FOOTNOTES:

Salem, Oct. 4th. Union Street (Family Mansion).—. . . . Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days gone by. . . . Here I have written many tales,—many that have been burned to ashes, many that doubtless deserved the same fate. This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all,—at least, till I were in my grave. And sometimes it seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy,—at least, as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of being. By and by, the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth,—not, indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice,—and forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought preferable to my old solitude till now. . . . And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never breakthrough the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude. . . . But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart. . . . I used to think I could imagine all passions, all feelings, and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know! . . . Indeed, we are but shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream,—till the heart be touched. That touch creates us,—then we begin to be,—thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity. . . .

And the Emerson poem in prose is given herewith:

O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles or by the sword-blade any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine; thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And this is the reward; that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summerrain, copious, but not troublesome to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the sole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own, and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love,—there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldst walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

[86-A]See the selections inPastels in Prose(1890), and the sympathetic introduction by William Dean Howells.

[88-A]SeeThe Chapbook, April, 1921, London.Poetry in Prose, Three Essays by T. S. Eliot, Frederic Manning, Richard Aldington.

One of the frequent sayings in the text books of literary history is that the literature of a nation always begins with poetry in verse, and that good prose is a later development. England and Greece are especially cited as examples, since Homer lived before Herodotus and the author ofBeowulfbefore King Alfred.

Scholars follow one another often like sheep. When a man of prominence utters an idea, it is taken up by a disciple and soon becomes a convention. The academic critics and professors usually enshrine the idea and it becomes a heresy to question it. The best illustration of this is the almost universal adherence given to the idea that verse poetry came before prose, a view first set forth by the geographer Strabo in speaking of Homer in the beginning of hisGeography. His views were not entertained, I believe, by Plato or Aristotle. The passage is worth quoting as I know of no other in literature that has raised so much confusion and misapprehension as to the nature of poetry:

Prose discourse—I mean artistic prose—is, I may say, an imitation of poetic discourse; for poetry as an art first came upon the scene and was first to win approval. Then came Cadmus, Pherecydes, Hecataeus and their followers, with prose writing in which they imitated the poetic art, abandoning the use of metre, but in other respects preserving the qualities of poetry. Then subsequent writers took away, each in his turn, something of these qualities,and brought prose down to its present form, as from a sublime height. In the same way we might say that comedy took its structure from tragedy, but that it also has been degraded from the sublime height of tragedy to its present "prose-like" style, as it is called.Geography, 1. 2. 6.

Most critics have accepted this view. Scaliger, however, in the middle of the sixteenth century repudiated it. He asked whether the first so-called poems, the metrical records in temples, antedated everyday speech.

Strabo was led to his error by the fact that theIliadandOdysseywere among the very few survivals of the end of an epoch of verse poetry, and also because some of the pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides and Empedocles wrote in verse. Now scholars are all agreed that the authors of the Homeric poems had many predecessors in the art of composing poetry for many ages back down into legendary times. The perfected poems in a pattern as regular as the dactylic hexameter were a stage of evolution and did not spring up out of the darkness of an age which had no literature. The Delphians claim that their first priestess invented the dactylic hexameter; the Delians said that Olen, a mythical singer from Asia Minor, first used it, but it was, of course, a development. Prose was not a development from verse, as Strabo thought. On the contrary, all verse, including Greek verse, was a development from rhythmical prose. The stories about Troy were first told in prose; next they were sung in ballads; then they were combined into epics.

Musæus, one of the earliest legendary poets, antedating Homer, was said to have composed prose.

As the earliest literatures of most nations have not been preserved to us, we can examine various literatures in their earliest stages only; we shall in almost every casefind that these are written in rhythmical prose or possess the beginning of a pattern hardly differing from rhythmic prose. It is against all human experience to conclude that an elaborate work of art following laws of measure could precede the production in prose that represents the transcription of the natural language of people which is in prose. We shall discover, however, that in some cases, like theSagasof Iceland, we have in prose, the very first poetical compositions, while other poetical compositions, like the epics of Ireland, show us the prose along with the metrical development in the body of the compositions.

First let us briefly note the characteristics of the poetry of natural savages. This is always in rhythmical prose, or free verse, and this may be seen in the anthology of Indian poems collected by Cronyn inThe Path of the Rainbow. The writer of the preface, Mary Austin, ventures the opinion that the writers of free verse poems in America are merely returning to the primitive form of poetry written by the native Americans. Similarly the emotional outbursts of native African tribes are in rhythmical prose. The only form of pattern in the poems of savages as well as of people in an early stage of civilization is a tendency to repeat the same phrase. But in their most emotional stories, fables and legends, in their proverbs and crude moral and religious philosophizing they use plain prose. This prose, especially that of the legends, contains their first poetry, and of course there is no pattern here. The pattern, assuming the form of irregular rhythm and repetition of phrase, appears chiefly in hymns and chants, and these are only two aspects of poetry.

The first change that occurs in a later stage of the hymn is that the phrase or clause, instead of being repeated exactly, is varied by a change of words, having a similar import. In short, we have the beginning ofparallelism. There is parallelism in the poems of all early civilizations. It reaches its fullest development in an age of civilization, as we observe in the poems of the Bible.

Probably the oldest poetry we have is that of the Egyptians and the Babylonians, and there is no regular metre of any kind in these except parallelism. The works are all irregularly rhythmical and in many cases the lines are arranged like modern free verse, to call attention to this irregular rhythm.

Dr. James H. Breasted, speaking of the Pyramid Texts, in hisReligion and Thought in Ancient Egypt, says: "Among the oldest literary fragments in the collection are the religious hymns and these exhibit an early poetic form, that of couplets displaying parallelism in arrangement of word, and thought—the form which is familiar to all in the Hebrew Psalms as 'parallelism of members.' It is carried back by its employment in the Pyramid Texts in the fourth millennium B.C., by far earlier than its appearance anywhere else. It is indeed the oldest of all literary forms known to us. Its use is not confined to the hymns mentioned, but appears also in other portions of the Pyramid Texts, where it is, however, not usually so highly developed."

All the poems of the Egyptians were written simply in rough, irregular lines of rhythmical prose. Read the famousSong of the Harperwhere an epicurean life is praised; it is impassioned rhythmical prose. Take up the love poems, elegies, fairy tales and prayers of the ancient Egyptians. They have no device of metre, rhythm or rhyme. The only pattern is the parallelism. A few hymns are arranged in stanzas of ten lines with a break in the middle of each line, but no definite metrical laws existed for the lengths of lines or number of feet, so as to make a uniform rhythmical pattern of the composition.

The Egyptians wrote much of their poetry in parallelistic prose. If we do not know how they pronounced their vowels, we know enough of their literature to see that regularity of accents and equal numbers of syllables were not characteristic of their poetry.

The epic ofGilgash, the chief poem of the Babylonians, and the various hymns translated by Professor Langdon, are all in irregular rhythmical prose. These may be older than the poetry of the Egyptians, but in form they are a great deal alike—simply prose with a rough rhythm, frequent parallelism, but no uniform device. The lines are arranged often like free verse. "It is difficult to draw the line between their poetry and the higher style of prose," says Francis Brown.[100-A]"There is a primitive freedom and lack of artificiality in the poetic movement, much greater than in the Hebrew Psalms. Metre is felt and observed at times, but then abandoned—the thought carrying itself along beyond the strict boundaries of metrical division."

We have seen that critics find in the hymns of the Egyptians and Babylonians the irregular rhythm and parallelisms of the Psalms, in short, impassioned rhythmical prose.

Let us now examine the form of the poetry of the Bible.

W. Robertson Smith in an able article, "The Poetry of the Old Testament," posthumously collected inLectures and Essays, showed that Hebrew poetry was rhythmic without possessing laws of metre, for the rhythm of thought created a naturally rhythmic prose. Rhythm is the measured rise and fall of feeling and utterance, to which the rhythm of sound is subordinate. Prosodic rules are not necessary, "for the words employed naturallygroup themselves in balanced members, in which the undulations of the thought are represented to the ear." When poetry becomes more artificial people do not trust to the rhythm of thought but attribute importance to metre and finally "we are apt to forget its essential subordination to rhythmic flow of thought."

There has been no more amusing game than the ever-renewed attempt to find metres in the Bible. One of the most ridiculous claims, at one time widely in vogue, was that the Greek metres were to be found in the Bible. Vossius and the younger Scaliger denounced these views, first advanced by Josephus and Philo.

We are beginning to see to-day that the chief characteristic of the form of the poetry in the Bible is parallelism in irregular rhythm.

Dr. König and other scholars agree that it is this irregular rhythm based on accent of syllable that distinguishes Hebrew poetry. Each line had a number of accented syllables ranging from two to five, but the lines did not regularly or alternately have the same number of accented syllables. The unaccented syllables were also not counted. The poem became nothing more than rhythmical prose. Sir George A. Smith says, in hisThe Early Poetry of Israel, that the Hebrew poets indulged deliberately in the metrical irregularities of verse. They deviated more than Shakespeare, who did not always confine himself to the iambic foot and pentameter line in his blank verse. "In every form of Oriental art we trace the influence of what may be called Symmetrophobia, an instinctive aversion to absolute symmetry, which if it knows no better, will express itself in arbitrary and even violent disturbances of the style or pattern of the work." The more correct view, however, is that this symmetry was never intended by the Hebrew poets; that the irregulararrangement of accents with occasional symmetry was the rule.

Both Smith and König cite G. Dalman, who says that this irregular rhythm is found in the songs of Arabia to-day sung in Palestine. These songs are made up of lines of from two to five syllables, of which one to four are unaccented, the poet being bound by no definite numbers. This is the irregular rhythm of Hebrew poetry, and also, by the way, of theNibelungen Lied. It is the rhythm of all early poetry, the Egyptian and Babylonian.

But even those who have given up the hope of finding metres in Hebrew poetry insist that a regular metrical form was used for the Kinoth or lamentations. Professor Budde held that the Kinoth had a regular metre. But the discovery merely amounted to this: that a long line was followed regularly by a short line. There was no uniformity of accented syllables in successive or alternate lines. There are two, three and four syllables in them almost at the will of the poet.

We may then conclude that rhythm is never regular in the poetry of the Bible.

All ancient Hebrew poetry was in rhythmical prose; prophecies, elegies, songs, hymns, parables, and dialogues. The irregular rhythmical form was a natural outflow of the ecstatic element.

But what about the parallelism? Does this make the Bible verse? Bishop Lowth, in hisLectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, delivered at Oxford in the middle of the eighteenth century, no doubt performed great service in calling attention to the parallelisms of Hebrew poetry. The importance of these in ancient Hebrew poetry has, however, been overestimated. Parallelism did not create poetry, but was often its garment. There are passages employing parallelisms that are notpoetry, while many poems exist in which these are not used. Dr. Edward König, in his article on Hebrew Poetry in theJewish Encyclopedia, concludes that the poets of the Bible were not bound by parallelism, often setting it aside and not using it.

In his account ofThe Literary Study of the Bible, Professor Richard G. Moulton has given an excellent study of the parallelism of the Bible, but he admits that parallelisms of clause are also prose devices. If parallelism, then, is also a property of prose, we cannot say that parallelism alone is sufficient to distinguish poetry from prose, or even Hebrew poetry from Hebrew prose. Moulton finds that prose and poetry overlap each other in the Bible. All this merely proves that parallelisms were no doubt anciently used to differentiate prose literature conveying emotions from prose literature barren of feeling. But parallelism was not indispensable to the literature of ecstasy.

Yet we cannot deny the fact that parallelisms occur in the Bible with such frequency as almost to have become a pattern of Hebrew poetry. Bishop Lowth thought the origin of the parallelism was due to the system of chanting hymns where there was a response by the congregation, and that the practice of the parallelism soon extended to all poetry. But, for example, proverbs from their very epigrammatic nature tend towards parallelism. The origin was most likely due to the variations of phrase introduced by individuals who tired of the incessant, silly repetition of similar words such as are indulged in by savages.

There is parallelism in all poetry, inBeowulfand theKalevala, and even in prose. For it must be admitted that under emotion a man tends to repeat an idea, in the same or in a synonymous language.

There can be no doubt that parallelism was consciously and deliberately indulged in by the Hebrew poets, but it is as absurd to confuse it with Hebrew poetry as to confuse metre with English poetry. There are poetical passages in the Bible containing no parallelisms. It should also be borne in mind that parallelism developed as a perfect pattern when poetry was at a high stage. Like all patterns it was a product of a type of civilization. No rude state of society can develop a pattern, which is the result of evolution.

Parallelism is not used frequently to-day as a pattern of verse, though it can be found in all modern literature. Yet it is a more natural means of expressing one's emotions than rhyme or metre.

The only pattern of importance, then, that appears extensively in the Bible is that of parallelism. There is no pattern of rhythm at all, for this is free. The result is that the poetry of the Bible is in what may be called prose, for the repetition of the idea and language in the parallelism is natural even in prose. Parallelism in the Bible did not create a distinct branch of literature called verse, as metre did. Those Psalms that have parallelism are very little different from those Psalms where it is absent. They are both really prose.

It was unfortunate that Hebrew poetry later eschewed the rhythmic prose used in the Bible and adopted first rhymed prose and then rhymed metre. There were several circumstances that led to this.

It has been usually recognized that rhymed prose was first used among the Hebrews in the Liturgy by Jannai, who flourished in the seventh century. Metre was introduced in the tenth century by Dunash ben Labrat. Both these poets followed Arabic models. Saadyah, the Hebrew philosopher, blamed Dunash for having ruined thebeauty and naturalness of the Hebrew language for poetry. Even Jehudah HaLevi, the great national poet who used Arabic meters, regretted, in his philosophical work,Hacuzari,[105-A]that these foreign Arabian influences should prevail among the Hebrew poets.

The oldest Arab poetry was also in prose. The earliest pattern for poetry among the Arabians was the Saj (cooing), or rhymed but unmetrical prose. Goldziher calls the Saj the oldest form of poetic speech; it continued to exist even after the regular metres were established, the Koran, for instance, being in Saj. At first it was unrhymed, as Goldziher says; the earliest Arabic poetry was in unmetrical prose.

From Saj arose Rajaz (trembling), which is partly metrical, and forms the transition to the artificial Arabic meters.

The earliest surviving Arabic poetry, the seven poems of theMuallaqat, composed before Mohammed, are so perfect in form that all Arabic scholars assume they were produced after a long period extending through many years of poetic practice. They were not rude products, but had an historical background, as did theIliad. They are written in perfected and complicated metres, but the Saj is older than these.

We have two other proofs that poetry was in early times written in rhythmical prose, or at least in a rhythm that makes only a slight approach to metre. These are to be found in two of the oldest Aryan literary monuments extant, theRigvedaof India and theAvestaof Iran.

Two-fifths of the hymns of theRigvedaare composed in a metre called trishtubh, the most frequent measure in theVeda. It is made up of stanzas of four lines, each ofeleven syllables, the last four of which only have to follow a pattern, this consisting of two iambuses or an iambus and a spondee. This requirement left a good deal of liberty to the poet. Here is an example of it, in theHymn to Dawn, in MacDonnels'Sanskrit Literature(P. 83):

Arise! the breath, the life again has reached us:Darkness has gone away and light is coming.She leaves a pathway for the sun to travel:We have arrived where men prolong existence.

Max Müller in his translation in prose has adhered in many cases to the original metre, and the reader feels he is reading prose. The Hindus, like the free verse writers, merely arranged their lines to call attention to the rhythm, but it was really prose employing metrical rules only at the end of the line. It has none of the hampering qualities of classic or English metres, or of the metres in the later Indian epics when the quantity of every syllable was determined.

TheRigvedasare fixed by some scholars at 1500 B.C.

When we come to theAvestaof the Iranians who left India and wrote their work in a language that is almost Sanskrit, we find more liberty as regards the metres. TheGathas, which are said to be the oldest portions of the work, the work of Zoroaster himself, have the same or nearly the same kind of metre as the Vedic hymns, but there is greater liberty. The syllables need not be of a uniform quantity at the end of the line, but each line, as in theRigvedas, also has the same number of syllables. The third of the fiveGathasuses the trishtubh or most frequent metre of theVeda, four lines of eleven syllables, but without restrictions as to quantity of final vowels.

Of course the reader can see that such verse is really prose, for there are no limitations as to when accent or quantity should uniformly be used. L. H. Mills in histranslation of theGathaskeeps close, as he tells us, to the original metres. He wisely breaks up the metrical line, based merely on the counting of syllables, and the result reads like prose, which it really is in the original.

A study of the five "metres" of the fiveGathasappears in Martin Haug'sEssays in the Sacred Language, Writings and Religion of the Parsis.

TheGathaswere written about the fourteenth century B.C. by Zoroaster and hence are not much later than theRigvedas.

In theRigvedasandGathaswe have the first stage of metre used by Aryan nations; these are the basis of all later metres. They were written, it must be recalled, not in ages of barbarism, and represent the transition from prose to regular metre. They are so near prose that only an arrangement into lines makes us call them metrical. After all, they do not differ much from the rhythmical prose in which the poetry of Ancient Egyptians, Babylonians and Hebrews was written. We see thus that rhythmical prose was the first language wherein poetry was written, and that hampering metre is always late in the literary development of a nation. We learn how great is the delusion of literary historians that metrical poetry is the first literature of all nations and that prose is a later growth.

The earliest poetry of a country is expressed first in prose by word of mouth. It is then put down first in writing in prose, and later versions sometimes change the prose into meter. Often the earlier prose version is lost and it is then concluded that a literature of a nation begins in verse.

Let us examine the form of the earliest Irish literature. The oldest stories in Irish literature center around the exploits of Cuchulinn, who is reputed to have died at thebeginning of the Christian era. This means that the tale about him was told by word of mouth up till the time they were written down in the seventh or eighth century. The versions of a few centuries later are the copies we now have in the epicTáin Bó Cualnge. According to Edmund C. Quiggin's article on Irish Literature in theBritannica, the original Tain consisted of prose interspersed with rhythmical prose called rhetoric. Later metrical poems were largely substituted for the rhetoric. As Mr. Quiggin says, the Tain is of interest as showing the preliminary stage through which the epics of all other nations had gone. No doubt even theIliadwas originally told in prose (and probably written in prose) while the verse versions are the latest we have of the story.

Eleanor Hull, inA Text Book of Irish Literature, also says in Vol. 1, p. 95, that there are few verse poems in the earlierTáin Bó Cualnge, most of the poetry being usually in declamatory prose style known as rosg, while in the later version long verse poems are frequent.

The earliest Teutonic verse was rather rhythmical prose, with some alliteration. It is often hard to distinguish Anglo-Saxon prose from Anglo-Saxon verse. Ælfric, who is regarded by many as one of the fathers of English prose, wrote hisLives of the Saintsin rhythmical prose, arranged in irregular lines just like our modern free verse. The reader may consult Professor Skeat's edition. This arrangement, needless to say, did not make poetry of it. But free verse, as we see, was written in England in 1000 A.D.

Dr. Edwin Guest, in hisHistory of English Rhythms, says that the Anglo-Saxon writers sometimes gave a very definite rhythm to their prose, and he cites a few passages characterizing King William, from the Chronicle attributed to Wulfstan in the latter part of the eleventhcentury. Dr. Guest adds that in his opinion this rhythmical prose was one of the instruments in breaking up the alliterative system of the Anglo-Saxons. The passage he cites, however, is no more rhythmical than many passages in modern English prose. Anglo-Saxon prose, then, often was rhythmical, and even arranged like free verse, but it became genuine poetry only when the element of ecstasy was present. Even the middle-English impassioned alliterative prose poem,The Wooing of Our Lord, of the thirteenth century, does not differ much from Anglo-Saxon verse.

The earliest Teutonic poetry was emotional prose, and only later did definite rules bind it. The author ofBeowulf, though the first English verse poet, is not the oldest Teutonic poet; he had predecessors in rhythmic prose. "When we consider primitive Teutonic verse closely," says Gosse in his article in theBritannicaon Verse, "we see that it did not begin with any conscious art, but as Vigfussen had said, 'was simply excited and emphatic prose' uttered with the repetition of catch words and letters. The use of these was presently regulated." English poetry, then, began in the use of excited and emphatic prose. One of the best pieces of Anglo-Saxon prose poetry is theSermon to the Englishon the ravages of the Dane by Archbishop Wulfstan of York in the early part of the eleventh century. It reads like Anglo-Saxon verse. One sees the unconscious influence of Anglo-Saxon prose poetry as late as Drummond'sThe Cypress Grove(1623), an ecstatic prose poem against death.

The fact that theSagas, the earliest literature of Iceland, were written in perfect prose has puzzled those who claim that the early literature of all nations is verse poetry, and that prose is a later development. The events whichtheSagascelebrate took place in the tenth century, and the following century was the period of their narration. They were written down in the present form chiefly in the thirteenth century. Ari Frodi (1067-1148) is considered by many the first inventor of classic Norse prose. The most famous of theGreater Sagasis theNjalawritten about the middle of the thirteenth century and celebrating events of the beginning of the eleventh century.

Earlier Icelandic verse poetry did exist, but it does not belong to Iceland proper. The great strength of real Iceland poetry was in theSagas, which Morris calls "unversified poetry." Some of these existed as early as the first part of the tenth century. It seems anomalous to the literary historian that a nation should at the very beginning of its literary history have developed prose before verse, that it should have celebrated its heroes in prose instead of verse song. All stories among ancient people were, however, originally told in prose; the first expression was always in rhythmical poetical prose.

It is not true, then, that verse is the first form in which a nation's poetry is written, or that prose developed from verse. Prose was the original language of poetry, and to prose it should return. The pattern was a gradual development.

[100-A]"The Religious Poetry of Babylonia."Presbyterian Review, 1888, p. 76.

[105-A]There is an English translation of this work.

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 theÆneid, imported it from the Italians. It was called by the Italiansversi 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 theÆneid, andSackville'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 atthe 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 hisLife 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 frigidlydidactic, 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'sLives 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 callvers librerhythmical 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 muchecstasy 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 volumeExotics and Retrospectives. The haunter is evidently ancestral memory or the spirit of life in the past.

Ancient her beautyAs the heart of man,Yet ever waxing fairer,Forever remaining young.Mortals wither in timeAs leaves in the frost of autumn;But time only brightens the glowAnd the bloom of her endless youth.All men have loved herBut none shall touch with his lipsEven 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 theAtlantic Monthlyfor October, 1919, considers the free verse form different from prose. He took a passage from Pater'sRenaissanceand 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 theSpoon River Anthologywhich 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 onHistory as Literatureis 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 loftyThat never have they been reachedBy the sons and daughters of men.Dead poets shall sing to us the deeds of men of mightAnd the love and the beauty of women.

Dr. Andrews in hisWriting and Reading of Versehas 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 theLeaves of Grassone ofthe 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, inTowards Democracyin 1883. In America Horace Traubel, long before the free verse vogue started, had been writing in hisThe Conservatorfree verse poems. No one paid attention to these even when some of them were collected inOptimosin 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 theNew 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 Beeby Warren, the author ofTen 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 thePindaric 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 workOn Literary Compositioncontains 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'sRhetoricwhich 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 hisPanegyrics. 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 oneof 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 isbetter 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 novelEuphuesand Sidney'sArcadia.

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 aNew Study of English Poetryby 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:

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