur. In any art, he who formulates and follows the novel theory must be forgiven when his aspiring genius oversteps convention; and, if you think to do better yourself let me ask, in the name of new poetry, ‘How many monkeys are you?’