The Influence of Free Verse on Prose

I HAVE seen it stated that, when Tennyson’s Princess was published in the United States, two generations ago, it was the best-selling book in the country, and that Patmore’s The Angel in the House, issued anonymously at about the same time, ran it a close second. This certainly argues a much wider interest in poetry than prevailed, let us say, a decade ago. But with the publication of Masefield’s The Everlasting Mercy, Frost’s North of Boston, and Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, the ‘new poetry’ ushered in, almost simultaneously with the war, a revival of poetic interest, the unquestioned power, especially dramatic power, of those three books serving to crash over the barriers of indifference that a languishing prettiness in poetry had gradually erected between the poets and the public. Certainly there is no languishing prettiness in Spoon River!

The new poetry, however, while it has conquered indifference, rapidly made converts, and rendered tame or artificial, even to the unconverted, much of the once admired minor poetry of the past (as that of Francis Thompson, for example), has not as yet ceased to bewilder readers by its forms, or freed itself from its own bewilderment regarding them. Reduced to its simplest terms, the bewilderment of the public asks the question, ‘What is the difference between free verse and prose? ’ while the poets, endeavoring to answer, give various and often contradictory replies, themselves seemingly not knowing. Only there is a faith within them that they are not writing prose. Anyone who has written verse both in the older and the newer forms can testify that, while he may be in the dark as to the technical philosophy of his vers libre, there is no question of a fundamental difference of impulse. He is as surely, in his own consciousness, writing poetry, as if it were falling in four-foot iambics, like The Lady of the Lake.

But the fact still remains, to puzzle poet and public, that prose often falls into iambics, also, and into other metres as well, though not so often. The experiments of Dr. William Morrison Patterson at Columbia have clearly shown the tendency of men and women to break up any group of sounds into rhythms, and the English language, strongly accented as it is, peculiarly invites rhythmic arrangement. Moreover, it is predominantly iambic, or the iambic pentameter would not have become so naturally our blank-verse measure, however great the influence of Chaucer. Standing in a crowd the other day, I heard a man declare, ‘He says he would n’t take his old job back for twice his former wages.’ That this man was talking anything but conversational prose is absurd; he was not even emotionally in the least excited. Yet he produced a sentence of almost pure iambics, which caught my ear like a tune, or, rather, a series of drum-taps.

Given, then, a language so easily falling into rhythmic groupings, and readers or listeners prone always to find order if possible in successive sounds, the process of consciously organizing speech into ‘harmonious numbers’ becomes both fascinating and perplexing. So long, however, as verse deliberately sets itself apart from prose by means of a metronomic regularity, by definite metres which return upon themselves, with or without the adornment and aid of rhyme, no confusion results between the two forms of prose and poetry. Our parents or grandparents were in no doubt as to The Princess, nor are we to-day as to the poems of Vachel Lindsay, for example, or of Masefield, or of any of the new poets who have clung to the older forms. But when the new poetry organizes itself, not on the basis of regularly recurrent metres but on the basis of those seemingly haphazard metres into which English speech is forever falling, — on rhythm, that is to say, — the bewilderment arises.

It is perfectly easy to take certain passages of rhythmic prose and, by setting them up in the manner of free verse, produce something which the average reader could hardly distinguish, if at all, from genuine vers libre.

It may, perhaps, be urged that this was never prose, but Hebrew poetry. I can only reply that it has been considered English prose — of a very choice sort — for some three hundred years. Yet how each ‘ line ’ swings out its individual rhythm; how beautiful upon the ear are those rhythms; how lines 5 and 6, practically repeating a swing, mount to the climax of the final proclamation!

Contrast this passage with a bit of free verse by the Imagist poet, ‘H.D.,’ who, Miss Lowell assures us, is careful never to permit a formal metre in her verse, though many other practitioners of vers libre let regular metre enter when it fits a rhythm.

Except that the Biblical passage has a sustained melody, holding its separate rhythms more closely together, it would be hard, I think, to convince the ordinary reader that, technically, these poems belong to a different genre. Moreover, a sustained melody, uniting to a climax a series of separate rhythms, or even metres, is by no means peculiar to prose. It is inherent in the best poetry, in the eloquence of Shakespeare or a sonnet by Rossetti. One of the supreme tests of a sonnet is that its fourteen individual lines of jeweled beauty shall yet seem to flow as one stream to the climax, with a still pool between the octet and the sestet.

This passage from Walter Pater, whose work, if not the most rhythmic, was certainly the most consciously wrought, of nineteenth-century English prose, not even excepting Poe’s, is a part of one of his most ornate and famous ‘purple passages.’ Yet, as free verse, it is curiously pale, vague, monotonous, and jerky. I have experimented with it in various linear divisions, but without being able to make it less so, nor can any free-verse arrangement rob the last four lines of their perilous suggestion of metred song, which in vers libre seems so out of place, yet, in the complete prose passage, is merely a delicious musical whisper to the ear.

Now, on the other hand, let us set up the following as prose: —

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo, shovel them under and let me work —I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Gettysburg and pile them high at Ypres and Verdun, shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass, let me work.

If it was fairly obvious from our first two examples that, when they are set up in the same linear fashion, making the same appeal to the eye, rhythmic prose and free verse can be almost indistinguishable, I think it is also obvious from these second and longer examples that there can also be a pronounced, if perhaps at first intangible, difference between them. If Pater’s passage loses effectiveness by being set up as free verse, and yet Mr. Sandburg’s ‘Grass’ also loses effectiveness by being set up as prose, we can hardly accept the statement of some critics (it is even Dr. Patterson’s direct implication), that free verse has nothing but its physical conformation to differentiate it from cadenced prose.

I am myself much less concerned to find out what this difference is as an occasional and, I fear, very stumbling, writer of free verse, than as a writer of prose. The most ardent champions can hardly deny, in the face of laboratory experiment, oral recitation to general audiences, and the plain evidences of common sense, that prose often swings into rhythms indistinguishable from vers libre (just as it even swings, in Ruskin, for example, or Dryden, actually into measured iambics); and that vers libre, when it is not handled with considerable skill, — which does happen now and then! —often achieves the rhythmic disjointedness of prose. This does ot nnecessarily mean that genuine vers libre is prose; it may even mean that prose is sometimes poetry! But the new poets have shown themselves quite able to look after their own defence, particularly with Miss Lowell as advocate; and, moreover, their technique is still admittedly in an experimental stage.

Prose, however, is not experimental, and has not been for two centuries. The question which the new poetry has forced upon prose — a question which, so far as I am aware, has hardly been considered, so busy have we been discussing the upstart verse-forms — is almost Nietzschean, a revaluation of its freedoms; one might well say, in light of such prose as Newman’s ‘Idea of a University,’ or Pater’s ‘Renaissance,’ or the plays of Synge and Dunsany, of its poetic graces and its eloquence. Wordsworth, who chose to create in metre, and Pater, who chose to create in prose, alike affirmed the right and glory of prose to rise into rhythm, to leave behind the mere pedestrian virtues of bald communication of ideas, and alike affirmed the broad similarity of the creative impulse behind both imaginative prose and true poetry — the search for truth and for the most fitting and beautiful garment in which to clothe it.

If, then, the line was after all so shadowy between prose and verse in the nineteenth century, and if, quite apart from its content, its matter, ‘Riders to the Sea,’ at the dawn of the twentieth century could seem far more poetic than many a drama written in pseudo-Shakespearean metre, what are we to say now of the distinction between prose and verse, when verse itself adopts the irregular rhythms of speech, and some poets regard measured metre in their work with as much abhorrence as Pater would have done in his? Does this mean that the author must hereafter reduce his prose to plodding pedestrianism, or be accused of trying to write poetry? Will a conscious rhythm in prose hereafter affect our ears as a conscious metre does now — as unpleasant, that is, and out of place? Will Newman have to write a new Apologia — for his style — against Amy Lowell?

I do not anticipate any such effect. Quite on the contrary, it seems to me that the achievement of free verse in waking the public interest in poetry, by handling the subjects of contemporary life in contemporary language, and in the natural rhythms of the speaking voice, will rather make for an enriching of prose, a renewed appreciation of its finer beauties and capacities, an appreciation greatly dimmed in these latter years by the decadent prose of our daily press, the sloppiness of our ‘popular' magazines, the lack of style in our popular fiction. To justify and explain this faith, I must go back to an earlier statement — namely, that t he writer of free verse is, in its composition, inwardly conscious that he is not writing prose, that he is not in the prose mood, as it were. Let us once more set up Sandburg’s ‘Grass,’ this time in its correct arrangement: —

Thus visualized, the eye alone, without oral aid, tells you that the rhythms here are carefully ordered, that they follow one another without any break, that is, without any passages where the car must strain to make a rhythm; and even that they are deliberately recurrent, hardly less recurrent in this case than metre might be. Add to the visual testimony the oral: read this suggestive lyric aloud and it distinctly sings. I make no mention of its content, its essentially lyrical subject-matter, and its figurative nature, meaning much more than it says. Quite aside from content, its form is distinctly not that of prose, though each separate rhythm might occur in a prose sentence, or, if read separately, might record itself in Dr. Patterson’s laboratory machine as a prose rhythm.

The rhythms follow one another without any break — there is a key to the secret. In writing free verse, verse based on rhythm, not metre, the poet nevertheless remains under the dominant necessity of keeping up the musical flow; he is still a musician, and in proportion as he does maintain, unbroken and harmonious, the musical flow, his poem becomes transfused with that curious beauty which tempts the lips to song and adds to the record of facts and the magic of images, the grace of a unified melody; which makes the whole complete, eternal. John Gould Fletcher, I think, acknowledges this when he maintains that free verse is, like the older forms, based on a metred regularity, with the strophe instead of the line as the unit. It has not, at any rate, broken free from music. Whatever their theories, all the skilled practitioners of vers libre are aware of their bondage to melody, their need to keep their rhythms so in hand that the rhythms set the tune for the reader and do not allow him to drop it.

In prose, on the contrary, in even the most rhythmical of passages, such as Pater’s hymn to the Lady Lisa, it has always been regarded by careful writers as a cardinal test of merit that the song should not sing itself unbroken; that so complete a welding of music and sense as this would destroy the very effect aimed at, namely, the heightening of a heightened mood in order to surcharge the sense, the intellectual message, with feeling. It would destroy it by injecting an artificial element. Prose, in other words, must always preserve the ‘homely virtue’ of recording facts or opinions; it must be pedestrian and plodding at least with one foot; and if feeling, emotion, so prevails in any idea the writer wishes to communicate that it spontaneously demands the sustaining breath of song, then there is no more excuse — perhaps less — now than ever for the writer to refrain from verse. In reading prose, any prose, good, bad, or indifferent, the ear, to be sure, more or less unconsciously selects a certain time-unit pulse (as Dr. Patterson calls it), and fits the words to this beat, now compressing many syllables into one beat, again prolonging, it may be, an exclamation into an entire beat of its own; but always striving, by a law of the human sensory make-up, to keep what is being read roughly organized into rhythm. You do it even when listening to the ticks of a clock. But, bear in mind, it is the reader, not the writer, who sets the tune; and this tune is not melodic, but rather an unvaried drum-tap. If prose falls with too great difficulty into correlation with our time-beat, we say it is rough and hard to read. If it falls too easily, it becomes sing-song, facile, without any nervous force, or any muscle. It is when the author so alternates, or, rather, weaves, the plodding elements of his prose, the balder communications of fact, which are merely smooth enough not to put too great a strain upon the reader to organize them into regularity, with passages in which he himself sets the tune, creates a conscious rhythm that compels the reader to follow it, to fall into step — it is then that we recognize prose at its characteristic flower; for it is then that the musical rhythms, rising above the mere time-beat which has been the tune supplied by the reader, croon out with sudden, startling sweetness, or swell with a gush of emotion, or are sombre with a dusking flash of memory; and the author’s intellectual idea which we have been following becomes surcharged with feeling, enriching our own response, without obtruding upon us any sense of artifice.

To revert again to Pater’s purple passage, read this aloud: —

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

This reads easily, but not too easily. Except in certain spots, probably no two readers would phrase it, that is, organize it over their unit-pulse, in the same way. Only with ‘and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary,’ does Pater himself dominantly set the tune, a brief phrase which rises like sudden incense. For the rest, there are rhythmic, cadenced phrases, but they swell and break and disappear again rather at the will of the reader than of the writer, so happily woven are they in the firm, humble texture of words spoken to communicate fact. That is why, when we tried to set each apart, after the manner of free verse, all the charm evaporated, and we seemed jerked along.

The writer of verse, whether free verse or in rhythm and metre, sets the tune from the start, and the worse for him if he lets it slip. You have no individual choice of the time-beat for

But neither have you for

The time is marked at the opening of the bar, as it were; and that the time changes frequently in free verse, as the time and key change in modern music, does not alter the fundamental fact. You are listening to music, not yourself compelling — sometimes even torturing — a rhythmic regularity or conformity out of a sequence of syllables, as in prose. Dispense with the eye, trust only to the ear, and the essential difference between free verse and prose will paradoxically become apparent, although it is the eye alone which the scoffers say differentiates them.

But because free verse bases its music on the more natural and colloquial rhythms of human speech, rather than on artificial metre, and because, in subject-matter, it has tended to keep close to our daily life, it seems to me at least not unlikely that the ear of the public, trained to appreciate and enjoy those rhythms, and to associate them with records of reality, will be the more ready to listen for them when they rise in prose, to appreciate and enjoy prosewriting which is not entirely pedestrian, which, when it approaches — as it often must — the passions and visions of poetry, can clothe itself with a wisp of their garments (as the beggars in Dunsany’s play put on beneath their rags each a bit of green silk), to symbolize that, it, too, stems from the divine.

The prose of the nineteenth century differed from that of the eighteenth — Pater or Newman or Emerson from Addison, let us say—no less surely than Wordsworth and Shelley differed from Pope, and under the same influences. If free verse is to release the poetry that is in daily speech, it may well follow that our prose, too, will feel a quickening breath of beauty; and a glint of the glory from the wings of song will flash down to touch the hair of the humble plodder who has too long walked with head bowed low, bidding him lift his face again.