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Title: A Study of Poetry

Author: Bliss Perry

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A STUDY OF POETRY

by
BLISS PERRY

_Professor of English Literature in Harvard University_

Author of "A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION," "WALT WHITMAN,"
"THE AMERICAN MIND," etc.



TO

M. S. P.



PREFACE

The method of studying poetry which I have followed in this book was
sketched some years ago in my chapter on "Poetry" in _Counsel Upon the
Reading of Books_. My confidence that the genetic method is the natural
way of approaching the subject has been shared by many lovers of poetry.
I hope, however, that I have not allowed my insistence upon the threefold
process of "impression, transforming imagination, and expression" to
harden into a set formula. Formulas have a certain dangerous usefulness
for critics and teachers, but they are a very small part of one's training
in the appreciation of poetry.

I have allotted little or no space to the specific discussion of epic and
drama, as these types are adequately treated in many books. Our own
generation is peculiarly attracted by various forms of the lyric, and in
Part Two I have devoted especial attention to that field.

While I hope that the book may attract the traditional "general reader,"
I have also tried to arrange it in such a fashion that it may be utilized
in the classroom. I have therefore ventured, in the Notes and
Illustrations and Appendix, to suggest some methods and material for the
use of students.

I wish to express my obligations to Professor R. M. Alden, whose
_Introduction to Poetry_ and _English Verse_ I have used in my own Harvard
courses in poetry. His views of metre have probably influenced mine even
more than I am aware. The last decade, which has witnessed such an
extraordinary revival of interest in poetry, has produced many valuable
contributions to poetic theory. I have found Professor Fairchild's _Making
of Poetry_ particularly suggestive. Attention is called, in the Notes and
Bibliography, to many other recent books on the subject.

Professors A. S. Cook of Yale and F. B. Snyder of Northwestern University
have been kind enough to read in manuscript certain chapters of this book,
and Dr. P. F. Baum of Harvard has assisted me most courteously. I am
indebted to several fellow-writers for their consent to the use of
extracts from their books, particularly to Brander Matthews for a passage
from _These Many Years_ and to Henry Osborn Taylor for a passage from his
_Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages_.

I wish also to thank the publishers who have generously allowed me to use
brief quotations from copyrighted books, especially Henry Holt & Co. for
permission to use a quotation and drawing from William James's
_Psychology_, and The Macmillan Company for permission to borrow from John
La Farge's delightful _Considerations on Painting_.

B. P.



CONTENTS

PART I

POETRY IN GENERAL

I.     A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND

II.    THE PROVINCE OF POETRY

III.   THE POET'S IMAGINATION

IV.    THE POET'S WORDS

V.     RHYTHM AND METRE

VI.    RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE


PART II

THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR

VII.   THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY

VIII.  RELATIONSHIPS AND TYPES OF THE LYRIC

IX.    RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL

X.     THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

APPENDIX

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX



A STUDY OF POETRY

PART I

POETRY IN GENERAL

  "Sidney and Shelley pleaded this cause.
  Because they spoke, must we be dumb?"
GEORGE E. WOODBERRY, _A New Defense of Poetry_



A STUDY OF POETRY

CHAPTER I


A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND

It is a gray day in autumn. I am sitting at my desk, wondering how to
begin the first chapter of this book about poetry. Outside the window
a woman is contentedly kneeling on the upturned brown earth of her
tulip-bed, patting lovingly with her trowel as she covers the bulbs
for next spring's blossoming. Does she know Katharine Tynan's verses
about "Planting Bulbs"? Probably not. But I find myself dropping the
procrastinating pen, and murmuring some of the lines:

  "Setting my bulbs a-row
    In cold earth under the grasses,
  Till the frost and the snow
    Are gone and the Winter passes--

       *       *       *       *       *

  "Turning the sods and the clay
    I think on the poor sad people
  Hiding their dead away
    In the churchyard, under the steeple.

  "All poor women and men,
    Broken-hearted and weeping,
  Their dead they call on in vain,
    Quietly smiling and sleeping.

  "Friends, now listen and hear,
    Give over crying and grieving,
  There shall come a day and a year
    When the dead shall be as the living.

  "There shall come a call, a foot-fall,
    And the golden trumpeters blowing
  Shall stir the dead with their call,
    Bid them be rising and going.

  "Then in the daffodil weather,
    Lover shall run to lover;
  Friends all trooping together;
    Death and Winter be over.

  "Laying my bulbs in the dark,
    Visions have I of hereafter.
  Lip to lip, breast to breast, hark!
    No more weeping, but laughter!"

Yet this is no way to start your chapter, suggests Conscience. Why do you
not write an opening paragraph, for better for worse, instead of looking
out of the window and quoting Katharine Tynan? And then it flashes over
me, in lieu of answer, that I have just discovered one way of beginning
the chapter, after all! For what I should like to do in this book is to
set forth in decent prose some of the strange potencies of verse: its
power, for instance, to seize upon a physical image like that of a woman
planting bulbs, and transmute it into a symbol of the resurrection of the
dead; its capacity for turning fact into truth and brown earth into
beauty; for remoulding the broken syllables of human speech into sheer
music; for lifting the mind, bowed down by wearying thought and haunting
fear, into a brooding ecstasy wherein weeping is changed into laughter and
autumnal premonitions of death into assurance of life, and the narrow
paths of individual experience are widened into those illimitable spaces
where the imagination rules. Poetry does all this, assuredly. But how? And
why? That is our problem.

"The future of poetry is immense," declared Matthew Arnold, and there are
few lovers of literature who doubt his triumphant assertion. But the past
of poetry is immense also: impressive in its sheer bulk and in its
immemorial duration. At a period earlier than any recorded history, poetry
seems to have occupied the attention of men, and some of the finest
spirits in every race that has attained to civilization have devoted
themselves to its production, or at least given themselves freely to the
enjoyment of reciting and reading verse, and of meditating upon its
significance. A consciousness of this rich human background should
accompany each new endeavor to examine the facts about poetry and to
determine its essential nature. The facts are indeed somewhat complicated,
and the nature of poetry, in certain aspects of it, at least, will remain
as always a mystery. Yet in that very complication and touch of mystery
there is a fascination which has laid its spell upon countless generations
of men, and which has been deepened rather than destroyed by the advance
of science and the results of scholarship. The study of folklore and
comparative literature has helped to explain some of the secrets of
poetry; the psychological laboratory, the history of criticism, the
investigation of linguistics, the modern developments in music and the
other arts, have all contributed something to our intelligent enjoyment of
the art of poetry and to our sense of its importance in the life of
humanity. There is no field of inquiry where the interrelations of
knowledge are more acutely to be perceived. The beginner in the study of
poetry may at once comfort himself and increase his zest by remembering
that any real training which he has already had in scientific observation,
in the habit of analysis, in the study of races and historic periods, in
the use of languages, in the practice or interpretation of any of the fine
arts, or even in any bodily exercise that has developed his sense of
rhythm, will be of ascertainable value to him in this new study.

But before attempting to apply his specific knowledge or aptitude to the
new field for investigation, he should be made aware of some of the wider
questions which the study of poetry involves. The first of these questions
has to do with the relations of the study of poetry to the general field
of Aesthetics.


_1. The Study of Poetry and the Study of Aesthetics_

The Greeks invented a convenient word to describe the study of poetry:
"Poetics." Aristotle's famous fragmentary treatise bore that title, and it
was concerned with the nature and laws of certain types of poetry and with
the relations of poetry to the other arts. For the Greeks assumed, as we
do, that poetry is an art: that it expresses emotion through words
rhythmically arranged. But as soon as they began to inquire into the
particular kind of emotion which is utilized in poetry and the various
rhythmical arrangements employed by poets, they found themselves compelled
to ask further questions. How do the other arts convey feeling? What
arrangement or rhythmic ordering of facts do they use in this process?
What takes place in us as we confront the work of art, or, in other words,
what is our reaction to an artistic stimulus?

For an answer to such wider questions as these, we moderns turn to the
so-called science of Aesthetics. This word, derived from the Greek
_aisthanomai_ (to perceive), has been defined as "anything having to do
with perception by the senses." But it was first used in its present sense
by the German thinker Baumgarten in the middle of the eighteenth century.
He meant by it "the theory of the fine arts." It has proved a convenient
term to describe both "The Science of the Beautiful" and "The Philosophy
of Beauty"; that is, both the analysis and classification of beautiful
things as well as speculation as to the origin and nature of Beauty
itself. But it should be borne in mind that aesthetic inquiry and answer
may precede by thousands of years the use of the formal language of
aesthetic theory. Mr. Kipling's "Story of Ung" cleverly represents the
cave-men as discussing the very topics which the contemporary studio and
classroom strive in vain to settle,--in vain, because they are the eternal
problems of art. Here are two faces, two trees, two colors, one of which
seems preferable to the other. Wherein lies the difference, as far as the
objects themselves are concerned? And what is it which the preferable face
or tree or color stirs or awakens within us as we look at it? These are
what we call aesthetic questions, but a man or a race may have a delicate
and sure sense of beauty without consciously asking such questions at all.
The awareness of beautiful objects in nature, and even the ability to
create a beautiful work of art, may not be accompanied by any gift for
aesthetic speculation. Conversely, many a Professor of aesthetics has
contentedly lived in an ugly house and you would not think that he had
ever looked at river or sky or had his pulses quickened by a tune.
Nevertheless, no one can turn the pages of a formal History of Aesthetics
without being reminded that the oldest and apparently the most simple
inquiries in this field may also be the subtlest and in a sense the most
modern. For illustration, take the three philosophical contributions of
the Greeks to aesthetic theory, as they are stated by Bosanquet:
[Footnote: Bosanquet, _History of Aesthetic_, chap. 3.]
(1) the conception that art deals with images, not realities, i.e. with
aesthetic "semblance" or things as they appear to the artist;
(2) the conception that art consists in "imitation," which they carried to
an absurdity, indeed, by arguing that an imitation must be less "valuable"
than the thing imitated;
(3) the conception that beauty consists in certain formal relations, such
as symmetry, harmony of parts--in a word, "unity in variety."

Now no one can snap a Kodak effectively without putting into practice the
first of these conceptions: nor understand the "new music" and "free
verse" without reckoning with both the second and the third. The value to
the student of poetry of some acquaintance with aesthetic theory is
sometimes direct, as in the really invaluable discussion contained in
Aristotle's _Poetics_, but more often, perhaps, it will be found in the
indirect stimulus to his sympathy and taste. For he must survey the
widespread sense of beauty in the ancient world, the splendid periods of
artistic creation in the Middle Ages, the growth of a new feeling for
landscape and for the richer and deeper human emotions, and the emergence
of the sense of the "significant" or individually "characteristic" in
the work of art. Finally he may come to lose himself with Kant or Hegel or
Coleridge in philosophical theories about the nature of beauty, or to
follow the curious analyses of experimental aesthetics in modern
laboratories, where the psycho-physical reactions to aesthetic stimuli are
cunningly registered and the effects of lines and colors and tones upon
the human organism are set forth with mathematical precision. He need not
trouble himself overmuch at the outset with definitions of Beauty. The
chief thing is to become aware of the long and intimate preoccupation of
men with beautiful objects and to remember that any inquiry into the
nature and laws of poetry will surely lead him into a deeper curiosity as
to the nature and manifestations of aesthetic feeling in general.


_2. The Impulse to Artistic Production_

Furthermore, no one can ask himself how it is that a poem comes into being
unless he also raises the wider question as to the origin and working of
the creative impulse in the other arts. It is clear that there is a gulf
between the mere sense of beauty--such as is possessed by primitive man,
or, in later stages of civilization, by the connoisseur in the fine
arts--and the concrete work of art. Thousands enjoy the statue, the
symphony, the ode; not one in a thousand can produce these objects.
Mere connoisseurship is sterile. "The ability to produce one fine line,"
said Edward FitzGerald, "transcends all the Able-Editor ability in this
ably-edited universe." What is the impulse which urges certain persons to
create beautiful objects? How is it that they cross the gulf which
separates the enjoyer from the producer?

It is easier to ask this question than to find a wholly satisfactory
answer to it. Plato's explanation, in the case of the poet, is simple
enough: it is the direct inspiration of the divinity,--the "god" takes
possession of the poet. Perhaps this may be true, in a sense, and we shall
revert to it later, but first let us look at some of the conditions for
the exercise of the creative impulse, as contemporary theorists have
endeavored to explain them.

Social relations, surely, afford one of the obvious conditions for the
impulse to art. The hand-clapping and thigh-smiting of primitive savages
in a state of crowd-excitement, the song-and-dance before admiring
spectators, the chorus of primitive ballads,--the crowd repeating and
altering the refrains,--the rhythmic song of laboring men and of women at
their weaving, sailors' "chanties," the celebration of funeral rites,
religious processional and pageant, are all expressions of communal
feeling, and it is this communal feeling--"the sense of joy in widest
commonalty spread"--which has inspired, in Greece and Italy, some of the
greatest artistic epochs. It is true that as civilization has proceeded,
this communal emotion has often seemed to fade away and leave us in the
presence of the individual artist only. We see Keats sitting at his garden
table writing the "Ode to Autumn," the lonely Shelley in the Cascine at
Florence composing the "West Wind," Wordsworth pacing the narrow walk
behind Dove Cottage and mumbling verses, Beethoven in his garret writing
music. But the creative act thus performed in solitude has a singular
potency, after all, for arousing that communal feeling which in the moment
of creation the artist seems to escape. What he produces in his loneliness
the world does not willingly let die. His work, as far as it becomes
known, really unites mankind. It fulfills a social purpose. "Its function
is social consolidation."

Tolstoy made so much of this "transmission of emotion," this "infectious"
quality of art as a means of union among men, that he reduced a good case
to an absurdity, for he argued himself into thinking that if a given work
of art does not infect the spectator--and preferably the uneducated
"peasant" spectator--with emotion, it is therefore not art at all. He
overlooked the obvious truth that there are certain types of difficult
or intricate beauty--in music, in architecture, and certainly in
poetry--which so tax the attention and the analytical and reflective
powers of the spectator as to make the inexperienced, uncultured spectator
or hearer simply unaware of the presence of beauty. Debussy's music,
Browning's dramatic monologues, Henry James's short stories, were not
written for Tolstoy's typical peasant. They would "transmit" to him
nothing at all. But although Tolstoy, a man of genius, overstated his case
with childlike perversity, he did valuable service in insisting upon
emotion as a basis for the art-impulse. The creative instinct is
undeniably accompanied by strong feeling, by pleasure in the actual work
of production and in the resultant object, and something of this pleasure
in the harmonious expression of emotion is shared by the competent
observer. The permanent vitality of a work of art does consist in its
capacity for stimulating and transmitting pleasure. One has only to think
of Gray's "Elegy" and the delight which it has afforded to generations of
men.

Another conception of the artistic impulse seeks to ally it with the
"play-instinct." According to Kant and Schiller there is a free "kingdom
of play" between the urgencies of necessity and of duty, and in this
sphere of freedom a man's whole nature has the chance to manifest itself.
He is wholly man only when he "plays," that is, when he is free to create.
Herbert Spencer and many subsequent theorists have pointed out the analogy
between the play of young animals, the free expression of their surplus
energy, their organic delight in the exercise of their muscles, and that
"playful" expenditure of a surplus of vitality which seems to characterize
the artist. This analogy is curiously suggestive, though it is
insufficient to account for all the phenomena concerned in human artistic
production.

The play theory, again, suggests that old and clairvoyant perception of
the Greeks that the art-impulse deals with aesthetic appearances rather
than with realities as such. The artist has to do with the semblance of
things; not with things as they "are in themselves" either physically or
logically, but with things as they appear to him. The work of the
impressionist painter or the imagist poet illustrates this conception. The
conventions of the stage are likewise a case in point. Stage settings,
conversations, actions, are all affected by the "_optique du théâtre_"
they are composed in a certain "key" which seeks to give a harmonious
impression, but which conveys frankly semblance and not reality. The
craving for "real" effects upon the stage is anti-aesthetic, like those
gladiatorial shows where persons were actually killed. I once saw an
unskilful fencer, acting the part of Romeo, really wound Tybalt: the
effect was lifelike, beyond question, but it was shocking.

From this doctrine of aesthetic semblance or "appearance" many thinkers
have drawn the conclusion that the pleasures afforded by art must in their
very nature be disinterested and sharable. Disinterested, because they
consist so largely in delighted contemplation merely. Women on the stage,
said Coquelin, should afford to the spectator "a theatrical pleasure only,
and not the pleasure of a lover." Compare with this the sprightly egotism
of the lyric poet's

  "If she be not so to me,
  What care I how fair she be?"

A certain aloofness is often felt to characterize great art: it is
perceived in the austerity and reserve of the Psyche of Naples and the
Venus of Melos:

  "And music pours on mortals
  Its beautiful disdain."

The lower pleasures of the senses of taste and touch, it is often pointed
out, are less pleasurable than the other senses when revived by memory.
Your dinner is _your_ dinner--your exclusive proprietorship of lower
pleasure--in a sense in which the snowy linen and gleaming silver and
radiant flowers upon the table are not yours only because they are
sharable. If music follows the dinner, though it be your favorite tune, it
is nevertheless not yours as what you have eaten is yours. Acute observers
like Santayana have denied or minimized this distinction, but the general
instinct of men persists in calling the pleasures of color and form and
sound "sharable," because they exist for all who can appreciate them.
The individual's happiness in these pleasures is not lessened, but rather
increased, by the coexistent happiness of others in the same object.

There is one other aspect of the artistic impulse which is of peculiar
importance to the student of poetry. It is this: the impulse toward
artistic creation always works along lines of order. The creative impulse
may remain a mystery in its essence, the play of blind instinct, as many
philosophers have supposed; a portion of the divine energy which is
somehow given to men. All sorts of men, good and bad, cultured and savage,
have now and again possessed this vital creative power. They have been
able to say with Thomas Lovell Beddoes:

  "I have a bit of fiat in my soul,
  And can myself create my little world."

The little world which their imagination has created may be represented
only by a totem pole or a colored basket or a few scratches on a piece of
bone; or it may be a temple or a symphony. But if it be anything more than
the mere whittling of a stick to exercise surplus energy, it is ordered
play or labor. It follows a method. It betrays  remeditation. It is the
expression of something in the mind. And even the mere whittler usually
whittles his stick to a point: that is, he is "making" something.
His knife, almost before he is aware of what he is doing, follows a
pattern--invented in his brain on the instant or remembered from other
patterns. He gets pleasure from the sheer muscular activity, and from
his tactile sense of the bronze or steel as it penetrates the softer wood.
But he gets a higher pleasure still from his pattern, from his sense of
making something, no matter how idly. And as soon as the pattern or
purpose or "design" is recognized by others the maker's pleasure is
heightened, sharable. For he has accomplished the miracle: he has thrown
the raw material of feeling into form--and that form itself yields
pleasure. His "bit of fiat" has taken a piece of wood and transformed it:
made it expressive of something. All the "arts of design" among primitive
races show this pattern-instinct.

But the impulse toward an ordered expression of feeling is equally
apparent in the rudimentary stages of music and poetry. The striking of
hands or feet in unison, the rhythmic shout of many voices, the regular
beat of the tom-tom, the excited spectators of a college athletic contest
as they break spontaneously from individual shouting into waves of
cheering and of song, the quickened feet of negro stevedores as some one
starts a tune, the children's delight in joining hands and moving in a
circle, all serve to illustrate the law that as feeling gains in intensity
it tends toward ordered expression. Poetry, said Coleridge, in one of his
marvelous moments of insight, is the result of "a more than usual state of
emotion" combined "with more than usual order."

What has been said about play and sharable pleasure and the beginning of
design has been well summarized by Sidney Colvin:
[Footnote: Article on "The Fine Arts" in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_.]

"There are some things which we do because we must; these are our
necessities. There are other things which we do because we ought; these
are our duties. There are other things which we do because we like; these
are our play. Among the various kinds of things done by men only because
they like, the fine arts are those of which the results afford to many
permanent and disinterested delight, and of which the performance, calling
for premeditated skill, is capable of regulation up to a certain point,
but that point passed, has secrets beyond the reach and a freedom beyond
the restraint of rules."


_3. "Form" and "Significance" in the Arts_

If the fine arts, then, deal with the ordered or harmonious expression of
feeling, it is clear that any specific work of art may be regarded, at
least theoretically, from two points of view. We may look at its "outside"
or its "inside"; that is to say at its ordering of parts, its pattern, its
"form," or else at the feeling or idea which it conveys. This distinction
between form and content, between expression and that which is expressed,
is temptingly convenient. It is a useful tool of analysis, but it is
dangerous to try to make it anything more than that. If we were looking at
a water-pipe and the water which flows through it, it would be easy to
keep a clear distinction between the form of the iron pipe, and its
content of water. But in certain of the fine arts very noticeably, such as
music, and in a diminished degree, poetry, and more or less in all of
them, the form is the expression or content. A clear-cut dissection of the
component elements of outside and inside, of water-pipe and water within
it, becomes impossible. Listening to music is like looking at a brook;
there is no inside and outside, it is all one intricately blended complex
of sensation. Music is a perfect example of "embodied feeling," as
students of aesthetics term it, and the body is here inseparable from the
feeling. But in poetry, which is likewise embodied feeling, it is somewhat
easier to attempt, for purposes of logical analysis, a separation of the
component elements of thought (i.e. "content") and form. We speak
constantly of the "idea" of a poem as being more or less adequately
"expressed," that is, rendered in terms of form. The actual form of a
given lyric may or may not be suited to its mood,
[Footnote: Certainly not, for instance, in Wordsworth's "Reverie of Poor
Susan."]
or the poet may not have been a sufficiently skilful workman to achieve
success in the form or "pattern" which he has rightly chosen.

Even in poetry, then, the distinction between inside and outside,
content and form, has sometimes its value, and in other arts, like
painting and sculpture, it often becomes highly interesting and
instructive to attempt the separation of the two elements. The French
painter Millet, for instance, is said to have remarked to a pupil who
showed him a well-executed sketch: "You can paint. But what have you to
say?" The pupil's work had in Millet's eyes no "significance." The English
painter G. F. Watts often expressed himself in the same fashion: "I paint
first of all because I have something to say.... My intention has not been
so much to paint pictures that will charm the eye as to suggest great
thoughts that will appeal to the imagination and the heart and kindle all
that is best and noblest in humanity.... My work is a protest against the
modern opinion that Art should have nothing to say intellectually."

On the other hand, many distinguished artists and critics have given
assent to what has been called the "Persian carpet" theory of painting.
According to them a picture should be judged precisely as one judges a
Persian rug--by the perfection of its formal beauty, its harmonies of
line, color and texture, its "unity in variety." It is evident that the
men who hold this opinion are emphasizing form in the work of art, and
that Millet and Watts emphasized significance. One school is thinking
primarily of expression, and the other of that which is expressed. The
important point for the student of poetry to grasp is that this divergence
of opinion turns upon the question of relative emphasis. Even pure form,
or "a-priori form" as it has sometimes been called,--such as a
rectangle, a square, a cube,--carries a certain element of association
which gives it a degree of significance. There is no absolutely bare or
blank pattern. "Four-square" means something to the mind, because it is
intimately connected with our experience.
[Footnote: See Bosanquet, _Three Lectures on Aesthetic_, pp. 19, 29, 39,
and Santayana, _The Sense of Beauty_, p. 83.]
It cannot be a mere question of balance, parallelism and abstract "unity
in variety." The acanthus design in architectural ornament, the Saracenic
decoration on a sword-blade, aim indeed primarily at formal beauty and
little more. The Chinese laundryman hands you a red slip of paper covered
with strokes of black ink in strange characters. It is undecipherable to
you, yet it possesses in its sheer charm of color and line, something of
beauty, and the freedom and vigor of the strokes are expressive of
vitality. It is impossible that Maud's face should really have been

  "Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,
   Dead perfection, no more."

Nevertheless, though absolutely pure decorative beauty does not exist, the
artist may push the decorative principle very far, so far, indeed, that
his product lacks interest and proves tedious or nonsensical. There is
"nonsense-verse," as we shall see later, which fulfills every condition
for pure formal beauty in poetry. Yet it is not poetry, but only
nonsense-verse.

Now shift the interest from the form to the meaning contained in the work
of art, that is, to its significance. An expressive face is one that
reveals character. Its lines are suggestive of something. They are
associated, like the lines of purely decorative beauty, with more or less
obscure tracts of our experience, but they arouse a keen mental interest.
They stimulate, they are packed closely with meaning, with fact, with
representative quality. The same thing is true of certain landscapes.
Witness Thomas Hardy's famous description of Egdon Heath in _The Return of
the Native_. It is true of music. Certain modern music almost breaks down,
as music, under the weight of meaning, of fact, of thought, which the
composer has striven to make it carry.

There is no question that the principle of significance may be pushed too
far, just as the principle of decorative or purely formal beauty may be
emphasized too exclusively. But is there any real antagonism between the
elements of form and significance, beauty and expressiveness? This
question has been debated ever since the time of Winckelmann and Lessing.
The controversy over the work of such artists as Wagner, Browning,
Whitman, Rodin has turned largely upon it.

Browning himself strove to cut the difficult aesthetic knot with a rough
stroke of common sense:

                            "Is it so pretty
  You can't discover if it means hope, fear,
  Sorrow or joy? Won't beauty go with these?"
[Footnote: "Fra Lippo Lippi."]

He tried again in the well-known passage from _The Ring and the Book_:

  "So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,
   Beyond mere imagery on the wall,--
   So note by note bring music from your mind
   Deeper than ever e'en Beethoven dived,--
   So write a book shall mean beyond the facts,
   Suffice the eye and save the soul beside."

How Whistler, the author of _Ten O'Clock_ and the creator of exquisitely
lovely things, must have loathed that final line! But Bosanquet's
carefully framed definition of the beautiful, in his _History of
Aesthetic_, endeavors, like Browning, to adjust the different claims of
form and significance: "The beautiful is that which has characteristic or
individual expressiveness for sense-perception or imagination, subject to
the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium."
That is to say, in less philosophical language, that as long as you
observe the laws of formal beauty which belong to the medium in which you
are working, you may be as expressive or significant as you like. But the
artist must be obedient to the terms of his chosen medium of expression;
if he is composing music or poetry he must not break the general laws of
music or poetry in order to attempt that valiant enterprise of saving a
soul.


_4. The Man in the Work of Art_

Though there is much in this matter of content and form which is baffling
to the student of general aesthetic theory, there is at least one aspect
of the question which the student of poetry must grasp clearly. It is
this: there is nothing in any work of art except what some man has put
there. _What he has put in_ is our content question; _what shape he has
put it into_ is our form question. In Bosanquet's more technical language:
"A man is the middle term between content and expression." There is
doubtless some element of mystery in what we call creative power, but this
is a part of man's mystery. There is no mystery in the artist's material
as such: he is working in pigments or clay or vibrating sound or whatever
other medium he has chosen. The qualities and possibilities of this
particular medium fascinate him, preoccupy him. He comes, as we say, to
think in terms of color or line or sound. He learns or may learn in time,
as Whistler bade him, "never to push a medium further than it will go."
The chief value of Lessing's epoch-making discussion of "time-arts" and
"space-arts" in his _Laokoon_ consisted in the emphasis laid upon the
specific material of the different arts, and hence upon the varying
opportunities which one medium or another affords to the artist. But
though human curiosity never wearies of examining the inexhaustible
possibilities of this or that material, it is chiefly concerned, after
all, in the use of material as it has been moulded by the fingers and the
brain of a particular artist. The material becomes transformed as it
passes through his "shop," in some such way as iron is transformed into
steel in a blast furnace. An apparatus called a "transformer" alters the
wave-length of an electrical current and reduces high pressure to low
pressure, or the reverse. The brain of the artist seems to function in a
somewhat similar manner as it reshapes the material furnished it by the
senses, and expresses it in new forms. Poetry furnishes striking
illustrations of the transformations wrought in the crucible of the
imagination, and we must look at these in detail in a subsequent chapter.
But it may be helpful here to quote the testimony of two or three artists
and then to examine the psychological basis of this central function of
the artist's mind.

"Painting is the expression of certain sensations," said Carolus Duran.
"You should not seek merely to copy the model that is posed before you,
but rather to take into account the impression that is made upon the
mind.... Take careful account of the substances that you must
render--wood, metal, textures, for instance. When you fail to reproduce
nature _as you feel it_, then you falsify it. _Painting is not done with
the eyes, but with the brain_."

W. W. Story, the sculptor, wrote: "Art is art because it is not nature....
The most perfect imitation of nature is therefore not art. _It must pass
through the mind of the artist and be changed_. Art is nature reflected
through the spiritual mirror, and tinged with all the sentiment, feeling,
passion of the spirit that reflects it."

In John La Farge's _Considerations on Painting_, a little book which is
full of suggestiveness to the student of literature, there are many
passages illustrating the conception of art as "the representation of the
artist's view of the world." La Farge points out that "drawing from life
is an exercise of memory. It might be said that the sight of the moment is
merely a theme upon which we embroider the memories of former likings,
former aspirations, former habits, images that we have cared for, and
through which we indicate to others our training, our race, the entire
educated part of our nature."

One of La Farge's concrete examples must be quoted at length:
[Footnote: _Considerations on Painting_, pp. 71-73. Macmillan.]

  "I remember myself, years ago, sketching with two well-known men,
  artists who were great friends, great cronies, asking each other all
  the time, how to do this and how to do that; but absolutely
  different in the texture of their minds and in the result that they
  wished to obtain, so far as the pictures and drawings by which they
  were well known to the public are concerned.

  "What we made, or rather, I should say, what we wished to note, was
  merely a memorandum of a passing effect upon the hills that lay
  before us. We had no idea of expressing ourselves, or of studying in
  any way the subject for any future use. We merely had the intention
  to note this affair rapidly, and we had all used the same words to
  express to each other what we liked in it. There were big clouds
  rolling over hills, sky clearing above, dots of trees and water and
  meadow-land below us, and the ground fell away suddenly before us.
  Well, our three sketches were, in the first place, different in
  shape; either from our physical differences, or from a habit of
  drawing certain shapes of a picture, which itself usually
  indicates--as you know, or ought to know--whether we are looking far
  or near. Two were oblong, but of different proportions; one was more
  nearly a square; the distance taken in to the right and left was
  smaller in the latter case, and, on the contrary, the height up and
  down--that is to say, the portion of land beneath and the portion of
  sky above--was greater. In each picture the clouds were treated with
  different precision and different attention. In one picture the open
  sky above was the main intention of the picture. In two pictures the
  upper sky was of no consequence--it was the clouds and the mountains
  that were insisted upon. The drawing was the same, that is to say,
  the general make of things; but each man had involuntarily looked
  upon what was most interesting to him in the whole sight; and though
  the whole sight was what he meant to represent, he had unconsciously
  preferred a beauty or an interest of things different from what his
  neighbour liked.

  "The colour of each painting was different--the vivacity of colour
  and tone, the distinctness of each part in relation to the whole;
  and each picture would have been recognized anywhere as a specimen
  of work by each one of us, characteristic of our names. And we spent
  on the whole affair perhaps twenty minutes.

  "I wish you to understand, again, that we each thought and felt as if
  we had been photographing the matter before us. We had not the first
  desire of expressing _ourselves_, and I think would have been very
  much worried had we not felt that each one was true to nature. And
  we were each one true to nature.... If you ever know how to paint
  somewhat well, and pass beyond the position of the student who has
  not yet learned to use his hands as an expression of the memories of
  his brain, you will always give to nature, that is to say, what is
  outside of you, the character of the lens through which you see
  it--which is yourself."

Such bits of testimony from painters help us to understand the brief
sayings of the critics, like Taine's well-known "Art is nature seen
through a temperament," G. L. Raymond's "Art is nature made human," and
Croce's "Art is the expression of impressions." These painters and critics
agree, evidently, that the mind of the artist is an organism which acts as
a "transformer." It receives the reports of the senses, but alters these
reports in transmission and it is precisely in this alteration that the
most personal and essential function of the  artist's brain is to be
found.

Remembering this, let the student of poetry now recall the diagram used in
handbooks of psychology to illustrate the process of sensory stimulus of a
nerve-centre and the succeeding motor reaction. The diagram is usually
drawn after this fashion:

Sensory stimulus           Nerve-centre          Motor Reaction
________________________________O______________________________
  -------------------->                 -------------------->

The process is thus described by William James:
[Footnote: _Psychology, Briefer Course_, American Science Series, p. 91.
Henry Holt.]

  "The afferent nerves, when excited by some physical irritant, be this as
  gross in its mode of operation as a chopping axe or as subtle as the
  waves of light, convey the excitement to the nervous centres. The
  commotion set up in the centres does not stop there, but discharges
  through the efferent nerves, exciting movements which vary with the
  animal and with the irritant applied."

The familiar laboratory experiment irritates with a drop of acid the hind
leg of a frog. Even if the frog's brain has been removed, leaving the
spinal cord alone to represent the nervous system, the stimulus of the
acid results in an instant movement of the leg. Sensory stimulus,
consequent excitement of the nerve centre and then motor reaction is the
law. Thus an alarmed cuttlefish secretes an inky fluid which colors the
sea-water and serves as his protection. Such illustrations may be
multiplied indefinitely.
[Footnote: See the extremely interesting statement by Sara Teasdale,
quoted in Miss Wilkinson's _New Voices_, p. 199. Macmillan, 1919.]
It may seem fanciful to insist upon the analogy between a frightened
cuttlefish squirting ink into sea-water and an agitated poet spreading ink
upon paper, but in both cases, as I have said elsewhere, "it is a question
of an organism, a stimulus and a reaction. The image of the solitary
reaper stirs a Wordsworth, and the result is a poem; a profound sorrow
comes to Alfred Tennyson, and he produces _In Memoriam_."
[Footnote: _Counsel upon the Reading of Books_, p. 219. Houghton Mifflin
Company.]

In the next chapter we must examine this process with more detail. But the
person who asks himself how poetry comes into being will find a
preliminary answer by reflecting upon the relation of "impression" to
"expression" in every nerve-organism, and in all the arts. Everywhere he
must reckon with this ceaseless current of impressions, "the stream of
consciousness," sweeping inward to the brain; everywhere he will detect
modification, selections, alterations in the stream as it passes through
the higher nervous centres; everywhere he will find these transformed
"impressions" expressed in the terms of some specific medium. Thus the
temple of Karnak expresses in huge blocks of stone an imagination which
has brooded over the idea of the divine permanence. The Greek
"discus-thrower" is the idealized embodiment of a typical kind of athlete,
a conception resulting from countless visual and tactile sensations. An
American millionaire buys a "Corot" or a "Monet," that is to say, a piece
of colored canvas upon which a highly individualized artistic temperament
has recorded its vision or impression of some aspect of the world as it
has been interpreted by Corot's or Monet's eye and brain and hand. A
certain stimulus or "impression," an organism which reshapes impressions,
and then an "expression" of these transformed impressions into the terms
permitted by some specific material: that is the threefold process which
seems to be valid in all of the fine arts. It is nowhere more intricately
fascinating than in poetry.



CHAPTER II

THE PROVINCE OF POETRY

    "The more I read and re-read the works of the great poets,
    and the more I study the writings of those who have some
    Theory of Poetry to set forth, the more am I convinced that
    the question _What is Poetry?_ can be properly answered only if
    we make _What it does_ take precedence of _How it does it_."
        J. A. STEWART, _The Myths of Plato_

In the previous chapter we have attempted a brief survey of some of the
general aesthetic questions which arise whenever we consider the form and
meaning of the fine arts. We must now try to look more narrowly at the
special field of poetry, asking ourselves how it comes into being, what
material it employs, and how it uses this material to secure those
specific effects which we all agree in calling "poetical," however widely
we may differ from one another in our analysis of the means by which the
effect is produced.

Let us begin with a truism. It is universally admitted that poetry, like
each of the fine arts, has a field of its own. To run a surveyor's
line accurately around the borders of this field, determining what belongs
to it rather than to the neighboring arts, is always difficult and
sometimes impossible. But the field itself is admittedly "there," in all
its richness and beauty, however bitterly the surveyors may quarrel about
the boundary lines. (It is well to remember that professional surveyors do
not themselves own these fields or raise any crops upon them!) How much
map-making ingenuity has been devoted to this task of grouping and
classifying the arts: distinguishing between art and fine art, between
artist, artificer and artisan; seeking to arrange a hierarchy of the arts
on the basis of their relative freedom from fixed ends, their relative
complexity or comprehensiveness of effect, their relative obligation to
imitate or represent something that exists in nature! No one cares
particularly to-day about such matters of precedence--as if the arts were
walking in a carefully ordered ecclesiastical procession. On the other
hand, there is ever-increasing recognition of the soundness of the
distinction made by Lessing in his _Laokoon: or the Limits of Painting and
Poetry_; namely, that the fine arts differ, as media of expression,
according to the nature of the material which they employ. That is to say,
the "time-arts"--like poetry and music--deal primarily with actions that
succeed one another in time. The space-arts--painting, sculpture,
architecture--deal primarily with bodies that coexist in space. Hence
there are some subjects that belong naturally in the "painting" group, and
others that belong as naturally in the "poetry" group. The artist should
not "confuse the genres," or, to quote Whistler again, he should not push
a medium further than it will go. Recent psychology has more or less upset
Lessing's technical theory of vision,
[Footnote: F. E. Bryant, _The Limits of Descriptive Writing_, etc. Ann
Arbor, 1906.]
but it has confirmed the value of his main contention as to the fields
of the various arts.


_1. The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice_

An illustration will make this matter clear. Let us take the Greek myth of
Orpheus and Eurydice, which has been utilized by many artists during more
than two thousand years assuredly, and how much longer no one knows.
Virgil told it in the _Georgics_ and Ovid in the _Metamorphoses_. It
became a favorite theme of medieval romance, and whether told in a French
_lai_ or Scottish ballad like "King Orfeo," it still keeps, among all the
strange transformations which it has undergone, "the freshness of the
early world." Let us condense the story from King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon
version of Boethius's _De Consolatione Philosophiae_: "There was once a
famous Thracian harper named Orpheus who had a beautiful wife named
Eurydice. She died and went to hell. Orpheus longed sorrowfully for her,
harping so sweetly that the very woods and wild beasts listened to his
woe. Finally, he resolved to seek her in hell and win her back by his
skill. And he played so marvelously there that the King of Hell to reward
him gave him back his wife again, only upon the condition that he should
not turn back to look at her as he led her forth. But, alas, who can
constrain love? When Orpheus came to the boundary of darkness and light,
he turned round to see if his wife was following--and she vanished."

Such was the myth in one of its manifold European forms. It deals
obviously with a succession of events, with actions easily narratable by
means of a "time-art" like poetry. The myth itself is one of fascinating
human interest, and if a prose writer like Hawthorne had chosen to tell it
in his _Wonder-Book_, we should doubtless speak of it as a "poetic" story.
We should mean, in using that adjective, that the myth contained
sentiment, imagination, passion, dramatic climax, pathos--the qualities
which we commonly associate with poetry--and that Hawthorne, although a
prose writer, had such an exquisite sympathy for Greek stories that his
handling of the material would be as delicate, and the result possibly as
lovely, as if the tale had been told in verse. But if we would realize the
full value of Lessing's distinction, we must turn to one of the countless
verse renderings of the myth. Here we have a succession of actions,
indeed, quite corresponding to those of the prose story. But these images
of action, succeeding one another in time, are now evoked by successive
musical sounds,--the sounds being, as in prose, arbitrary word-symbols of
image and idea,--only that in poetry the sounds have a certain ordered
arrangement which heightens the emotional effect of the images evoked.
Prose writer and poet might mean to tell precisely the same tale, but in
reality they cannot, for one is composing, no matter how cunningly, in the
tunes of prose and the other in the tunes of verse. The change in the
instrument means an alteration in the mental effect.

Now turn to Lessing's other exemplar of the time-arts, the musician--for
musicians as well as poets, painters and sculptors have utilized the myth
of Orpheus and Eurydice. What can the musician do with the theme? Gluck's
opera may serve for answer. He cannot, by the aid of music alone, call up
very definite ideas or images. He cannot tell the Orpheus story clearly to
one who has never heard it. But to one who already knows the tale, a
composer's overture--without stage accessories or singing actors or any
"operatic" devices as such--furnishes in its successions and combinations
of musical sound, without the use of verbal symbols, a unique pleasurable
emotion which strongly and powerfully reinforces the emotions suggested by
the Orpheus myth itself. Certain portions of the story, such as those
relating to the wondrous harping, can obviously be interpreted better
through music than through the medium of any other art.

What can Lessing's "space-arts," sculpture and painting, do with the
material furnished by the Orpheus myth? It is clear that they cannot tell
the whole story, since they are dealing with "bodies that coexist" rather
than with successive actions. They must select some one instant of action
only, and preferably the most significant moment of the whole, the parting
of husband and wife. In the museum at Naples there is the wonderful Greek
treatment of this theme, in sculptured high relief. The sculptor has
chosen the moment of parting. Hermes, the messenger of the gods to recall
Eurydice, has twined his hand gently around the left hand of the woman.
With her right hand she still touches her husband, but the dread instant
is upon them all. The sculptor, representing the persons in three
dimensions, as far as high relief allows, has sufficiently
characterized their faces and figures, and with exquisite sense of rhythm
and balance in his composition has fulfilled every requirement of formal
beauty that marble affords.

In Sir Frederick Leighton's painting of Orpheus and Eurydice and in many
another less famous painter's rendering of the theme, there is likewise
the portrayal of an arrested moment. But the painter represents the
personages and the background in two dimensions. He can separate his
figures more completely than the sculptor, can make their instant of
action more "dramatic," can portray certain objects, such as the
diaphanous robe of Eurydice as she vanishes into mist, which are beyond
the power of the sculptor to represent, and above all he can suggest the
color of the objects themselves, the degree of light and shade, the
"atmosphere" of the whole, in a fashion unapproachable by the rival arts.

The illustration need not be worked out more elaborately here, though the
student may profitably reflect upon the resources of the modern moving
picture--which is a novel combination of the "time" and "space" arts--and
of the mimetic dance, as affording still further opportunities for
expressing the artistic possibilities of the Orpheus story. But the chief
lesson to be learned by one who is attempting in this way to survey the
provinces of the different arts is this: no two of all the artists who
have availed themselves of the Orpheus material have _really had the same
subject_, although the title of each of their productions, if catalogued,
might conveniently be called "Orpheus and Eurydice." Each has had his own
conception of the theme, each his own professional technique in handling
his chosen medium, each his own habits of brain, each, in a word, has
found his own subject. "Are these children who are playing in the
sunlight," said Fromentin, "or is it a place in the sunlight in
which children are playing?" One is a "figure" subject, that is to say,
while the other is a landscape subject.

The whole topic of the "provinces" of the arts becomes hopelessly academic
and sterile if one fails to keep his eye upon the individual artist, whose
free choice of a subject is conditioned solely by his own artistic
interest in rendering such aspects of any theme as his own medium of
expression will allow him to represent. Take one of the most beautiful
objects in nature, a quiet sea. Is this a "painter-like" subject?
Assuredly, yet the etcher has often rendered the effect of a quiet sea in
terms of line, as a pastellist has rendered it in terms of color, and a
musician in terms of tone-feeling, and a poet in terms of tone-feeling
plus thought. Each one of them finds something for himself, selects
his own "subject," from the material presented by the quiet sea, and
whatever he may find belongs to him. We declaim against the confusion of
the genres, the attempt to render in the terms of one art what belongs, as
we had supposed, to another art, and we are often right in our protest.
Yet artists have always been jumping each other's claims, and the sole
test of the lawfulness of the procedure is the success of the result. If
the border-foray of the impressionist or imagist proves successful, well
and good, but a triumphant raid should not be mistaken for the steady
lines of the main campaign.


_2. The Special Field_

What then do we mean by the province of poetry? Simply that there is a
special field in which, for uncounted centuries, poets have produced a
certain kind of artistic effect. Strictly speaking, it is better to say
"poets" rather than "the poet," just as William James confesses that
strictly speaking there is no such thing as "the Imagination," there are
only imaginations. But "the poet" is a convenient expression to indicate a
man functioning _qua_ poet--i.e. a man poetizing; and we shall continue to
use it. When we say that "the poet" in Sir Walter Scott inspires this or
that utterance, while "the novelist" or "the historian" or "the critic" in
him has prompted this or that other utterance, we are within our rights.

The field of poetry, as commonly understood, is that portion of human
feeling which expresses itself through rhythmical and preferably metrical
language. In this field "the poet" labors. The human feeling which he
embodies in verse comes to him originally, as feeling comes to all men, in
connection with a series of mental images. These visual, auditory, motor
or tactile images crowd the stream of consciousness as it sweeps inward to
the brain. There the images are subjected to a process of selection,
modification, transformation.
[Footnote: "The finest poetry was first experience; but the thought
has suffered a transformation since it was an experience." Emerson,
_Shakespeare: The Poet_.]
At some point in the process the poet's images tend to become verbal,--as
the painter's or the musician's do not,--and these verbal images are then
discharged in rhythmical patterns. It is one type of the threefold process
roughly described at the close of Chapter I. What is peculiar to the poet
as compared with other men or other artists is to be traced not so much in
the peculiar nature of his visual, auditory, motor or tactile images--for
in this respect poets differ enormously among one another--as in the
increasingly verbal form of these images as they are reshaped by his
imagination, and in the strongly rhythmical or metrical character of the
final expression.

Let carbon represent the first of the stages, the excited feeling
resulting from sensory stimulus. That is the raw material of poetic
emotion. Let the diamond represent the second stage, the chemical change,
as it were, produced in the mental images under the heat and pressure of
the imagination. The final stage would be represented by the cutting,
polishing and setting of the diamond, by the arrangement of the
transformed and now purely verbal images into effective rhythmical or
metrical designs.

Wordsworth once wrote of true poets who possessed

  "The vision and the faculty divine,
  Though wanting the accomplishment of verse."

Let us venture to apply Wordsworth's terminology to the process already
described. The "vision" of the poet would mean his sense-impressions of
every kind, his experience, as Goethe said, of "the outer world, the inner
world and the other world." The "faculty divine," into which vision blends
insensibly, would mean the mysterious change of these sense-impressions--
as they become subjected to reflection, comparison, memory, "passion
recollected in tranquillity,"--into words possessing a peculiar life and
power. The "accomplishment of verse" is easier to understand. It is the
expression, by means of these words now pulsating with rhythm--the natural
language of excitement--of whatever the poet has seen and felt, modified
by his imagination. The result is a poem: "embodied feeling."

Browning says to his imaginary poet:

  "Your brains beat into rhythm--you tell
               What we felt only."

There is much virtue, for us, in this rudely vigorous description of "the
poet." Certainly all of us feel, and thus far we are all potential poets.
But according to Browning there is, so to speak, a physiological
difference between the poet's brain and ours. His brain beats into rhythm;
that is the simple but enormous difference in function, and hence it is
that he can tell what we only feel. That is, he becomes a "singer" as well
as "maker," while we, conscious though we may be of the capacity for
intense feeling, cannot embody our feelings in the forms of verse. We may
indeed go so far as to reshape mental images in our heated brains--for all
men do this under excitement, but to sing what we have thus made is denied
to us.


_3. An Illustration from William James_

No one can be more conscious than the present writer of the impossibility
of describing in plain prose the admittedly complicated and mysterious
series of changes by which poetry comes into being. Those readers who find
that even the lines just quoted from Wordsworth and Browning throw little
new light upon the old difficulties, may nevertheless get a bit of help
here by turning back to William James's diagram of the working of the
brain. It will be remembered that in Chapter I we used the simplest
possible chart to represent the sensory stimulus of a nerve-centre and the
succeeding motor reaction, and we compared the "in-coming" and "out-going"
nerve processes with the function of Impression and Expression in the
arts. But to understand something of what takes place in the making of
poetry we must now substitute for our first diagram the slightly more
complicated one which William James employs to represent, not those lower
nerve-centres which "act from present sensational stimuli alone," but the
hemispheres of the human brain which "act from considerations."
[Footnote: _Psychology, Briefer Course_, pp. 97, 98. Henry Holt.]
Considerations are images constructed out of past experience, they are
reproductions of what has been felt or witnessed.

  "They are, in short, _remote_ sensations; and the main difference
  between the hemisphereless animal and the whole one may be concisely
  expressed by saying that _the one obeys absent, the other only present,
  objects. The hemispheres would then seem to be the chief seat of
  memory._"

Then follows the accompanying diagram and illustration.

  "If we liken the nervous currents to electric currents, we can compare
  the nervous system, _C_, below the hemispheres to a direct circuit from
  sense-organ to muscle along the line _S... C... M_. The hemisphere, _H_,
  adds the long circuit or loop-line through which the current may pass
  when for any reason the direct line is not used.

[Illustration: M ?----- C ?----- H ?----- C ?---- S ]

  "Thus, a tired wayfarer on a hot day throws himself on the damp earth
  beneath a maple-tree. The sensations of delicious rest and coolness
  pouring themselves through the direct line would naturally discharge
  into the muscles of complete extension: he would abandon himself to the
  dangerous repose. But the loop-line being open, part of the current is
  drafted along it, and awakens rheumatic or catarrhal reminiscences,
  which prevail over the instigations of sense, and make the man arise and
  pursue his way to where he may enjoy his rest more safely."

William James's entire discussion of the value of the hemisphere
"loop-line" as a reservoir of reminiscences is of peculiar suggestiveness
to the student of poetry. For it is along this loop-line of "memories and
ideas of the distant" that poetry wins its generalizing or universalizing
power. It is here that the life of reason enters into the life of mere
sensation, transforming the reports of the nerves into ideas and thoughts
that have coherence and general human significance. It is possible,
certainly, as the experiments of contemporary "imagists" prove, to write
poetry of a certain type without employing the "loop-line." But this is
pure sensorium verse, the report of retinal, auditory or tactile images,
and nothing more. "Response to impressions and representation of those
impressions in their _original isolation_ are the marks of the new poetry.
Response to impressions, _correlation of those impressions into a
connected body of phenomena_, and final interpretation of them as a whole
are, have been, and always will be the marks of the enduring in all
literature, whether poetry or prose."
[Footnote: Lewis Worthington Smith, "The New Naiveté," _Atlantic_, April,
1916.]
To quote another critic: "A rock, a star, a lyre, a cataract, do not,
except incidentally and indirectly, owe their command of our sympathies to
the bare power of evoking reactions in a series of ocular envelopes or
auditory canals. Their power lies in their freightage of association,
in their tactical position at the focus of converging experience, in
the number and vigor of the occasions in which they have crossed and
re-crossed the palpitating thoroughfares of life. ... Sense-impressions
are poetically valuable only in the measure of their power to procreate or
re-create experience."
[Footnote: O. W. Firkins, "The New Movement in Poetry," _Nation_, October
14, 1915.]

One may give the fullest recognition to the delicacy and sincerity of
imagist verse, to its magical skill in seeming to open new doors of sense
experience by merely shutting the old doors of memory, to its naive
courage in rediscovering the formula of "Back to Nature."
[Footnote: See the discussion of imagist verse in chap. III.]
Like "free verse," it has widened the field of expression, although its
advocates have sometimes forgotten that thousands of "imagist" poems lie
embedded in the verse of Browning and even in the prose of George
Meredith.
[Footnote: J. L. Lowes, "An Unacknowledged Imagist," _Nation_, February
24, 1916.]
We shall discuss some of its tenets later, but it should be noted at this
point that the radical deficiency of imagist verse, as such, is in its
lack of general ideas. Much of it might have been written by an infinitely
sensitive decapitated frog. It is "hemisphereless" poetry.


_4. The Poet and Other Men_

The mere physical vision of the poet may or may not be any keener than the
vision of other men. There is an infinite variety in the bodily endowments
of habitual verse-makers: there have been near-sighted poets like
Tennyson, far-sighted poets like Wordsworth, and, in the well-known
case of Robert Browning, a poet conveniently far-sighted in one eye and
near-sighted in the other! No doubt the life-long practice of observing
and recording natural phenomena sharpens the sense of poets, as it does
the senses of Indians, naturalists, sailors and all outdoors men. The
quick eye for costume and character possessed by a Chaucer or a Shakspere
is remarkable, but equally so is the observation of a Dickens or a Balzac.
It is rather in what we call psychical vision that the poet is wont to
excel, that is, in his ability to perceive the meaning of visual
phenomena. Here he ceases to be a mere reporter of retinal images, and
takes upon himself the higher and harder function of an interpreter of the
visible world. He has no immunity from the universal human experiences: he
loves and he is angry and he sees men born and die. He becomes according
to the measure of his intellectual capacity a thinker. He strives to see
into the human heart, to comprehend the working of the human mind. He
reads the divine justice in the tragic fall of Kings. He penetrates
beneath the external forms of Nature and perceives her as a "living
presence." Yet the faculty of vision which the poet possesses in so
eminent a degree is shared by many who are not poets. Darwin's outward eye
was as keen as Wordsworth's; St. Paul's sense of the reality of the
invisible world is more wonderful than Shakspere's. The poet is indeed
first of all a seer, but he must be something more than a seer before he
is wholly poet.

Another mark of the poetic mind is its vivid sense of relations. The part
suggests the whole. In the single instance there is a hint of the general
law. The self-same Power that brings the fresh rhodora to the woods brings
the poet there also. In the field-mouse, the daisy, the water-fowl, he
beholds types and symbols. His own experience stands for all men's. The
conscience-stricken Macbeth is a poet when he cries, "Life is a walking
shadow," and King Lear makes the same pathetic generalization when he
exclaims, "What, have his daughters brought him to this pass?" Through the
shifting phenomena of the present the poet feels the sweep of the
universe; his mimic play and "the great globe itself" are alike an
"insubstantial pageant," though it may happen, as Tennyson said of
Wordsworth, that even in the transient he gives the sense of the
abiding, "whose dwelling is the light of setting suns."

But this perception of relations, characteristic as it is of the poetic
temper, is also an attribute of the philosopher. The intellect of a
Newton, too, leaps from the specific instance to the general law; every
man, in proportion to his intelligence and insight, feels that the world
is one; while Plato and Descartes play with the time and space world with
all the grave sportiveness of Prospero.

Again, the poets have always been the "genus irritabile"--the irritable
tribe. They not only see deeply, but feel acutely. Often they are too
highly sensitized for their own happiness. If they receive a pleasure more
exquisite than ours from a flower, a glimpse of the sea, a gracious
action, they are correspondingly quick to feel dissonances, imperfections,
slights. Like Lamb, they are "rather squeamish about their women and
children." Like Keats, they are "snuffed out by an article." Keener
pleasures, keener pains, this is the law of their life; but it is
applicable to all persons of the so-called artistic temperament. It is one
of the penalties of a fine organism. It does not of itself describe a
poet.
[Footnote: I have here utilized a few paragraphs from my chapter on
"Poetry" in _Counsel upon the Reading of Books_, Houghton Mifflin
Company.]

The real difference between "the poet" and other men is rather to be
traced, as the present chapter has tried to indicate, in his capacity for
making and employing verbal images of a certain kind, and combining these
images into rhythmical and metrical designs. In each of his functions--as
"seer," as "maker," and as "singer"--he shows himself a true creator.
Criticism no longer attempts to act as his "law-giver," to assert what he
may or may not do. The poet is free, like every creative artist, to make a
beautiful object in any way he can. And nevertheless criticism--watching
countless poets lovingly for many a century, observing their various
endowments, their manifest endeavors, their victories and defeats,
observing likewise the nature of language, that strange medium (so much
stranger than any clay or bronze!) through which poets are compelled to
express their conceptions--criticism believes that poetry, like
each of the sister arts, has its natural province, its own field of the
beautiful. We have tried in this chapter to suggest the general direction
of that field, without looking too narrowly for its precise boundaries. In
W. H. Hudson's _Green Mansions_ the reader will remember how a few sticks
and stones, laid upon a hilltop, were used as markers to indicate the
outlines of a continent. Criticism, likewise, needs its poor sticks and
stones of commonplace, if it is to point out any roadway. Our own road
leads first into the difficult territory of the poet's imaginings, and
then into the more familiar world of the poet's words.



CHAPTER III

THE POET'S IMAGINATION

  "The essence of poetry is _invention_; such invention as, by producing
  something unexpected, surprises and delights."
    SAMUEL JOHNSON

  "The singers do not beget, only the Poet begets."
    WALT WHITMAN

We must not at the outset insist too strongly upon the radical
distinction between "the poet"--as we have called him for
convenience--and other men. The common sense of mankind asserts that this
distinction exists, yet it also asserts that all children are poets after
a certain fashion, and that the vast majority of adult persons are, at
some moment or other, susceptible to poetic feeling. A small girl, the
other day, spoke of a telegraph wire as "that message-vine." Her father
and mother smiled at this naive renaming of the world of fact. It was a
child's instinctive "poetizing" imagination, but the father and mother,
while no longer capable, perhaps, of such daring verbal magic, were
conscious that they had too often played with the world of fact, and, for
the instant at least, remoulded it into something nearer the heart's
desire. That is to say, they could still feel "poetically," though their
wonderful chance of making up new names for everything had gone as soon as
the gates were shut upon the Paradise of childhood.

All readers of poetry agree that it originates somehow in feeling, and
that if it be true poetry, it stimulates feeling in the hearer. And all
readers agree likewise that feeling is transmitted from the maker of
poetry to the enjoyer of poetry by means of the imagination. But the
moment we pass beyond these accepted truisms, difficulties begin.


_1. Feeling and Imagination_

What is feeling, and exactly how is it bound up with the imagination? The
psychology of feeling remains obscure, even after the labors of
generations of specialists; and it is obvious that the general theories
about the nature of imagination have shifted greatly, even within the
memory of living men. Nevertheless there are some facts, in this
constantly contested territory, which now seem indisputable. One of them,
and of peculiar significance to students of poetry, is this: in the stream
of objects immediately present to consciousness there are no images of
feeling itself.
[Footnote: This point has been elaborated with great care in Professor A.
H. R. Fairchild's _Making of Poetry_. Putnam's, 1912.]

"If I am asked to call up an image of a rose, of a tree, of a cloud, or of
a skylark, I can readily do it; but if I am asked to feel loneliness or
sorrow, to feel hatred or jealousy, or to feel joy on the return of
spring, I cannot readily do it. And the reason why I cannot do it is
because I can call up no image of any one of these feelings. For
everything I come to know through my senses, for everything in connection
with what I do or feel I can call up some kind of mental image; but for no
kind of feeling itself can I ever possibly have a direct image. The only
effective way of arousing any particular feeling that is more than mere
bodily feeling is to call up the images that are naturally connected with
that feeling."
[Footnote: Fairchild, pp. 24, 25.]

If then, "the raw material of poetry," as Professor Fairchild insists,
is "the mental image," we must try to see how these images are presented
to the mind of the poet and in turn communicated to us. Instead of
asserting, as our grandfathers did, that the imagination is a "faculty"
of the mind, like "judgment," or accepting the theory of our fathers that
imagination "is the whole mind thrown into the process of imagining," the
present generation has been taught by psychologists like Charcot, James
and Ribot that we are chiefly concerned with "imaginations," that is, a
series of visual, auditory, motor or tactile images flooding in upon the
mind, and that it is safer to talk about these "imaginations" than about
"the Imagination." Literary critics will continue to use this last
expression--as we are doing in the present chapter--because it is too
convenient to be given up. But they mean by it something fairly definite:
namely, the images swarming in the stream of consciousness, and their
integration into wholes that satisfy the human desire for beauty. It is
in its ultimate aim rather than in its immediate processes that the
"artistic" imagination differs from the inventor's or scientist's or
philosopher's imagination. We no longer assert, as did Stopford Brooke
some forty years ago, that "the highest scientific intellect is a joke
compared with the power displayed by a Shakespeare, a Homer, a Dante." We
are inclined rather to believe that in its highest exercise of power the
scientific mind is attempting much the same feat as the highest type of
poetic mind, and that in both cases it is a feat of imaginative energy.


_2. Creative and Artistic Imagination_

The reader who has hitherto allowed himself to think of a poet as a sort
of freak of nature, abnormal in the very constitution of his mind, and
achieving his results by methods so obscure that "inspiration" is our
helpless name for indicating them, cannot do better than master such a
book as Ribot's _Essay on the Creative Imagination_.
[Footnote: Th. Ribot, _Essai sur l'Imagination créatrice_. Paris, 1900.
English translation by Open Court Co., Chicago, 1906.]
This famous psychologist, starting with the conception that the raw
material for the creative imagination is images, and that its basis lies
in a motor impulse, examines first the emotional factor involved in every
act of the creative imagination. Then he passes to the unconscious factor,
the involuntary "coming" of the idea, that "moment of genius," as Buffon
called it, which often marks the end of an unconscious elaboration of the
idea or the beginning of conscious elaboration.
[Footnote: See the quotation from Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the
mathematician, in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter.]
Ribot points out that certain organic changes, as in blood circulation--
the familiar rush of blood to the head--accompany imaginative activity.
Then he discusses the inventor's and artist's "fixed idea," their "will
that it shall be so," "the motor tendency of images engendering the
ideal." Ribot's distinction between the animal's revival of images and the
true creative combination of images in the mental life of children and of
primitive man bears directly upon poetry, but even more suggestive to us
is his diagram of the successive stages by which inventions come into
being. There are two types of this process, and three stages of each: (A)
the "idea," the "discovery" or invention, and then the verification or
application; or else (B) the unconscious preparation, followed
by the "idea" or "inspiration," and then by the "development" or
construction. Whether a man is inventing a safety-pin or a sonnet, the
series of imaginative processes seems to be much the same. There is of
course a typical difference between the "plastic" imagination, dealing
with clear images, objective relations, and seen at its best in the arts
of form like sculpture and architecture, and that "diffluent" imagination
which prefers vaguely outlined images, which is markedly subjective and
emotional, and of which modern music like Debussy's is a good example. But
whatever may be the specific type of imagination involved, we find alike
in inventor, scientist and artist the same general sequence of "germ,
incubation, flowering and completion," and the same fundamental motor
impulse as the driving power.

Holding in mind these general characteristics of the creative imagination,
as traced by Ribot, let us now test our conception of the distinctively
artistic imagination. Countless are the attempts to define or describe it,
and it would be unwise for the student, at this point, to rest satisfied
with any single formulation of its functions. But it may be helpful to
quote a paragraph from Hartley B. Alexander's brilliant and subtle book,
_Poetry and the Individual_:
[Footnote: Putnam's, 1906.]

  "The energy of the mind or of the soul--for it welds all psychical
  activities--which is the agent of our world-winnings and the
  procreator of our growing life, we term imagination. It is
  distinguished from perception by its relative freedom from the
  dictation of sense; it is distinguished from memory by its power to
  acquire--memory only retains; it is distinguished from emotion in
  being a force rather than a motive; from the understanding in being
  an assimilator rather than the mere weigher of what is set before it;
  from the will, because the will is but the wielder of the reins--the
  will is but the charioteer, the imagination is the Pharaoh in
  command. It is distinguished from all these, yet it includes them
  all, for it is the full functioning of the whole mind and in the
  total activity drives all mental faculties to its one supreme
  end--the widening of the world wherein we dwell. Through beauty the
  world grows, and it is the business of the imagination to create the
  beautiful. The imagination synthesises, humanises, personalises,
  illumines reality with the soul's most intimate moods, and so exalts
  with spiritual understandings."

The value of such a description, presented without any context, will vary
with the training of the individual reader, but its quickening power will
be recognized even by those who are incapable of grasping all the
intellectual distinctions involved.


_3. Poetic Imagination in Particular_

We are now ready, after this consideration of the creative and artistic
imagination, to look more closely at some of the qualities of the poetic
imagination in particular. The specific formal features of that
imagination lie, as we have seen, in its use of verbal imagery, and in the
combination of verbal images into rhythmical patterns. But are there not
functions of the poet's mind preceding the formation of verbal images? The
psychology of language is still unsettled, and whether a man can think
without the use of words is often doubted. But a painter can certainly
"think" in terms of color, as an architect or mathematician can "think" in
terms of form and space, or a musician in terms of sound, without
employing verbal symbols at all. And are there not characteristic
activities of the poetic imagination which antedate the fixation and
expression of images in words? Apparently there are.

The reader will find, in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter, a
quotation from Mr. Lascelles-Abercrombie, in which he refers to the
"region where the outward radiations of man's nature combine with the
irradiations of the world." That is to say, the inward-sweeping stream of
consciousness is instantly met by an outward-moving activity of the brain
which recognizes relationships between the objects proffered to the senses
and the personality itself. The "I" projects itself into these objects,
claims them, appropriates them as a part of its own nature. Professor
Fairchild, who calls this self-projecting process by the somewhat
ambiguous name of "personalizing," rightly insists, I believe, that poets
make a more distinctive use of this activity than other men. He quotes
some of the classic confidences of poets themselves: Keats's "If a sparrow
come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the
gravel"; and Goethe on the sheep pictured by the artist Roos, "I always
feel uneasy when I look at these beasts. Their state, so limited, dull,
gaping, and dreaming, excites in me such sympathy that I fear I shall
become a sheep, and almost think the artist must have been one." I can
match this Goethe story with the prayer of little Larry H., son of an
eminent Harvard biologist. Larry, at the age of six, was taken by his
mother to the top of a Vermont hill-pasture, where, for the first time in
his life, he saw a herd of cows and was thrilled by their glorious bigness
and nearness and novelty. When he said his prayers that night, he was
enough of a poet to change his usual formula into this:

  "Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me,
  Bless thy little _cow_ to-night"--

_Larry being the cow._

  "There was a child went forth every day,"

records Walt Whitman,

  "And the first object he look'd upon that object
  he became."

Professor Fairchild quotes these lines from Whitman, and a few of the many
passages of the same purport from Coleridge and Wordsworth. They are all
summed up in Coleridge's heart-broken

  "Oh, Lady, we receive but what we give,
  And in our life alone does Nature live."

This "animism," or identifying imagination, by means of which the child or
the primitive man or the poet transfers his own life into the unorganic or
organic world, is one of the oldest and surest indications of poetic
faculty, and as far as we can see, it is antecedent to the use of verbal
images or symbols.

Another characteristic of the poetic temperament, allied with the
preceding, likewise seems to belong in the region where words are not as
yet emerging above the threshold of consciousness. I mean the strange
feeling, witnessed to by many poets, of the fluidity, fusibility,
transparency--the infinitely changing and interchangeable aspects--of the
world as it appears to the senses. It is evident that poets are not
looking--at least when in this mood--at our "logical" world of hard, clear
fact and law. They are gazing rather at what Whitman called "the eternal
float of solution," the "flowing of all things" of the Greeks, the
"river within the river" of Emerson. This tendency is peculiarly marked,
of course, in artists possessing the "diffluent" type of imagination, and
Romantic poets and critics have had much to say about it. The imagination,
said Wordsworth, "recoils from everything but the plastic, the pliant, the
indefinite."
[Footnote: Preface to 1815 edition of his _Poems_.]
"Shakespeare, too," says Carlye,
[Footnote: Essay on Goethe's Works.]
"does not look _at_ a thing, but into it, through it; so that he
constructively comprehends it, can take it asunder and put it together
again; _the thing melts as it were, into light under his eye, and anew
creates itself before him_. That is to say, he is a Poet. For Goethe, as
for Shakespeare, _the world lies all translucent, all fusible_ we might
call it, encircled with _Wonder_; the Natural in reality the Supernatural,
for to the seer's eyes both become one."

In his essay on Tieck Carlyle remarks again upon this characteristic of
the mind of the typical poet: "He is no mere observer and compiler;
rendering back to us, with additions or subtractions, the Beauty which
existing things have of themselves presented to him; but a true Maker, to
whom the actual and external is but the excitement for ideal creations
representing and ennobling its effects."

Coleridge's formula is briefer still; the imagination "dissolves,
diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create."
[Footnote: _Biographia Literaria_.]

Such passages help us to understand the mystical moments which many poets
have recorded, in which their feeling of "diffusion" has led them to doubt
the existence of the external world. Wordsworth grasping "at a wall or
tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality," and
Tennyson's "weird seizures" which he transferred from his own experience
to his imaginary Prince in _The Princess_, are familiar examples of this
type of mysticism. But the sense of the infinite fusibility and change in
the objective world is deeper than that revealed in any one type of
diffluent imagination. It is a profound characteristic of the poetic
mind as such. Yet it should be remembered that the philosopher and
the scientist likewise assert that ours is a vital, ever-flowing,
onward-urging world, in the process of "becoming" rather than merely
"being." "We are far from the noon of man" sang Tennyson, in a
late-Victorian and evolutionary version of St. John's "It doth not
yet appear what we shall be." "The primary imagination," asserted
Coleridge, "is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of
creation in the infinite _I am_."
[Footnote: _Biographia Literaria_, chap. 13.]
Here, evidently, unless the "God-intoxicated" Coleridge is talking
nonsense, we are in the presence of powers that do not need as yet any use
of verbal symbols.


_4. Verbal Images_

The plasticity of the world as it appears to the mind of the poet is
clearly evidenced by the swarm of images which present themselves to the
poet's consciousness. In the re-presentation of these pictures to us the
poet is forced, of course, to use verbal images. The precise point at
which he becomes conscious of employing words no doubt varies with the
individual, and depends upon the relative balance of auditory, visual or
tactile images in his mind. Swinburne often impresses us as working
primarily with the "stuff" of word-sounds, as Browning with the stuff of
sharp-cut tactile or motor images, and Victor Hugo with the stuff of
visual impressions. But in each case the poet's sole medium of _expression
to us_ is through verbal symbols, and it is hard to get behind these into
the real workshop of the brain where each poet is busily minting his own
peculiar raw material into the current coin of human speech.

Nevertheless, many poets have been sufficiently conscious of what is going
on within their workshop to tell us something about it. Professor
Fairchild has made an interesting collection
[Footnote: _The Making of Poetry_, pp. 78, 79.]
of testimony relating to the tumultuous crowding of images, each
clamoring, as it were, for recognition and crying "take me!" He instances,
as other critics have done, the extraordinary succession of images by
which Shelley strives to portray the spirit of the skylark. The similes
actually chosen by Shelley seem to have been merely the lucky candidates
selected from an infinitely greater number. In Francis Thompson's
captivating description of Shelley as a glorious child the reader is
conscious of the same initial rush of images, although the medium of
expression here is heightened prose instead of verse:
[Footnote: _Dublin Review_, July, 1908.]

  "Coming to Shelley's poetry, we peep over the wild mask of
  revolutionary metaphysics, and we see the winsome face of the child.
  Perhaps none of his poems is more purely and typically Shelleian than
  The Cloud, and it is interesting to note how essentially it springs
  from the faculty of make-believe. The same thing is conspicuous,
  though less purely conspicuous, throughout his singing; it is the
  child's faculty of make-believe raised to the nth power. He is still
  at play, save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch,
  and his playthings are those which the gods give their children. The
  universe is his box of toys. He dabbles his fingers in the day-fall.
  He is gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars. He makes bright
  mischief with the moon. The meteors nuzzle their noses in his hand.
  He teases into growling the kennelled thunder, and laughs at the
  shaking of its fiery chain. He dances in and out of the gates of
  heaven: its floor is littered with his broken fancies. He runs wild
  over the fields of ether. He chases the rolling world. He gets
  between the feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of
  patient Nature, and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred
  wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his song."


_5. The Selection and Control of Images_

It is easier, no doubt, to realize something of the swarming of images in
the stream of consciousness than it is to understand how these images are
selected, combined and controlled. Some principle of association, some law
governing the synthesis, there must be; and English criticism has long
treasured some of the clairvoyant words of Coleridge and Wordsworth upon
this matter. The essential problem is suggested by Wordsworth's phrase
"the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement." Is the
"excitement," then, the chief factor in the selection and combination of
images, and do the "feelings," as if with delicate tentacles,
instinctively choose and reject and integrate such images as blend with
the poet's mood?

Coleridge, with his subtle builder's instinct, uses his favorite word
"synthesis" not merely as applied to images as such, but to all the
faculties of the soul:

"The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man
into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other
according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and a
spirit of unity, that blends, and as it were fuses, each into each, by
that synthetic and magical power to which I would exclusively appropriate
the name of Imagination." "Synthetic and magical power," indeed, with a
Coleridge as Master of the Mysteries! But the perplexed student of poetry
may well wish a more exact description of what really takes place.

An American critic, after much searching in recent psychological
explanations of artistic creation, attempts to describe the genesis of a
poem in these words:
[Footnote: Lewis E. Gates, _Studies and Appreciations_, p. 215. Macmillan,
1900.]

  "The poet concentrates his thought on some concrete piece of life, on
  some incident, character, or bit of personal experience; because of
  his emotional temperament, this concentration of interest stirs in
  him a quick play of feeling and prompts the swift concurrence of many
  images. Under the incitement of these feelings, and in accordance
  with laws of association that may at least in part be described,
  these images grow bright and clear, take definite shapes, fall into
  significant groupings, branch and ramify, and break into sparkling
  mimicry of the actual world of the senses--all the time delicately
  controlled by the poet's conscious purpose and so growing
  intellectually significant, but all the time, if the work of art is
  to be vital, impelled also in their alert weaving of patterns by the
  moods of the poet, by his fine instinctive sense of the emotional
  expressiveness of this or that image that lurks in the background of
  his consciousness. For this intricate web of images, tinged with his
  most intimate moods, the poet through his intuitive command of words
  finds an apt series of sound-symbols and records them with written
  characters. And so a poem arises through an exquisite distillation of
  personal moods into imagery and into language, and is ready to offer
  to all future generations its undiminishing store of spiritual joy
  and strength."

A better description than this we are not likely to find, although some
critics would question the phrase, "all the time delicately controlled by
the poet's conscious purpose."
[Footnote: "Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according
to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose
poetry.'. . . It is not subject to the control of the active powers of the
mind. ... Its birth and recurrence have no necessary connection with the
consciousness or will." Shelley, _A Defense of Poetry_.]

For sometimes, assuredly, the synthesis of images seems to take place
without the volition of the poet. The hypnotic trance, the narcotic dream
or revery, and even our experience of ordinary dreams, provide abundant
examples. One dreams, for instance, of a tidal river, flowing in with a
gentle full current which bends in one direction all the water-weeds and
the long grasses trailing from the banks; then somehow the tide seems to
change, and all the water and the weeds and grasses, even the fishes in
the stream, turn slowly and flow out to sea. The current synthesizes,
harmonizes, moves onward like music,--and we are aware that it is all a
dream. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," composed in a deep opium slumber, moves
like that, one train of images melting into another like the interwoven
figures of a dance led by the "damsel with a dulcimer." There is no
"conscious purpose" whatever, and no "meaning" in the ordinary
interpretation of that word. Nevertheless it is perfect integration of
imagery, pure beauty to the senses. Something of this rapture in the sheer
release of control must have been in Charles Lamb's mind when he wrote to
Coleridge about the "pure happiness"  of being insane. "Dream not,
Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till
you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively so." (June 10,
1796.)

If "Kubla Khan" represents one extreme, Poe's account of how he wrote "The
Raven"
[Footnote: _The Philosophy of Composition_.]
--incredible as the story appears to most of us--may serve to illustrate
the other, namely, a cool, conscious, workmanlike control of every element
in the selection and combination of imagery. Wordsworth's naive
explanation of the task performed by the imagination in his "Cuckoo" and
"Leech-Gatherer"
[Footnote: Preface to poems of 1815-1845.]
occupies a middle ground. We are at least certain of his entire
honesty--and incidentally of his total lack of humor!

  "'Shall I call thee Bird,
  Or but a wandering Voice?'

"This concise interrogation characterizes the seeming ubiquity of the
voice of the cuckoo, and dispossesses the creature almost of a corporeal
existence; the Imagination being tempted to this exertion of her power by
a consciousness in the memory that the cuckoo is almost perpetually heard
throughout the season of spring, but seldom becomes an object of sight....

  "'As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
  Couched on the bald top of an eminence,
  Wonder to all who do the same espy
  By what means it could thither come, and whence,
  So that it seems a thing endued with sense,
  Like a sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf
  Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun himself.

  Such seemed this Man; not all alive or dead.
  Nor all asleep, in his extreme old age.
       *       *       *       *       *
  Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood,
  That heareth not the loud winds when they call,
  And moveth altogether if it move at all.'

"In these images, the conferring, the abstracting, and the modifying
powers of the Imagination, immediately and mediately acting, are all
brought into conjunction. The stone is endowed with something of the power
of life to approximate it to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast stripped of
some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone; which
intermediate image is thus treated for the purpose of bringing the
original image, that of the stone, to a nearer resemblance to the figure
and condition of the aged man; who is divested of so much of the
indications of life and motion as to bring him to the point
where the two objects unite and coalesce in just comparison."

Wordsworth's analysis of the processes of his own imagination, like Poe's
story of the composition of "The Raven," is an analysis made after the
imagination had functioned. There can be no absolute proof of its
correctness in every detail. It is evident that we have to deal with an
infinite variety of normal and abnormal minds. Some of these defy
classification; others fall into easily recognized types, such as "the
lunatic, the lover and the poet," as sketched by Theseus, Duke of Athens.
How modern, after all, is the Duke's little lecture on the psychology of
imagination!

  "The lunatic, the lover and the poet
  Are of imagination all compact;
  One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
  That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
  Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
  The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
  Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
  And as imagination bodies forth
  The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
  Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
  A local habitation and a name.
  Such tricks hath strong imagination,
  That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
  It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
  Or in the night, imagining some fear,
  How easy is a bush supposed a bear!"
[Footnote: _Midsummer Night's Dream_, v, i, 7-22.]

Shakspere, it will be observed, does not hesitate to use that dangerous
term "the poet!" Yet as students of poetry we must constantly bring
ourselves back to the recorded experience of individual men, and from
these make our comparisons and generalizations. It may even happen that
some readers will get a clearer conception of the selection and synthesis
of images if they turn for the moment away from poetry and endeavor to
realize something of the same processes as they take place in imaginative
prose. In Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_, for example, the dominant image,
which becomes the symbol of his entire theme, is the piece of scarlet
cloth which originally caught his attention. This physical object
becomes, after long brooding, subtly changed into a moral symbol of sin
and its concealment. It permeates the book, it is borne openly upon the
breast of one sufferer, it is written terribly in the flesh of another, it
flames at last in the very sky. All the lesser images and symbols of the
romance are mastered by it, subordinated to it; it becomes the dominant
note in the composition. The romance of _The Scarlet Letter_ is, as we say
of any great poem or drama, an "ideal synthesis"; i.e. a putting together
of images in accordance with some central idea. The more significant the
idea or theme or master image, the richer and fuller are the possibilities
of beauty in detail. Apply this familiar law of complexity to a poet's
conscious or unconscious choice of images. In the essay which we have
already quoted
[Footnote: _Studies and Appreciations_, p. 216.]
Lewis Gates remarks:

"In every artist there is a definite mental bias, a definite spiritual
organization and play of instincts, which results in large measure from
the common life of his day and generation, and which represents this
life--makes it potent--within the individuality of the artist. This
so-called 'acquired constitution of the life of the soul'--it has been
described by Professor Dilthey with noteworthy acuteness and
thoroughness--determines in some measure the contents of the artist's
mind, for it determines his interests, and therefore the sensations and
perceptions that he captures and automatically stores up. It guides him in
his judgments of worth, in his instinctive likes and dislikes as regards
conduct and character, and controls in large measure the play of his
imagination as he shapes the action of his drama or epic and the destinies
of his heroes. Its prejudices interfiltrate throughout the molecules of
his entire moral and mental life, and give to each image and idea some
slight shade of attractiveness or repulsiveness, so that when the artist's
spirit is at work under the stress of feeling, weaving into the fabric of
a poem the competing images and ideas in his consciousness, certain ideas
and images come more readily and others lag behind, and the resulting work
of art gets a colour and an emotional tone and suggestions of value that
subtly reflect the genius of the age."


_6. "Imagist" Verse_

Such a conception of the association of images as reflecting not only this
"acquired constitution of the soul" of the poet but also the genius of the
age is in marked contrast to some of the theories held by contemporary
"imagists." As we have already noted, in Chapter II, they stress the
individual reaction to phenomena, at some tense moment. They discard, as
far as possible, the long "loop-line" of previous experience. As for
diction, they have, like all true artists, a horror of the _cliché_--the
rubber-stamp word, blurred by use. As for rhythm, they fear any
conventionality of pattern. In subsequent chapters we must look more
closely at these matters of diction and of rhythm, but they are both
involved in any statement of the principles of Imagist verse. Richard
Aldington sums up his article on "The Imagists"
[Footnote: "Greenwich Village," July 15, 1915.]
in these words:

"Let me resume the cardinal points of the Imagist style:
1. Direct treatment of the subject. 2. A hardness and economy of speech.
3. Individuality of rhythm; vers libre. 4. The exact word. The Imagists
would like to possess 'le mot qui fait image, l'adjectif inattendu et
précis qui dessine de pied en cap et donne la senteur de la chose qu'il
est chargé de rendre, la touche juste, la couleur qui chatoie et vibre.'"

In the preface to _Imagist Poets_ (1915), and in Miss Amy Lowell's
_Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_ (1917) the tenets of imagism are
stated briefly and clearly. Imagism, we are told, aims to use always the
language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the
nearly-exact nor the merely decorative word; to create new rhythms--as the
expression of new moods--and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo
old moods; to allow absolute freedom in the choice of a subject; to
present an image, rendering particulars exactly; to produce poetry that is
hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite; to secure condensation.

It will be observed that in the special sort of picture-making which
Imagist poetry achieves, the question of free verse is merely incidental.
"We fight for it as a principle of liberty," says Miss Lowell, but she
does not insist upon it as the only method of writing poetry. Mr.
Aldington admits frankly that about forty per cent of _vers libre_ is
prose. Mr. Lowes, as we have already remarked, has printed dozens of
passages from Meredith's novels in the typographical arrangement of free
verse so as to emphasize their "imagist" character. One of the most
effective is this:

  "He was like a Tartar
  Modelled by a Greek:
  Supple
  As the Scythian's bow,
  Braced
  As the string!"

Suppose, however, that we agree to defer for the moment the vexed question
as to whether images of this kind are to be considered prose or verse.
Examine simply for their vivid picture-making quality the collections
entitled _Imagist Poets_ (1915,1916,1917), or, in the _Anthology of
Magazine Verse_ for 1915, such poems as J. G. Fletcher's "Green Symphony"
or "H. D.'s" "Sea-Iris" or Miss Lowell's "The Fruit Shop." Read Miss
Lowell's extraordinarily brilliant volume _Men, Women and Ghosts_ (1916),
particularly the series of poems entitled "Towns in Colour." Then read the
author's preface, in which her artistic purpose in writing "Towns in
Colour" is set forth: "In these poems, I have endeavoured to give the
colour, and light, and shade, of certain places and hours, stressing _the
purely pictorial effect_, and with little or no reference to any other
aspect of the places described. It is an enchanting thing to wander
through a city looking for its _unrelated beauty_, the beauty by which it
captivates the sensuous sense of seeing." [Footnote: Italics mine.]

Nothing could be more gallantly frank than the phrase "unrelated beauty."
For it serves as a touchstone to distinguish between those imagist poems
which leave us satisfied and those which do not. Sometimes, assuredly, the
insulated, unrelated beauty is enough. What delicate reticence there is in
Richard Aldington's "Summer":

  "A butterfly,
  Black and scarlet,
  Spotted with white,
  Fans its wings
  Over a privet flower.

  "A thousand crimson foxgloves,
  Tall bloody pikes,
  Stand motionless in the gravel quarry;
  The wind runs over them.

  "A rose film over a pale sky
  Fantastically cut by dark chimneys;
  Across an old city garden."

The imagination asks no more.

Now read my friend Baker Brownell's "Sunday Afternoon":

  "The wind pushes huge bundles
  Of itself in warm motion
  Through the barrack windows;
  It rattles a sheet of flypaper
  Tacked in a smear of sunshine on the sill.
  A voice and other voices squirt
  A slow path among the room's tumbled sounds.
  A ukelele somewhere clanks
  In accidental jets
  Up from the room's background."

Here the stark truthfulness of the images does not prevent an instinctive
"Well, what of it?" "And afterward, what else?" Unless we adopt the
Japanese theory of "stop poems," where the implied continuation of the
mood, the suggested application of the symbol or allegory, is the sole
justification of the actual words given, a great deal of imagist verse, in
my opinion, serves merely to sharpen the senses without utilizing the full
imaginative powers of the mind. The making of images is an essential
portion of the poet's task, but in memorably great poetry it is only a
detail in a  larger whole. Miss Lowell's "Patterns" is one of the most
effective of contemporary poems, but it is far more than a document of
imagism. It is a triumph of structural imagination.


_7. Genius and Inspiration_

Whatever may be the value, for students, of trying to analyse the
image-making and image-combining faculty, every one admits that it is a
necessary element in the production of poetry. Let Coleridge have the
final statement of this mystery of his art: "The power of reducing
multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some
one predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but
can never be learnt. It is in this that _Poeta nascitur non fit_." We
cannot avoid the difficulties of the question by attributing the poet's
imagination to "genius." Whether genius is a neurosis, as some think, or
whether it is sanity at perfection, makes little difference here.
Both a Poe and a Sophocles are equally capable of producing ideal
syntheses. Nor does the old word "inspiration" help much either.
Whatever we mean by inspiration--a something not ourselves, supernatural
or sub-liminal--a "vision" of Blake, the "voices" of Joan of Arc, the
"god" that moved within the Corybantian revelers--it is an excitement of
the image-making faculty, and not that faculty itself. Disordered "genius"
and inspiration undisciplined by reason are alike powerless to produce
images that permanently satisfy the sense of beauty. Tolstoy's common-
sense remark is surely sound: "One's writing is good only where the
intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of
them over-balances the other, it's all up."
[Footnote: Compare W. A. Neilson's chapter on "The Balance of Qualities"
in _Essentials of Poetry_. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912.]


_8. A Summary_

Let us now endeavor to summarize this testimony which we have taken
from poets and critics. Though they do not agree in all details, and
though they often use words that are either too vague or too highly
specialized, the general drift of the testimony is fairly clear. Poets
and critics agree that the imagination is something different from the
mere memory-image; that by a process of selection and combination and
re-presentation of images something really new comes into being, and that
we are therefore justified in using the term _constructive_, or _creative_
imagination. This imagination embodies, as we say, or "bodies forth," as
Duke Theseus said, "the forms of things unknown." It ultimately becomes
the poet's task to "shape" these forms with his "pen," that is to say, to
suggest them through word-symbols, arranged in a certain fashion. The
selection of these word-symbols will be discussed in Chapter IV, and their
rhythmical arrangement in Chapter V. But we have tried in the present
chapter to trace the functioning of the poetic imagination in those stages
of its activity which precede the definite shaping of poems with the pen.
If we say, with Professor Fairchild,
[Footnote: _Making of Poetry_, p. 34.]
that "the central processes or kinds of activity involved in the making of
poetry are three: personalizing, combining and versifying," it is obvious
that we have been dealing with the first two. If we prefer to use the
famous terms employed by Ruskin in _Modern Painters_, we have been
considering the penetrative, associative and contemplative types of
imagination. But these Ruskinian names, however brilliantly and
suggestively employed by the master, are dangerous tools for the beginner
in the study of poetry.

If the beginner desires to review, at this point, the chief matters
brought to his attention in the present chapter, he may make a real test
of their validity by opening his senses to the imagery of a few lines of
poetry. Remember that poets are endeavoring to convey the "sense" of
things rather than the knowledge of things. Disregard for the moment the
precise words employed in the following lines, and concentrate the
attention upon the images, as if the image were not made of words at all,
but were mere naked sense-stimulus.

In this line the poet is trying to make us _see_ something ("visual"
image):

  "The bride hath paced into the hall,
  _Red as a rose_ is she."

Can you see her?

In these lines the poet is trying to make us _hear_ something ("auditory"
image):

  "A _noise like of a hidden brook_
  In the leafy month of June
  That to the _sleeping woods all night
  Singeth a quiet tune_."

Do you hear the tune? Do you hear it as clearly as you can hear

  "_The tambourines
  Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of Queens_"?

In these lines the poet is trying to make us feel certain bodily
sensations ("tactile" image):

  "I closed my lids and kept them close,
  _And the balls like pulses beat_;
  For the sky and the sea and the sea and the sky,
  _Lay like a load on my weary eye_,
  And the dead were at my feet."

Do your eyes feel that pressure?

You are sitting quite motionless in your chair as you read these lines
("motor" image):

  "I _sprang_ to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
  I _galloped_, Dirck _galloped_, we _galloped_ all three!"

Are you instantly on horseback? If you are, the poet has put you there by
conveying from his mind to yours, through the use of verbal imagery and
rhythm, his "sense" of riding, which has now become _your_ sense of
riding.

If the reader can meet this test of realizing simple images through his
own body-and-mind reaction to their stimulus, the door of poetry is open
to him. He can enter into its limitless enjoyments. If he wishes to
analyse more closely the nature of the pleasure which poetry affords, he
may select any lines he happens to like, and ask himself how the various
functions of the imagination are illustrated by them. Suppose the lines
are Coleridge's description of the bridal procession, already quoted in
part:

  "The bride hath paced into the hall,
   Red as a rose is she;
   Nodding their heads before her goes
   The merry minstrelsy."

Here surely is imagination penetrative; the selection of some one
characteristic trait of the object; that trait (the "redness" or the
"nodding") re-presented to us, and emphasized by conferring, modifying or
abstracting whatever elements the poet wishes to stress or to suppress.
The result is a combination of imagery which forms an idealized picture,
presenting the shows of things as the mind would like to see them and thus
satisfying our sense of beauty. For there is no question that the mind
takes a supreme satisfaction in such an idealization of reality as
Coleridge's picture of the swift tropical sunset,

  "At one stride comes the dark,"

or Emerson's picture of the slow New England sunrise,

  "O tenderly the haughty day
  Fills his blue urn with fire."

Little has been said about beauty in this chapter, but no one doubts that
a sense of beauty guides the "shaping spirit of imagination" in that dim
region through which the poet feels his way before he comes to the
conscious choice of expressive words and to the ordering of those words
into beautiful rhythmical designs.



CHAPTER IV


THE POET'S WORDS

  "Words are sensible signs necessary for communication."
    JOHN LOCKE, _Human Understanding_, 3, 2, 1.

  "As conceptions are the images of things to the mind within itself, so
  are words or names the marks of those conceptions to the minds of them
  we converse with."
    SOUTH, quoted in Johnson's _Dictionary_.

  "Word: a sound, or combination of sounds, used in any language as the
  sign of a conception, or of a conception together with its grammatical
  relations.... A word is a spoken sign that has arrived at its value as
  used in any language by a series of historical changes, and that holds
  its value by virtue of usage, being exposed to such further changes, of
  form and of meaning, as usage may prescribe...."
    _Century Dictionary_.

  "A word is not a crystal--transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a
  living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to
  the circumstances and the time in which it is used."
    Justice OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, _Towne vs. Eisner_.

  "I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of
  prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order;--poetry =
  the _best_ words in the best order."
    COLERIDGE, _Table Talk_.


_1. The Eye and the Ear_

"Literary" language is commonly distinguished from the language of
ordinary life by certain heightenings or suppressions. The novelist or
essayist, let us say, fashions his language more or less in accordance
with his own mood, with his immediate aim in writing, with the capacity of
his expected readers. He is discoursing with a certain real or imaginary
audience. He may put himself on paper, as Montaigne said, as if he were
talking to the first man he happens to meet; or he may choose to address
himself to the few chosen spirits of his generation and of succeeding
generations. He trusts the arbitrary written or printed symbols of
word-sounds to carry his thoughts safely into the minds of other men.
The "literary" user of language in modern times comes to depend upon
the written or printed page; he tends to become more or less "eye-minded";
whereas the typical orator remains "ear-minded"--i.e. peculiarly sensitive
to a series of sounds, and composing for the ear of listeners rather than
for the eye of readers.

Now as compared with the typical novelist, the poet is surely, like the
orator, "ear-minded." Tonal symbols of ideas and emotions, rather than
visual symbols of ideas and emotions, are the primary stuff with which he
is working, although as soon as the advancing civilization of his race
brings an end to the primitive reciting of poetry and its transmission
through oral repetition alone, it is obvious that he must depend, like
other literary artists, or like the modern musicians, upon the written or
printed signs for the sounds which he has composed. But so stubborn are
the habits of our eyes that we tend always to confuse the look of the
poet's words upon the printed page with the sound of those words as they
are perceived by the ear. We are seldom guilty of this confusion in the
case of the musician. His "music" is not identified with the arbitrary
black marks which make up his printed score. For most of us there is
no music until those marks are actually translated into terms of tone--
although it is true that the trained reader of music can easily translate
to his inner ear without any audible rendering of the indicated sounds.

This distinction is essential to the understanding of poetry. A poem is
not primarily a series of printed word-signs addressed to the eye; it is a
series of sounds addressed to the ear, and the arbitrary symbols for these
sounds do not convey the poem unless they are audibly rendered--except to
those readers who, like the skilled readers of printed music, can
instantly hear the indicated sounds without any actual rendition of them
into physical tone. Many professed lovers of poetry have no real ear for
it. They are hopelessly "eye-minded." They try to decide questions of
metre and stanza, of free verse and of emotionally patterned prose by the
appearance of the printed page instead of by the nerves of hearing. Poets
like Mr. Vachel Lindsay--who recites or chants his own verses after the
manner of the primitive bard--have rendered a true service by leading
us away from the confusions wrought by typography, and back to that sheer
delight in rhythmic oral utterance in which poetry originates.


_2. How Words convey Feeling_

For it must never be forgotten that poetry begins in excitement, in some
body-and-mind experience; that it is capable, through its rhythmic
utterance of words which suggest this experience, of transmitting emotion
to the hearer; and that the nature of language allows the emotion to be
embodied in more or less permanent form. Let us look more closely at some
of the questions involved in the origin, the transmission and embodiment
of poetic feeling, remembering that we are now trying to trace these
processes in so far as they are revealed by the poet's use of words.
Rhythm will be discussed in the next chapter.

We have already noted that there are no mental images of feeling itself.
The images recognized by the consciousness of poets are those of
experiences and objects associated with feeling. The words employed to
revive and transmit these images are usually described as "concrete" or
"sensuous" in distinction from abstract or purely conceptual. They are
"experiential" words, arising out of bodily or spiritual contact with
objects or ideas that have been personalized, colored with individual
feeling. Such words have a "fringe," as psychologists say. They are rich
in overtones of meaning; not bare, like words addressed to the sheer
intelligence, but covered with veils of association, with tokens of past
experience. They are like ships laden with cargoes, although the cargo
varies with the texture and the history of each mind. It is probable that
this very word "ship," just now employed, calls up as many different
mental images as there are readers of this page. Brander Matthews has
recorded a curious divergence of imagery aroused by the familiar word
"forest." Half a dozen well-known men of letters, chatting together in a
London club, tried to tell one another what "forest" suggested to each:

  "Until that evening I had never thought of forest as clothing itself
  in different colors and taking on different forms in the eyes of
  different men; but I then discovered that even the most innocent
  word may don strange disguises. To Hardy forest suggested the sturdy
  oaks to be assaulted by the woodlanders of Wessex; and to Du Maurier
  it evoked the trim and tidy avenues of the national domain of France.
  To Black the word naturally brought to mind the low scrub of the
  so-called deer-forests of Scotland; and to Gosse it summoned up a
  view of the green-clad mountains that towered up from the
  Scandinavian fiords. To Howells forest recalled the thick woods that
  in his youth fringed the rivers of Ohio; and to me there came back
  swiftly the memory of the wild growths, bristling unrestrained by
  man, in the Chippewa Reservation which I had crossed fourteen years
  before in my canoe trip from Lake Superior to the Mississippi. Simple
  as the word seemed, it was interpreted by each of us in accord with
  his previous personal experience. And these divergent experiences
  exchanged that evening brought home to me as never before the
  inherent and inevitable inadequacy of the vocabulary of every
  language, since there must always be two partners in any communication
  by means of words, and the verbal currency passing from one to the other
  has no fixed value necessarily the same to both of them."
[Footnote: Brander Matthews, _These Many Years_. Scribner's, New York,
1917.]

But one need not journey to London town in order to test this matter. Let
half a dozen healthy young Americans stop before the window of a shop
where sporting goods are exhibited. Here are fishing-rods, tennis
racquets, riding-whips, golf-balls, running-shoes, baseball bats,
footballs, oars, paddles, snow-shoes, goggles for motorists, Indian clubs
and rifles. Each of these physical objects focuses the attention of the
observer in more or less exact proportion to his interest in the
particular sport suggested by the implement. If he is a passionate tennis
player, a thousand motor-tactile memories are stirred by the sight of the
racquet. He is already balancing it in his fingers, playing his favorite
strokes with it, winning tournaments with it--though he seems to be
standing quietly in front of the window. The man next him is already
snowshoeing over the frozen hills. But if a man has never played lacrosse,
or been on horseback, or mastered a canoe, the lacrosse racquet or
riding-whip or paddle mean little to him emotionally, except that they may
stir his imaginative curiosity about a sport whose pleasures he has never
experienced. His eye is likely to pass them over as indifferently as if he
were glancing at the window of a druggist or a grocer. These varying
responses of the individual to the visual stimulus of this or that
physical object in a heterogeneous collection may serve to illustrate his
capacity for feeling. Our chance group before the shop window thus becomes
a symbol of all human minds as they confront the actual visible universe.
They hunger and thirst for this or that particular thing, while another
object leaves them cold.

Now suppose that our half-dozen young men are sitting in the dark,
talking--evoking body-and-mind memories by means of words alone. No two
can possibly have the same memories, the same series of mental pictures.
Not even the most vivid and picturesque word chosen by the best talker of
the company has the same meaning for them all. They all understand the
word, approximately, but each _feels_ it in a way unexperienced by his
friend. The freightage of significance carried by each concrete, sensuous,
picture-making word is bound to vary according to the entire physical and
mental history of the man who hears it. Even the commonest and most
universal words for things and sensations--such as "hand," "foot," "dark,"
"fear," "fire," "warm," "home"--are suffused with personal emotions,
faintly or clearly felt; they have been or are _my_ hand, foot, fear,
darkness, warmth, happiness. Now the poet is like a man talking or singing
in the dark to a circle of friends. He cannot say to them "See this" or
"Feel that" in the literal sense of "see" and "feel"; he can only call up
by means of words and tunes what his friends have seen and felt already,
and then under the excitement of such memories suggest new combinations,
new weavings of the infinitely varied web of human experience, new voyages
with fresh sails upon seas untried.

It is true that we may picture the poet as singing or talking to himself
in solitude and darkness, obeying primarily the impulse of expression
rather than of communication. Hence John Stuart Mill's distinction between
the orator and the poet: "Eloquence is _heard_; poetry is _over_heard.
Eloquence supposes an audience. The peculiarity of poetry appears to us to
lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling
confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself
in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling
in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet's mind."
[Footnote: J. S. Mill, "Thoughts on Poetry," in _Dissertations_, vol. 1.
See also F. N. Scott, "The Most Fundamental Differentia of Poetry and
Prose." Published by Modern Language Association, 19, 2.]
But whether his primary aim be the relief of his own feelings (for a man
swears even when he is alone!) or the communication of his feelings to
other persons, it remains true that a poet's language betrays his bodily
and mental history. "The poet," said Thoreau, "writes the history of his
own body."

For example, a study of Browning's vocabulary made by Professor C. H.
Herford
[Footnote: _Robert Browning_, Modern English Writers, pp. 244-66.
Blackwood & Sons. 1905.]
emphasizes that poet's acute tactual and muscular sensibilities, his quick
and eager apprehension of space-relations:

  "He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing color, of
  dazzling light; in the more complex _motory_-stimulus of intricate,
  abrupt and plastic form.... He delighted in the angular, indented,
  intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call
  for the most delicate, and at the same time most agile, adjustments
  of the eye. He caught at the edges of things.... _Spikes_ and
  _wedges_ and _swords_ run riot in his work.... He loved the grinding,
  clashing and rending sibilants and explosives as Tennyson the
  tender-hefted liquids.... He is the poet of sudden surprises,
  unforseen transformations.... The simple joy in abrupt changes of
  sensation which belonged to his riotous energy of nerve lent support
  to his peremptory way of imagining all change and especially all
  vital and significant becoming."

The same truth is apparent as we pass from the individual poet to the
poetic literature of his race. Here too is the stamp of bodily history.
Hebrew poetry, as is well known, is always expressing emotion in terms of
bodily sensation.

  "_Anger_," says Renan,
  [Footnote: Quoted by J. H. Gardiner, _The Bible as Literature_, p.
  114.]
  "is expressed in Hebrew in a throng of ways, each picturesque, and
  each borrowed from physiological facts. Now the metaphor is taken
  from the rapid and animated breathing which accompanies the passion,
  now from heat or from boiling, now from the act of a noisy breaking,
  now from shivering. _Discouragement_ and _despair_ are expressed by
  the melting of the heart, _fear_ by the loosening of the reins.
  _Pride_ is portrayed by the holding high of the head, with the figure
  straight and stiff. _Patience_ is a long breathing, _impatience_
  short breathing, _desire_ is thirst or paleness. Pardon is expressed
  by a throng of metaphors borrowed from the idea of covering, of
  hiding, of coating over the fault. In _Job_ God sews up sins in a
  sack, seals it, then throws it behind him: all to signify that he
  forgets them....

  "My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord; my
  heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God.

  "Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul.

  "I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep
  waters, where the floods overflow me.

  "I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I
  wait for my God."

Greek poetry, likewise, is made out of "warm, swift, vibrating" words,
thrilling with bodily sensation. Gilbert Murray
[Footnote: "What English Poetry may Learn from Greek," _Atlantic Monthly_,
November, 1912.]
has described the weaving of these beautiful single words into patterns:

  "The whole essence of lyric is rhythm. It is the weaving of words
  into a song-pattern, so that the mere arrangement of the syllables
  produces a kind of dancing joy.... Greek lyric is derived directly
  from the religious dance; that is, not merely the pattering of the
  feet, _but the yearning movement of the whole body_, the ultimate
  expression of emotion that cannot be pressed into articulate speech,
  compact of intense rhythm and intense feeling."

Nor should it be forgotten that Milton, while praising "a graceful and
ornate rhetoric," declares that poetry, compared with this, is "more
simple, sensuous and passionate."
[Footnote: _Tract on Education._ ]
These words "sensuous" and "passionate," dulled as they have become by
repetition, should be interpreted in their full literal sense. While
language is unquestionably a social device for the exchange of ideas and
feelings, it is also true that poetic diction is a revelation of
individual experience, of body-and-mind contacts with reality. Every poet
is still an Adam in the Garden, inventing new names as fast as the new
wonderful Beasts---so terrible, so delightful!--come marching by.


_3. Words as Current Coin_

But the poet's words, stamped and colored as they are by unique individual
experience, must also have a general _transmission value_ which renders
them current coin. If words were merely representations of private
experience, merely our own nicknames for things, they would not pass the
walls of the Garden inhabited by each man's imagination. "Expression"
would be possible, but "communication" would be impossible, and indeed
there would be no recognizable terms of expression except the "bow-wow" or
"pooh-pooh" or "ding-dong" of the individual Adam----and even these
expressive syllables might not be the ones acceptable to Eve!

The truth is that though the impulse to expression is individual, and that
in highly developed languages a single man can give his personal stamp to
words, making them say what he wishes them to say, as Dante puts it,
speech is nevertheless primarily a social function. A word is a social
instrument. "It belongs," says Professor Whitney,
[Footnote: W. D. Whitney, _Language and the Study of Language_, p. 404.]
"not to the individual, but to the member of society.... What we may
severally choose to say is not language until it be accepted and employed
by our fellows. The whole development of speech, though initiated by the
acts of individuals, is wrought out by the community."

... A solitary man would never frame a language. Let a child grow up in
utter seclusion, and, however rich and suggestive might be the nature
around him, however full and appreciative his sense of that which lay
without, and his consciousness of that which went on within him, he would
all his life remain a mute."

What is more, the individual's mastery of language is due solely to his
social effort in employing it. Speech materials are not inherited; they
are painfully acquired. It is well known that an English child brought up
in China and hearing no word of English will speak Chinese without a trace
of his English parentage in form or idiom.
[Footnote: See Baldwin's _Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology_,
article "Language."]
His own body-and-mind experiences will be communicated in the medium
already established by the body-and-mind experiences of the Chinese race.
In that medium only can the thoughts of this English-born child have any
transmission value. His father and mother spoke a tongue moulded by
Chaucer and Shakspere, but to the boy whom we have imagined all that
age-long labor of perfecting a social instrument of speech is lost
without a trace. As far as language is concerned, he is a Chinaman and
nothing else.

Now take the case of a Chinese boy who has come to an American school and
college. Just before writing this paragraph I have read the blue-book of
such a boy, written in a Harvard examination on Tennyson. It was an
exceptionally well-expressed blue-book, in idiomatic English, and it
revealed an unusual appreciation of Tennyson's delicate and sure
felicities of speech. The Chinese boy, by dint of an intellectual effort
of which most of his American classmates were incapable, had mastered many
of the secrets of an alien tongue, and had taken possession of the rich
treasures of English poetry. If he had been composing verse himself,
instead of writing a college blue-book, it is likely that he would have
preferred to use his own mother-tongue, as the more natural medium for the
expression of his intimate thoughts and feelings. But that expression, no
matter how artistic, would have "communicated" nothing whatever to an
American professor ignorant of the Chinese language. It is clear that the
power of any person to convey his ideas and emotions to others is
conditioned upon the common possession of some medium of exchange.


4. _Words an Imperfect Medium_

And it is precisely here that we face one of the fundamental difficulties
of the poet's task; a difficulty that affects, indeed, all human
intercourse. For words are notoriously an imperfect medium of
communication. They "were not invented at first," says Professor Walter
Raleigh in his book on Wordsworth, "and are very imperfectly adapted at
best, for the severer purposes of truth. They bear upon them all the
weaknesses of their origin, and all the maims inflicted by the
prejudices and fanaticisms of generations of their employers. They
perpetuate the memory or prolong the life of many noble forms of human
extravagance, and they are the monuments of many splendid virtues. But
with all their abilities and dignities they are seldom well fitted for the
quiet and accurate statement of the thing that is.... Beasts fight with
horns, and men, when the guns are silent, with words. The changes of
meaning in words from good to bad and from bad to good senses, which are
quite independent of their root meaning, is proof enough, without detailed
illustration, of the incessant nature of the strife. The question is not
what a word means, but what it imputes."
[Footnote: Raleigh's _Wordsworth_. London, 1903.]

Now if the quiet and accurate statement of things as they are is the ideal
language of prose, it is obvious that the characteristic diction of poetry
is unquiet, inaccurate, incurably emotional. Herein lie its dangers and
its glories. No poet can keep for very long to the "neutral style," to the
cool gray wallpaper words, so to speak; he wants more color---passionate
words that will "stick fiery off" against the neutral background of
conventional diction. In vain does Horace warn him against "purple
patches"; for he knows that the tolerant Horace allowed himself to use
purple patches whenever he wished. All employers of language for emotional
effect--orators, novelists, essayists, writers of editorials--utilize in
certain passages these colored, heightened, figured words. It is as if
they ordered their printers to set individual words or whole groups of
words in upper-case type.

And yet these "upper-case words" of heightened emotional value are not
really isolated from their context. Their values are relative and not
absolute. Like the high lights of a picture, their effectiveness depends
upon the tone of the composition as a whole. To insert a big or violent
word for its own potency is like sewing the purple patch upon a faded
garment. The predominant thought and feeling of a passage give the
richest individual words their penetrating power, just as the weight of
the axe-head sinks the blade into the wood. "Futurist" poets like
Marinetti have protested against the bonds of syntax, the necessity of
logical subject and predicate, and have experimented with nouns alone.
"Words delivered from the fetters of punctuation," says Marinetti, "will
flash against one another, will interlace their various forms of
magnetism, and follow the uninterrupted dynamics of force."
[Footnote: There is an interesting discussion of Futurism in Sir Henry
Newbolt's _New Study of English Poetry_. Dutton, 1919.]
But do they? The reader may judge for himself in reading Marinetti's poem
on the siege of a Turkish fort:

  "Towers guns virility flights erection telemetre exstacy toumbtoumb 3
  seconds toumbtoumb waves smiles laughs plaff poaff glouglouglouglou
  hide-and-seek crystals virgins flesh jewels pearls iodine salts
  bromide skirts gas liqueurs bubbles 3 seconds toumbtoumb officer
  whiteness telemetre cross fire megaphone sight-at-thousand-metres
  all-men-to-left enough every-man-to-his post incline-7-degrees
  splendour jet pierce immensity azure deflowering onslaught alleys
  cries labyrinth mattress sobs ploughing desert bed precision
  telemetre monoplane cackling theatre applause monoplane equals
  balcony rose wheel drum trepan gad-fly rout arabs oxen blood-colour
  shambles wounds refuge oasis."

In these vivid nouns there is certainly some raw material for a poem, just
as a heap of bits of colored glass might make material for a rose-window.
But both poem and window must be built by somebody: the shining fragments
will never fashion themselves into a whole.


5. _Predominant Tone-Feeling_

If each poem is composed in its own "key," as we say of music, with its
own scale of "values," as we say of pictures, it is obvious that the
separate words tend to take on tones and hues from the predominant
tone-feeling of the poem. It is a sort of protective coloration, like
Nature's devices for blending birds and insects into their background; or,
to choose a more prosaic illustration, like dipping a lump of sugar into a
cup of coffee. The white sugar and the yellowish cream and the black
coffee blend into something unlike any of the separate ingredients, yet
the presence of each is felt. It is true that some words refuse to be
absorbed into the texture of the poem: they remain as it were foreign
substances in the stream of imagery, something alien, stubborn, jarring,
although expressive enough in themselves. All the pioneers in poetic
diction assume this risk of using "un-poetic" words in their desire to
employ expressive words. Classic examples are Wordsworth's homely "tubs"
and "porringers," and Walt Whitman's catalogues of everyday implements
used in various trades. _Othello_ was hissed upon its first appearance on
the Paris stage because of that "vulgar" word handkerchief. Thus "fork"
and "spoon" have almost purely utilitarian associations and are
consequently difficult terms for the service of poetry, but "knife" has a
wider range of suggestion. Did not the peaceful Robert Louis Stevenson
confess his romantic longing to "knife a man"?

But it is not necessary to multiply illustrations of this law of
connotation. The true poetic value of a word lies partly in its history,
in its past employments, and partly also in the new vitality which it
receives from each brain which fills the word with its own life. It is
like an old violin, with its subtle overtones, the result of many
vibrations of the past, but yet each new player may coax a new tune from
it. When Wordsworth writes of

  "The silence that is in the starry sky,
  The sleep that is among the lonely hills,"

he is combining words that are immemorially familiar into a total effect
that is peculiarly "Wordsworthian." Diction is obviously only a part of a
greater whole in which ideas and emotions are also merged. A concordance
of all the words employed by a poet teaches us much about him, and
conversely a knowledge of the poet's personality and of his governing
ideas helps us in the study of his diction. Poets often have favorite
words--like Marlowe's "black," Shelley's "light," Tennyson's "wind,"
Swinburne's "fire." Each of these words becomes suffused with the whole
personality of the poet who employs it. It not only cannot be taken out of
its context in the particular poem in which it appears, but it cannot be
adequately _felt_ without some recognition of the particular sensational
and emotional experience which prompted its use. Many concordance-hunters
thus miss the real game, and fall into the Renaissance error of
word-grubbing for its own sake, as if mere words had a value of their own
independently of the life breathed into them by living men. I recall a
conversation at Bormes with the French poet Angellier. He was complaining
humorously of his friend L., a famous scholar whose big book was "carrying
all the treasures of French literature down to posterity like a
cold-storage transport ship." "But he published a criticism of one of my
poems," Angellier went on, "which proved that he did not understand the
poem at all. He had studied it too hard! The words of a poem are
stepping-stones across a brook. If you linger on one of them too long, you
will get your feet wet! You must cross, _vite_!" If the poets lead us from
one mood to another over a bridge of words, the words themselves are not
the goal of the journey. They are instruments used in the transmission of
emotion.


6. _Specific Tone-Color_

It is obvious, then, that the full poetic value of a word cannot be
ascertained apart from its context. The value is relative and not
absolute. And nevertheless, just as the bit of colored glass may have a
certain interest and beauty of its own, independently of its possible
place in the rose-window, it is true that separate words possess special
qualities of physical and emotional suggestiveness. Dangerous as it is to
characterize the qualities of the sound of a word apart from the sense of
that word, there is undeniably such a thing as "tone-color." A piano and a
violin, striking the same note, are easily differentiated by the quality
of the sound, and of two violins, playing the same series of notes, it is
usually possible to declare which instrument has the richer tone or
timbre. Words, likewise, differ greatly in tone-quality. A great deal of
ingenuity has been devoted to the analysis of "bright" and "dark" vowels,
smooth and harsh consonants, with the aim of showing that each sound has
its special expressive force, its peculiar adaptability to transmit a
certain kind of feeling. Says Professor A. H. Tolman:
[Footnote: "The Symbolic Value of Sounds," in _Hamlet and Other Essays_,
by A. H. Tolman. Boston, 1904.]


  "Let us arrange the English vowel sounds in the following scale:

  [short i] (little)     [long i]   (I)         [short oo] (wood)
  [short e] (met)        [long u]   (due)       [long ow]  (cow)
  [short a] (mat)        [short ah] (what)      [long o]   (gold)
  [long e]  (mete)       [long ah]  (father)    [long oo]  (gloom)
  [ai]      (fair)       [oi]       (boil)      [aw]       (awe)
  [long a]  (mate)       [short u]  (but)

  "The sounds at the beginning of this scale are especially fitted to
  express uncontrollable joy and delight, gayety, triviality, rapid
  movement, brightness, delicacy, and physical littleness; the sounds
  at the end are peculiarly adapted to express horror, solemnity, awe,
  deep grief, slowness of motion, darkness, and extreme or oppressive
  greatness of size. The scale runs, then, from the little to the
  large, from the bright to the dark, from ecstatic delight to horror,
  and from the trivial to the solemn and awful."

Robert Louis Stevenson in his _Some Technical Elements of Style in
Literature_, and many other curious searchers into the secrets of words,
have attempted to explain the physiological basis of these varying
"tone-qualities." Some of them are obviously imitative of sounds in
nature; some are merely suggestive of these sounds through more or less
remote analogies; some are frankly imitative of muscular effort or of
muscular relaxation. High-pitched vowels and low-pitched vowels, liquid
consonants and harsh consonants, are unquestionably associated with
muscular memories, that is to say, with individual body-and-mind
experiences. Lines like Tennyson's famous

  "The moan of doves in immemorial elms
   And murmuring of innumerable bees"

thus represent, in their vowel and consonantal expressiveness, the past
history of countless physical sensations, widely shared by innumerable
individuals, and it is to this fact that the "transmission value" of the
lines is due.

Imitative effects are easily recognized, and need no comment:

  "Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings"

  "The mellow ouzel fluting in the elm"

  "The wind that'll wail like a child
          and the sea that'll moan like a man."

Suggestive effects are more subtle. Sometimes they are due primarily to
those rhythmical arrangements of words which we shall discuss in the next
chapter, but poetry often employs the sound of single words to awaken dim
or bright associations. Robert Bridges's catalogue of the Greek nymphs in
"Eros and Psyche" is an extreme example of risking the total effect of a
stanza upon the mere beautiful sounds of proper names.

  "Swift to her wish came swimming on the waves
  His lovely ocean nymphs, her guides to be,
  The Nereids all, who live among the caves
  And valleys of the deep, Cymodocè,
  Agavè, blue-eyed Hallia and Nesaea,
  Speio, and Thoë, Glaucè and Actaea,
  Iaira, Melitè and Amphinomè,
  Apseudès and Nemertès, Callianassa,
  Cymothoë, Thaleia, Limnorrhea,
  Clymenè, Ianeira and Ianassa,
  Doris and Panopè and Galatea,
  Dynamenè, Dexamenè and Maira,
  Ferusa, Doto, Proto, Callianeira,
  Amphithoë, Oreithuia and Amathea."

Names of objects like "bobolink" and "raven" may affect us emotionally by
the quality of their tone. Through association with the sounds of the
human voice, heard under stress of various emotions, we attribute joyous
or foreboding qualities to the bird's tone, and then transfer these
associations to the bare name of the bird.

Names of places are notoriously rich in their evocation of emotion.

  "He caught a chill in the lagoons of Venice,
  And died in Padua."

Here the fact of illness and death may be prosaic enough, but the very
names of "Venice" and "Padua" are poetry--like "Rome," "Ireland,"
"Arabia," "California."

  "Where the great Vision of the guarded mount
  Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold."

Who knows precisely where that "guarded mount" is upon the map? And who
cares? "The sailor's heart," confesses Lincoln Colcord,
[Footnote: _The New Republic_, September 16, 1916.]
"refutes the prose of knowledge, and still believes in delectable and
sounding names. He dreams of capes and islands whose appellations are
music and a song.... The first big land sighted on the outward passage is
Java Head; beside it stands Cape Sangian Sira, with its name like a
battle-cry. We are in the Straits of Sunda: name charged with the heady
languor of the Orient, bringing to mind pictures of palm-fringed shores
and native villages, of the dark-skinned men of Java clad in bright
sarongs, clamoring from their black-painted dugouts, selling fruit and
brilliant birds. These waters are rich in names that stir the blood, like
Krakatoa, Gunong Delam, or Lambuan; or finer, more sounding than all the
rest, Telok Betong and Rajah Bassa, a town and a mountain--Telok Betong at
the head of Lampong Bay and Rajah Bassa, grand old bulwark on the Sumatra
shore, the cradle of fierce and sudden squalls."

It may be urged, of course, that in lines of true poetry the sense carries
the sound with it, and that nothing is gained by trying to analyse the
sounds apart from the sense. Professor C. M. Lewis
[Footnote: _Principles of English Verse_. New York, 1906.]
asserts bluntly: "When you say Titan you mean something big, and when you
say tittle you mean something small; but it is not the sound of either
word that means either bigness or littleness, it is the sense. If you put
together a great many similar consonants in one sentence, they will
attract special attention to the words in which they occur, and the
significance of those words, whatever it may be, is thereby intensified;
but whether the words are 'a team of little atomies' or 'a triumphant
terrible Titan,' it is not the sound of the consonants that makes the
significance. When Tennyson speaks of the shrill-edged shriek of
a mother, his words suggest with peculiar vividness the idea of a shriek;
but when you speak of stars that shyly shimmer, the same sounds only
intensify the idea of shy shimmering." This is refreshing, and yet it is
to be noted that "Titan" and "tittle" and "shrill-edged shriek" and "shyly
shimmer" are by no means identical in sound: they have merely certain
consonants in common. A fairer test of tone-color may be found if we turn
to frank nonsense-verse, where the formal elements of poetry surely exist
without any control of meaning or "sense":

  "The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
   Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
   And burbled as it came!

  "'T was brillig, and the slithy toves
     Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
  All mimsy were the borogoves,
    And the mome raths outgrabe."

  "It seems rather pretty," commented the wise Alice, "but it's rather
  hard to understand! Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only
  I don't exactly know what they are!"

This is precisely what one feels when one listens to a poem recited in a
language of which one happens to be ignorant. The wonderful colored words
are there, and they seem somehow to fill our heads with ideas, only we do
not know what they are. Many readers who know a little Italian or German
will confess that their enjoyment of a lyric in those languages suffers
only a slight, if any, impairment through their ignorance of the precise
meaning of all the words in the poem: if they know enough to feel the
predominant mood--as when we listen to a song sung in a language of which
we are wholly ignorant--we can sacrifice the succession of exact ideas.
For words bare of meaning to the intellect may be covered with veils of
emotional association due to the sound alone. Garrick ridiculed--and
doubtless at the same time envied--George Whitefield's power to make women
weep by the rich overtones with which he pronounced "that blessed word
Mesopotamia."

The capacities and the limitations of tone-quality in itself may be seen
no less clearly in parodies. Swinburne, a master technician in words and
rhythm, occasionally delighted, as in "Nephelidia,"
[Footnote: Quoted in Carolyn Wells, _A Parody Anthology_. New York, 1904.]
to make fun of himself as well as of his poetic contemporaries:

  "Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft
          to the spirit and soul of our senses
    Sweetens the stress of surprising suspicion that
          sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh;
  Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical
          moods and triangular tenses,--
    'Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is
          dark till the dawn of the day when we die.'"

Or, take Calverley's parody of Robert Browning:

  "You see this pebble-stone? It's a thing I bought
  Of a bit of a chit of a boy i' the mid o' the day.
  I like to dock the smaller parts o' speech,
  As we curtail the already cur-tail'd cur--"

The characteristic tone-quality of the vocabulary of each of these
poets--whether it be

  "A soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses"

or

  "A bit of a chit of a boy i' the mid o' the day"--

is as perfectly conveyed by the parodist as if the lines had been written
in dead earnest. Poe's "Ulalume" is a masterly display of tone-color
technique, but exactly what it means, or whether it means anything at all,
is a matter upon which critics have never been able to agree. It is
certain, however, that a poet's words possess a kind of physical
suggestiveness, more or less closely related to their mental significance.
In nonsense-verse and parodies we have a glimpse, as it were, at the body
of poetry stripped of its soul.


7. _"Figures of Speech"_

To understand why poets habitually use figurative language, we must recall
what has been said in Chapter III about verbal images. Under the heat and
pressure of emotion, things alter their shape and size and quality, ideas
are transformed into concrete images, diction becomes impassioned, plain
speech tends to become metaphorical. The language of any excited person,
whether he is uttering himself in prose or verse, is marked by "tropes";
i.e. "turnings"--images which express one thing in the terms of another
thing. The language of feeling is characteristically "tropical," and
indeed every man who uses metaphors is for the moment talking like a
poet--unless, as too often happens both in prose and verse, the metaphor
has become conventionalized and therefore lifeless. The born poet
thinks in "figures," in "pictured" language, or, as it has been called, in
"re-presentative" language,
[Footnote: G. L. Raymond, _Poetry as a Representative Art_, chap. 19.]
since he represents, both to his own mind and to those with whom he is
communicating, the objects of poetic emotion under new forms. If he wishes
to describe an eagle, he need not say: "A rapacious bird of the falcon
family, remarkable for its strength, size, graceful figure, and
extraordinary flight." He represents these facts by making a picture:

  "He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
  Close to the sun in lonely lands,
  Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

  "The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
  He watches from his mountain walls,
  And like a thunderbolt he falls."
[Footnote: Tennyson, "The Eagle." ]

Or suppose the poet is a woman, meditating upon the coming of old age, and
reflecting that age brings riches of its own. Observe how this thought is
"troped"; i.e. turned into figures which re-present the fundamental idea:

  "Come, Captain Age,
  With your great sea-chest full of treasure!
  Under the yellow and wrinkled tarpaulin
  Disclose the carved ivory
  And the sandalwood inlaid with pearl,
  Riches of wisdom and years.
  Unfold the India shawl,
  With the border of emerald and orange and crimson and blue,
  Weave of a lifetime.
  I shall be warm and splendid
  With the spoils of the Indies of age."
[Footnote: Sarah N. Cleghorn, "Come, Captain Age."]

It is true, of course, that a poet may sometimes prefer to use
unornamented language, "not elevated," as Wordsworth said, "above the
level of prose." Such passages may nevertheless be marked by poetic
beauty, due to the circumstances or atmosphere in which the plain words
are spoken. The drama is full of such instances. "I loved you not," says
Hamlet; to which Ophelia replies only: "I was the more deceived." No
figure of speech could be more moving than that.

I once found in an old graveyard on Cape Cod, among the sunny, desolate
sandhills, these lines graven on a headstone:

  "She died, and left to me
  This heath, this calm and quiet scene;
  This memory of what hath been,
  And nevermore will be."

I had read the lines often enough in books, but here I realized for the
first time the perfection of their beauty.

But though a poet, for special reasons, may now and then renounce the use
of figurative language, it remains true that this is the characteristic
and habitual mode of utterance, not only of poetry but of all emotional
prose. Here are a few sentences from an English sailor's account of the
fight off Heligoland on August 28, 1915. He was on a destroyer:

  "Scarcely had we started when from out the mist and across our front,
  in furious pursuit, came the first cruiser squadron--the town class,
  Birmingham, etc.--each unit a match for three Mainzes; and as we
  looked and reduced speed they opened fire, _and the clear
  'bang-bang!' of their guns was just a cooling drink_....

  "The Mainz was immensely gallant. The last I saw of her, absolutely
  wrecked alow and aloft, her whole midships a fuming inferno, she had
  one gun forward and one aft still spitting forth fury and defiance
  _like a wildcat mad with wounds_.

  "Our own four-funnel friend recommenced at this juncture with a
  couple of salvos, but rather half-heartedly, and we really did not
  care a d----, for there, straight ahead of us, in lordly procession,
  _like elephants walking through a pack of dogs_, came the Lion, Queen
  Mary, Invincible, and New Zealand, our battle cruisers, great and
  grim and _uncouth as some antediluvian monsters_. How solid they
  looked! How utterly _earthquaking_!"

The use and the effectiveness of figures depend primarily, then, upon the
mood and intentions of the writer. Figures are figures, whether employed
in prose or verse. Mr. Kipling does not lose his capacity for employing
metaphors as he turns from writing verse to writing stories, and the
rhetorician's analysis of similes, personifications,  allegories, and all
the other devices of "tropical" language is precisely the same, whether he
is studying poetry or prose. Any good textbook in rhetoric gives adequate
examples of these various classes of figures, and they need not be
repeated here.


8. _Words as Permanent Embodiment of Poetic Feeling_

We have seen that the characteristic vocabulary of poetry originates in
emotion and that it is capable of transmitting emotion to the hearer or
reader. But how far are words capable of embodying emotion in permanent
form? Poets themselves, in proud consciousness of the enduring character
of their creations, have often boasted that they were building monuments
more enduring than bronze or marble. When Shakspere asserts this in his
sonnets, he is following not only an Elizabethan convention, but a
universal instinct of the men of his craft. Is it a delusion? Here are
words--mere vibrating sounds, light and winged and evanescent things,
assuming a meaning value only through the common consent of those who
interchange them, altering that meaning more or less from year to year,
often passing wholly from the living speech of men, decaying when races
decay and civilizations change. What transiency, what waste and oblivion
like that which waits upon millions on millions of autumn leaves!

Yet nothing in human history is more indisputable than the fact that
certain passages of poetry do survive, age after age, while empires pass,
and philosophies change and science alters the mental attitude of men as
well as the outward circumstances of life upon this planet.

Some thoughts and feelings, then, eternalize themselves in human speech;
most thoughts and feelings do not. Wherein lies the difference?
If most words are perishable stuff, what is it that keeps other words from
perishing? Is it superior organization and arrangement of this fragile
material, "fame's great antiseptic, style"? Or is it by virtue of some
secret passionate quality imparted to words by the poet, so that the
apparently familiar syllables take on a life and significance which is
really not their own, but his? And is this intimate personalized quality
of words "style," also, as well as that more external "style" revealed in
clear and orderly and idiomatic arrangement? Or does the mystery of
permanence reside in the poet's generalizing power, by which he is able to
express universal, and hence permanently interesting human experience? And
therefore, was not the late Professor Courthope right when he declared, "I
take all great poetry to be not so much what Plato thought it, the
utterance of individual genius, half inspired, half insane, as the
enduring voice of the soul and conscience of man living in society"?

Answers to such questions as these depend somewhat upon the "romantic" or
"classic" bias of the critics. Romantic criticism tends to stress the
significance of the personality of the individual poet. The classic school
of criticism tends to emphasize the more general and universal qualities
revealed by the poet's work. But while the schools and  fashions of
criticism shift their ground and alter their verdicts as succeeding
generations change in taste, the great poets continue as before to
particularize and also to generalize, to be "romantic" and "classic" by
turns, or even in the same poem. They defy critical augury, in their
unending quest of beauty and truth. That they succeed, now and then, in
giving a permanently lovely embodiment to their vision is surely a more
important fact than the rightness or wrongness of whatever artistic theory
they may have invoked or followed.

For many a time, surely, their triumphs are a contradiction of their
theories. To take a very familiar example, Wordsworth's theory of poetic
diction shifted like a weathercock. In the Advertisement to the _Lyrical
Ballads_ (1798) he asserted: "The following poems are to be considered as
experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far
the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is
adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure." In the Preface of the second
edition (1800) he announced that his purpose had been "to ascertain how
far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language
of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that
quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a poet may rationally
endeavour to impart." But in the famous remarks on poetic diction which
accompanied the third edition (1802) he inserted after the words "A
selection of language really used by men" this additional statement of his
intention: "And at the same time to throw over them a certain colouring of
the imagination whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in
an unusual aspect." In place of the original statement about the
conversation of the middle and lower classes of society, we are now
assured that the language of poetry "if selected truly and judiciously,
must necessarily be dignified and variegated and alive with metaphors and
figures.... This selection will form a distinction ... and will entirely
separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary
life."

What an amazing change in theory in four years! Yet it is no more
remarkable than Wordsworth's successive emendations in the text of his
poems. In 1807 his blind Highland boy had gone voyaging in

  "A Household Tub, like one of those
   Which women use to wash their clothes;
     This carried the blind Boy."

In 1815 the wash-tub becomes

  "The shell of a green turtle, thin
   And hollow--you might sit therein,
     It was so wide and deep."

And in 1820 the worried and dissatisfied artist changes that unlucky
vessel once more into the final banality of

  "A shell of ample size, and light
   As the pearly car of Amphitrite
     That sportive dolphins drew."

Sometimes, it is true, this adventurer in poetic diction had rather better
fortune in his alterations. The much-ridiculed lines of 1798 about the
child's grave--

  "I've measured it from side to side,
   'T is three feet long and two feet wide"--

became in 1820:

  "Though but of compass small and bare
   To thirsty suns and parching air."

Like his friend Coleridge, Wordsworth forsook gradually his early
experiments with matter-of-fact phrases, with quaintly grotesque figures.
Revolt against conventional eighteenth-century diction had given him a
blessed sense of freedom, but he found his real strength later in subduing
that freedom to a sense of law. Archaisms, queernesses, flatly
naturalistic turns of speech gave place to a vocabulary of simple dignity
and austere beauty. Wordsworth attained his highest originality as an
artist by disregarding singularity, by making familiar words reveal new
potencies of expression.

For after all, we must come back to what William James called the long
"loop-line," to that reservoir of ideas and feelings which stores up the
experience of individuals and of the race, and to the words which most
effectively evoke that experience. Two classes at Columbia University, a
few years ago, were asked to select fifty English words of basic
importance in the expression of human life. In choosing these words, they
were to aim at reality and strength rather than at beauty. When the two
lists were combined, they presented these seventy-eight different words,
which are here arranged alphabetically: age, ambition, beauty, bloom,
country, courage, dawn, day, death, despair, destiny, devotion, dirge,
disaster, divine, dream, earth, enchantment, eternity, fair, faith,
fantasy, flower, fortune, freedom, friendship, glory, glow, god, grief,
happiness, harmony, hate, heart, heaven, honor, hope, immortality, joy,
justice, knell, life, longing, love, man, melancholy, melody, mercy, moon,
mortal, nature, noble, night, paradise, parting, peace, pleasure, pride,
regret, sea, sigh, sleep, solitude, song, sorrow, soul, spirit, spring,
star, suffer, tears, tender, time, virtue, weep, whisper, wind and youth.
[Footnote: See Nation, February 23, 1911.]

Surely these words, selected as they were for their significance, are not
lacking in beauty of sound. On the contrary, any list of the most
beautiful words in English would include many of them. But it is the
meaning of these "long-loop" words, rather than their formal beauty alone,
which fits them for the service of poetry. And they acquire in that
service a "literary" value, which is subtly blended with their "sound"
value and logical "meaning" value. They connote so much! They suggest more
than they actually say. They unite the individual mood of the moment with
the soul of mankind.

And there is still another mode of union between the individual and the
race, which we must attempt in the next chapter to regard more closely,
but which should be mentioned here in connection with the permanent
embodiment of feeling in words,--namely, the mysterious fact of rhythm.
Single words are born and die, we learn them and forget them, they alter
their meanings, they always say less than we really intend, they are
imperfect instruments for signaling from one brain to another. Yet these
crumbling particles of speech may be miraculously held together and built
into a tune, and with the tune comes another element of law, order,
permanence. The instinct for the drumbeat lies deep down in our bodies; it
affects our mental life, the organization of our emotions, and our
response to the rhythmical arrangement of words. For mere ideas and words
are not poetry, but only part of the material for poetry. A poem does not
come into full being until the words begin to dance.



CHAPTER V

RHYTHM AND METRE

  "Rhythm is the recurrence of stress at intervals; metre is the
  regular, or measured, recurrence of stress."
    M. H. SHACKFORD, _A First Book of Poetics_

  "Metres being manifestly sections of rhythm."
    ARISTOTLE, _Poetics_, 4. (Butcher's translation)

  "Thoughts that voluntary move
  Harmonious numbers."
    MILTON


_1. The Nature of Rhythm_

And why must the words begin to dance? The answer is to be perceived in
the very nature of Rhythm, that old name for the ceaseless pulsing or
"flowing" of all living things. So deep indeed lies the instinct for
rhythm in our consciousness that we impute it even to inanimate objects.
We hear the ticking of the clock as tíck-tock, tíck-tock, or else
tick-tóck, tick-tóck, although psychologists assure us that the clock's
wheels are moving with indifferent, mechanical precision, and that it is
simply our own focusing of attention upon alternate beats which creates
the impression of rhythm. We hear a rhythm in the wheels of the train, and
in the purring of the motor-engine, knowing all the while that it
is we who impose or make-up the rhythm, in our human instinct for
organizing the units of attention. We cannot help it, as long as our own
pulses beat. No two persons catch quite the same rhythm in the sounds of
the animate and inanimate world, because no two persons have absolutely
identical pulse-beats, identical powers of attention, an identical
psycho-physical organism. We all perceive that there is a rhythm in a
racing crew, in a perfectly timed stroke of golf, in a fisherman's fly-
casting, in a violinist's bow, in a close-hauled sailboat fighting with
the wind. But we appropriate and organize these objective impressions in
subtly different ways.

When, for instance, we listen to poetry read aloud, or when we read it
aloud ourselves, some of us are instinctive "timers,"
[Footnote: See W. M. Patterson, _The Rhythm of Prose_. Columbia University
Press, 1916.]
paying primary attention to the spaced or measured intervals of time,
although in so doing we are not wholly regardless of those points of
"stress" which help to make the time-intervals plainer. Others of us are
natural "stressers," in that we pay primary attention to the "weight" of
words,--the relative loudness or pitch, by which their meaning or
importance is indicated,--and it is only secondarily that we think of
these weighted or "stressed" words as separated from one another by
approximately equal intervals of time. Standing on the rocks at Gloucester
after an easterly storm, a typical "timer" might be chiefly conscious of
the steady sequence of the waves, the measured intervals between
their summits; while the typical stresser, although subconsciously aware
of the steady iteration of the giant rollers, might watch primarily their
foaming crests, and listen chiefly to their crashing thunder. The point to
be remembered is this: that neither the "timing" instinct nor the
"stressing" instinct excludes the other, although in most individuals one
or the other predominates. Musicians, for instance, are apt to be
noticeable "timers," while many scholars who deal habitually with words in
their varied shifts of meaning, are professionally inclined to be
"stressers."


_2. The Measurement of Rhythm_

Let us apply these facts to some of the more simple of the vexed questions
of prosody, No one disputes the universality of the rhythmizing impulse;
the quarrel begins as soon as any prosodist attempts to dogmatize about
the nature and measurement of those flowing time-intervals whose
arrangement we call rhythm. No one disputes, again, that the only arbiter
in matters of prosody is the trained ear, and not the eye. Infinitely
deceptive is the printed page of verse when regarded by the eye. Verse may
be made to look like prose and prose to look like verse. Capital letters,
lines, rhymes, phrases and paragraphs may be so cunningly or
conventionally arranged by the printer as to disguise the real nature of
the rhythmical and metrical pattern. When in doubt, close your eyes!

We agree, then, that in all spoken language--and this is as true of prose
as it is of verse--there are time-intervals more or less clearly marked,
and that the ear is the final judge as to the nature of these intervals.
But can the ear really measure the intervals with any approximation to
certainty, so that prosodists, for instance, can agree that a given poem
is written in a definite metre? In one sense "yes." No one doubts that the
_Odyssey_ is written in "dactylic hexameters," i.e., in lines made up of
six "feet," each one of which is normally composed of a long syllable plus
two short syllables, or of an acceptable equivalent for that particular
combination. But when we are taught in school that Longfellow's
_Evangeline_ is also written in "dactylic hexameters," trouble begins for
the few inquisitive, since it is certain that if you close your eyes and
listen carefully to a dozen lines of Homer's Greek, and then to a
dozen lines of Longfellow's English, each written in so-called
"hexameters," you are listening to two very different arrangements of
time-intervals, so different, in fact, that the two poems are really not
in the same "measure" or "metre" at all. For the Greek poet was, as a
metrist, thinking primarily of quantity, of the relative "timing" of his
syllables, and the American of the relative "stress" of his syllables.
[Footnote: "Musically speaking--because the musical terms are exact and
not ambiguous--true dactyls are in 2-4 time and the verse of _Evangeline_
is in 3-8 time." T. D. Goodell, _Nation_, October 12, 1911.]

That illustration is drearily hackneyed, no doubt, but it has a double
value. It is perfectly clear; and furthermore, it serves to remind us of
the instinctive differences between different persons and different races
as regards the ways of arranging time-intervals so as to create the
rhythms of verse. The individual's standard of measurement--his poetic
foot-rule, so to speak--is very elastic,--"made of rubber" indeed, as the
experiments of many psychological laboratories have demonstrated beyond a
question. Furthermore, the composers of poetry build it out of very
elastic units. They are simply putting syllables of words together into a
rhythmical design, and these "airy syllables," in themselves mere symbols
of ideas and feelings, cannot be weighed by any absolutely correct
sound-scales. They cannot be measured in time by any absolutely accurate
watch-dial, or exactly estimated in their meaning, whether that be literal
or figurative, by any dictionary of words and phrases. But this is only
saying that the syllables which make up the units of verse, whether the
units be called "foot" or "line" or "phrase," are not dead, mechanical
things, but live things, moving rhythmically, entering thereby into the
pulsing, chiming life of the real world, and taking on more fullness of
life and beauty in elastic movement, in ordered but infinitely flexible
design, than they ever could possess as independent particles.


_3. Conflict and Compromise_

And everywhere in the arrangement of syllables into the patterns of rhythm
and metre we find conflict and compromise, the surrender of some values of
sound or sense for the sake of a greater unity. To revert to
considerations dealt with in an earlier chapter, we touch here upon the
old antinomy--or it may be, harmony--between "form" and "significance,"
between the "outside" and the "inside" of the work of art. For words,
surely, have one kind of value as _pure sound_, as "cadences" made up of
stresses, slides, pauses, and even of silences when the expected syllable
is artfully withheld. It is this sound-value, for instance, which you
perceive as you listen to a beautifully recited poem in Russian, a
language of which you know not a single word; and you may experience a
modification of the same pleasure in closing your mind wholly to the
"sense" of a richly musical passage in Swinburne, and delighting your ear
by its mere beauty of tone. But words have also that other value as
_meaning_, and we are aware how these meaning values shift with the stress
and turns of thought, so that a given word has a greater or less weight in
different sentences or even in different clauses of the same sentence.
"Meaning" values, like sound values, are never precisely fixed in a
mechanical and universally agreed-upon scale, they are relative, not
absolute. Sometimes meaning and sound conflict with one another, and one
must be sacrificed in part, as when the normal accent of a word
refuses to coincide with the verse-accent demanded by a certain measure,
so that we "wrench" the accent a trifle, or make it "hover" over two
syllables without really alighting upon either. And it is significant that
lovers of poetry have always found pleasure in such compromises.
[Footnote: Compare the passage about Chopin's piano-playing, quoted from
Alden in the Notes and Illustrations for this chapter.]
They enjoy minor departures from and returns to the normal, the expected
measure of both sound and sense, just as a man likes to sail a boat as
closely into the wind as he conveniently can, making his actual course a
compromise between the line as laid by the compass, and the actual facts
of wind and tide and the behavior of his particular boat. It is thus that
the sailor "makes it," triumphantly! And the poet "makes it" likewise, out
of deep, strong-running tides of rhythmic impulse, out of arbitrary words
and rebellious moods, out of

  "Thoughts hardly to be packed
  Into a narrow act,
  Fancies that broke through language and escaped,"

until he compels rhythm and syllables to move concordantly, and blend into
that larger living whole--the dancing, singing crowd of sounds and
meanings which make up a poem.


_4. The Rhythms of Prose_

Just here it may be of help to us to turn away for a moment from verse
rhythm, and to consider what Dryden called "the other harmony" of prose.
For no one doubts that prose has rhythm, as well as verse. Vast and
learned treatises have been written on the prose rhythms of the Greeks and
Romans, and Saintsbury's _History of English Prose Rhythm_ is a monumental
collection of wonderful prose passages in English, with the scansion of
"long" and "short" syllables and of "feet" marked after a fashion that
seems to please no one but the author. But in truth the task of inventing
an adequate system for notating the rhythm of prose, and securing a
working agreement among prosodists as to a proper terminology, is almost
insuperable. Those of us who sat in our youth at the feet of German
masters were taught that the distinction between verse and prose was
simple: verse was, as the Greeks had called it, "bound speech" and prose
was "loosened speech." But a large proportion of the poetry published in
the last ten years is "free verse," which is assuredly of a "loosened"
rather than a "bound" pattern.

Apparently the old fence between prose and verse has been broken down. Or,
if one conceives of indubitable prose and indubitable verse as forming two
intersecting circles, there is a neutral zone,

[Illustration:   Prose  /  Neutral Zone  /  Verse]

which some would call "prose poetry" and some "free verse," and which,
according to the experiments of Dr. Patterson
[Footnote: _The Rhythm of Prose_, already cited.]
may be appropriated as "prose experience" or "verse experience" according
to the rhythmic instinct of each individual. Indeed Mr. T. S. Omond has
admitted that "the very same words, with the very same natural stresses,
may be prose or verse according as we treat them. The difference is in
ourselves, in the mental rhythm to which we unconsciously adjust the
words."
[Footnote: Quoted in B. M. Alden, "The Mental Side of Metrical Form,"
_Modern Language Review_, July, 1914.]
Many familiar sentences from the English Bible or Prayer-Book, such as the
words from the _Te Deum_, "We, therefore, pray thee, help thy servants,
whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood," have a rhythm which may
be felt as prose or verse, according to the mental habit or mood or
rhythmizing impulse of the hearer.

Nevertheless it remains true in general that the rhythms of prose are more
constantly varied, broken and intricate than the rhythms of verse. They
are characterized, according to the interesting experiments of Dr.
Patterson, by syncopated time,
[Footnote: "For a 'timer' the definition of prose as distinguished from
verse experience depends upon a predominance of syncopation over
coincidence in the coordination of the accented syllables of the text with
the measuring pulses." _Rhythm of Prose_, p. 22.]
whereas in normal verse there is a fairly clean-cut coincidence between
the pulses of the hearer and the strokes of the rhythm. Every one seems to
agree that there is a certain danger in mixing these infinitely subtle and
"syncopated" tunes of prose with the easily recognized tunes of verse.
There is, unquestionably, a natural "iambic" roll in English prose, due to
the predominant alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in our
native tongue, but when Dickens--to cite what John Wesley would call "an
eminent sinner" in this respect--inserts in his emotional prose line after
line of five-stress "iambic" verse, we feel instinctively that the
presence of the blank verse impairs the true harmony of the prose.
[Footnote:  Observe, in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter,
the frequency of the blank-verse lines in Robert G. Ingersoll's "Address
over a Little Boy's Grave."]
Delicate writers of English prose usually avoid this coincidence of
pattern with the more familiar patterns of verse, but it is impossible to
avoid it wholly, and some of the most beautiful cadences of English prose
might, if detached from their context, be scanned for a few syllables as
perfect verse. The free verse of Whitman, Henley and Matthew Arnold is
full of these embedded fragments of recognized "tunes of verse," mingled
with the unidentifiable tunes of prose. There has seldom been a more
curious example of accidental coincidence than in this sentence from a
prosaic textbook on "The Parallelogram of Forces": "And hence no force,
however great, can draw a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line which
shall be absolutely straight." This is precisely the "four-stressed
iambic" metre of _In Memoriam_, and it even preserves the peculiar rhyme
order of the _In Memoriam_ stanza:

  "And hence no force, however great,
    Can draw a cord, however fine,
    Into a horizontal line
  Which shall be absolutely straight."

We shall consider more closely, in the section on Free Verse in the
following chapter, this question of the coincidence and variation of
pattern as certain types of loosened verse pass in and out of the zone
which is commonly recognized as pure prose. But it is highly important
here to remember another fact, which professional psychologists in their
laboratory experiments with the notation of verse and prose have
frequently forgotten, namely, the existence of a type of ornamented prose,
which has had a marked historical influence upon the development of
English style. This ornamented prose, elaborated by Greek and Roman
rhetoricians, and constantly apparent in the pages of Cicero, heightened
its rhythm by various devices of alliteration, assonance, tone-color,
cadence, phrase and period. Greek oratory even employed rhyme in highly
colored passages, precisely as Miss Amy Lowell uses rhyme in her
polyphonic or "many-voiced" prose. Medieval Latin took over all of these
devices from Classical Latin, and in its varied oratorical, liturgical and
epistolary forms it strove to imitate the various modes of _cursus_
("running") and _clausula_ ("cadence") which had characterized the rhythms
of Isocrates and Cicero.
[Footnote: A. C. Clark, _Prose Rhythm in English_. Oxford, 1913.
Morris W. Croll, "The Cadence of English Oratorical Prose," _Studies in
Philology_. January, 1919.
Oliver W. Elton, "English Prose Numbers," in _Essays and Studies_ by
members of the English Association, 4th Series. Oxford, 1913.]
From the Medieval Latin Missal and Breviary these devices of prose rhythm,
particularly those affecting the end of sentences, were taken over into
the Collects and other parts of the liturgy of the English Prayer-Book.
They had a constant influence upon the rhythms employed by the translators
of the English Bible, and through the Bible the cadences of this ancient
ornamented prose have passed over into the familiar but intricate
harmonies of our "heightened" modern prose.

While this whole matter is too technical to be dealt with adequately here,
it may serve at least to remind the reader that an appreciation of English
prose rhythms, as they have been actually employed for many centuries,
requires a sensitiveness to the rhetorical position of phrases and
clauses, and to "the use of sonorous words in the places of rhetorical
emphasis, which cannot be indicated by the bare symbols of prosody."
[Footnote: New York _Nation_, February 27, 1913.]
For that sonority and cadence and balance which constitute a harmonious
prose sentence cannot be adequately felt by a possibly illiterate
scientist in his laboratory for acoustics; the "literary" value of words,
in all strongly emotional prose, is inextricably mingled with the bare
sound values: it is thought-units that must be delicately "balanced" as
well as stresses and slides and final clauses; it is the elevation of
ideas, the nobility and beauty of feeling, as discerned by the trained
literary sense, which makes the final difference between enduring prose
harmonies and the mere tinkling of the "musical glasses."
[Footnote: This point is suggestively discussed by C. E. Andrews,
_The Writing and Reading of Verse_, chap. 5. New York, 1918.]
The student of verse may very profitably continue to exercise himself with
the rhythms of prose. He should learn to share the unwearied enthusiasm of
Professor Saintsbury for the splendid cadences of our sixteenth-century
English, for the florid decorative period of Thomas Browne and Jeremy
Taylor, for the eloquent "prose poetry" of De Quincey and Ruskin and
Charles Kingsley, and for the strangely subtle effects wrought by Pater
and Stevenson. But he must not imagine that any laboratory system of
tapping syncopated time, or any painstaking marking of macrons (-) breves
(u) and caesuras (||) will give him full initiation into the mysteries of
prose cadences which have been built, not merely out of stressed and
unstressed syllables, but out of the passionate intellectual life of many
generations of men. He may learn to feel that life as it pulsates in
words, but no one has thus far devised an adequate scheme for its
notation.


_5. Quantity, Stress and Syllable_

The notation of verse, however, while certainly not a wholly simple
matter, is far easier. It is practicable to indicate by conventional
printer's devices the general rhythmical and metrical scheme of a poem,
and to indicate the more obvious, at least, of its incidental variations
from the expected pattern. It remains as true of verse as it is of prose
that the "literary" values of words--their connotations or emotional
overtones--are too subtle to be indicated by any marks invented by a
printer; but the alternation or succession of long or short syllables, of
stressed or unstressed syllables, the nature of particular feet
and lines and stanzas, the order and interlacing of rhymes, and even the
devices of tone-color, are sufficiently external elements of verse to
allow easy methods of indication.

When you and I first began to study Virgil and Horace, for instance, we
were taught that the Roman poets, imitating the Greeks, built heir verses
upon the principle of _Quantity_. The metrical unit was the foot, made up
of long and short syllables in various combinations, two short syllables
being equivalent to one long one. The feet most commonly used were the
Iambus [short-long], the Anapest [short-short-long], the Trochee
[long-short], the Dactyl [long-short-short], and the Spondee [long-long].
Then we were instructed that a "verse" or line consisting of one foot was
called a monometer, of two feet, a dimeter, of three, a trimeter, of four,
a tetrameter, of five, a pentameter, of six, a hexameter. This looked like
a fairly easy game, and before long we were marking the quantities in the
first line of the Aeneid, as other school-children had done ever since the
time of St. Augustine:

  _Arma vi¦rumque ca¦no  Tro¦jae qui ¦ primus ab¦oris_.

Or perhaps it was Horace's

  _Maece¦nas, atavis ¦¦ edite reg¦ibus_.

We were told, of course, that it was not all quite as simple as this: that
there were frequent metrical variations, such as trochees changing places
with dactyls, and anapests with iambi; that feet could be inverted, so
that a trochaic line might begin with an iambus, an anapestic line with a
dactyl, or _vice versa_; that syllables might be omitted at the beginning
or the end or even in the middle of a line, and that this "cutting-off"
was called _catalexis_; that syllables might even be added at the
beginning or end of certain lines and that these syllables were called
_hypermetric_; and that we must be very watchful about pauses,
particularly about a somewhat mysterious chief pause, liable to occur
about the middle of a line, called a _caesura_. But the magic password to
admit us to this unknown world of Greek and Roman prosody was after all
the word _Quantity_.

If a few of us were bold enough to ask the main difference between this
Roman system of versification and the system which governed modern English
poetry--even such rude playground verse as

  "Eeny, meeny, miny, mo,
  Catch a nigger by the toe"--

we were promptly told by the teacher that the difference was a very plain
one, namely, that English, like all the Germanic languages, obeyed in its
verse the principles of _Stress_. Instead of looking for "long" and
"short" syllables, we had merely to look for "stressed" and "unstressed"
syllables. It was a matter, not of quantity, but of accent; and if we
remembered this fact, there was no harm but rather a great convenience, in
retaining the technical names of classical versification. Only we must be
careful that by "iambus," in English poetry, we _meant_ an unstressed
syllable, rather than a short syllable followed by a long one. And so with
"trochee," "dactyl," "anapest" and the rest; if we knew that accent and
not quantity was what we really had in mind, it was proper enough to speak
of _Paradise Lost_ as written in "iambic pentameter," and _Evangeline_ in
"dactylic hexameter," etc. The trick was to count stresses and not
syllables, for was not Coleridge's _Christabel_ written in a metre which
varied its syllables anywhere from four to twelve for the line, yet
maintained its music by regularity of stress?

Nothing could be plainer than all this. Yet some of us discovered when we
went to college and listened to instructors who grew strangely excited
over prosody, that it was not all as easy as this distinction between
_Quantity_ and _Stress_ would seem to indicate. For we were now told that
the Greek and Roman habits of daily speech in prose had something to do
with their instinctive choice of verse-rhythms: that at the very time when
the Greek heroic hexameters were being composed, there was a natural
dactylic roll in spoken prose; that Roman daily speech had a stronger
stress than Greek, so that Horace, in imitating Greek lyric measures, had
stubborn natural word-accents to reconcile with his quantitative measures;
that the Roman poets, who had originally allowed normal word-accent and
verse-pulse to coincide for the most part, came gradually to enjoy a
certain clash between them, keeping all the while the quantitative
principle dominant; so that when Virgil and Horace read their verses
aloud, and word-accent and verse-pulse fell upon different syllables, the
verse-pulse yielded slightly to the word-accent, thus adding something of
the charm of conversational prose to the normal time-values of the rhythm.
In a word, we were now taught--if I may quote from a personal letter of a
distinguished American Latinist--that "the almost universal belief that
Latin verse is a matter of quantity only is a mistake. Word-accent was not
lost in Latin verse."

And then, as if this undermining of our schoolboy faith in pure Quantity
were not enough, came the surprising information that the Romans had kept,
perhaps from the beginning of their poetizing, a popular type of accented
verse, as seen in the rude chant of the Roman legionaries,

  _Mílle Fráncos mílle sémel Sármatás occídimús_.
[Footnote: See C. M. Lewis, _Foreign Sources of Modern English
Versification_. Halle, 1898.]

Certainly those sun-burnt "doughboys" were not bothering themselves
about trochees and iambi and such toys of cultivated "literary" persons;
they were amusing themselves on the march by inventing words to fit the
"goose-step." Their

  _Unus homo mille mille mille decollavimus_

which Professor Courthope scans as trochaic verse,
[Footnote: _History of English Poetry_, vol. 1, p. 73.]
seems to me nothing but "stress" verse, like

  _"Hay-foot, straw-foot, belly full of bean-soup--Hep--Hep!"_

Popular accentual verse persisted, then, while the more cultivated Roman
public acquired and then gradually lost, in the course of centuries, its
ear for the quantitative rhythms which originally had been copied from the
Greeks.

Furthermore, according to our ingenious college teachers, there was still
a third principle of versification to be reckoned with, not depending on
Quantity or Stress, but merely _Syllabic_, or syllable-counting. This was
immemorially old, it seemed, and it had reappeared mysteriously in Europe
in the Dark Ages.

Dr. Lewis cites from a Latin manuscript poem of the ninth century:
[Footnote: _Foreign Sources_, etc., p. 3.]

  _"Beatissimus namque Dionysius ¦ Athenis quondam episcopus,
  Quem Sanctus Clemens direxit in Galliam ¦ propter praedicandi
    gratiam_," etc.

"Each verse contains 21 syllables, with a caesura after the 12th. No
further regularity, either metrical or rhythmical, can be perceived.
Such a verse could probably not have been written except for music."
Church-music, apparently, was also a factor in the development of
versification,--particularly that "Gregorian" style which demanded neither
quantitative nor accentual rhythm, but simply a fair count of syllables in
the libretto, note matching syllable exactly. But when the great medieval
Latin hymns, like _Dies ire_, were written, the Syllabic principle of
versification, like the Quantitative principle, dropped out of sight,
and we witness once more the emergence of the Stress or accentual system,
heavily ornamented with rhymes.
[Footnote: See the quotation from Taylor's _Classical Heritage of the
Middle Ages_ printed in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter.]
Yet the Syllabic method reappears once more, we were told, in French
prosody, and thus affects the verse of Chaucer and of subsequent English
poetry, and it still may be studied, isolated as far as may be from
considerations of quantity and stress, in certain English songs written
for music, where syllable carefully matches note. The "long metre"
(8 syllables), "short metre" (6 syllables) and "common metre"
(7 syllables, 6 syllables) of the hymn books is a convenient
illustration of thinking of metre in terms of syllables alone.


_6. The Appeal to the Ear_

At this point, perhaps, having set forth the three theories of _Quantity,
Stress_ and _Syllable_, our instructors were sensible enough to make an
appeal to the ear. Reminding us that stress was the controlling principle
in Germanic poetry,--although not denying that considerations of quantity
and number of syllables might have something to do with the effect,--they
read aloud to us some Old English verse. Perhaps it was that _Song of the
Battle of Brunanburh_ which Tennyson has so skilfully rendered into modern
English words while preserving the Old English metre. And here, though the
Anglo-Saxon words were certainly uncouth, we caught the chief stresses
without difficulty, usually four beats to the line. If the instructor,
while these rude strokes of rhythm were still pounding in our ears,
followed the Old English with a dozen lines of Chaucer, we could all
perceive the presence of a newer, smoother, more highly elaborated
verse-music, where the number of syllables had been cunningly
reckoned, and the verse-accent seemed always to fall upon a syllable long
and strong enough to bear the weight easily, and the rhymes rippled like a
brook. Whether we called the metre of the _Prologue_ rhymed couplets of
iambic pentameter, or rhymed couplets of ten-syllabled, five-stressed
verse, the music, at least, was clear enough. And so was the music of the
"blank" or unrhymed five-stress lines of Marlowe and Shakspere and Milton,
and as we listened it was easy to believe that "stress" and "quantity" and
"syllable," all playing together like a chime of bells, are concordant and
not quarrelsome elements in the harmony of modern English verse. Only, to
be richly concordant, each must be prepared to yield a little if need be,
to the other!

I have taken too many pages, perhaps, in thus sketching the rudimentary
education of a college student in the elements of rhythm and metre, and in
showing how the theoretical difficulties of the subject--which are
admittedly great--often disappear as soon as one resolves to let the ear
decide. A satisfied ear may soothe a dissatisfied mind. I have quoted from
a letter of an American scholar about quantity being the "controlling"
element of cultivated Roman verse, and I now quote from a personal letter
of an American poet, emphasizing the necessity of "reading poetry as it
was meant to be read": "My point is _not_ that English verse has no
quantity, but that the controlling element is not quantity but accent. The
lack of fixed _syllabic _quantity is just what I emphasize. This lack
makes definite _beat _impossible: or at least it makes it absurd to
attempt to scan English verse by feet. The proportion of 'irregularities'
and 'exceptions' becomes painful to the student and embarrassing to the
professor. He is put to fearful straits to explain his prosody and make it
fit the verse. And when he has done all this, the student, if he has a
good ear, forthwith forgets it all, and reads the verse as it was meant to
be read, as a succession of musical bars (without pitch, of course), in
which the accent marks the rhythm, and pauses and _rests _often take the
place of missing syllables. To this ingenuous student I hold out my hand
and cast in my lot with him. He is the man for whom English poetry is
written."

It may be objected, of course, that the phrase "reading poetry as it was
meant to be read" really begs the question. For English poets have often
amused themselves by composing purely quantitative verse, which they wish
us to read as quantitative. The result may be as artificial as the
painfully composed Latin quantitative verse of English schoolboys, but the
thing can be done. Tennyson's experiments in quantity are well known, and
should be carefully studied. He was proud of his hexameter:

  "High winds roaring above me, dark leaves falling about me,"

and of his pentameter:

  "All men alike hate slops, particularly gruel."

Here the English long and short syllables--as far as "long" and "short"
can be definitely distinguished in English--correspond precisely to the
rules of Roman prosody. The present Laureate, Robert Bridges, whose
investigations in English and Roman prosody have been incessant, has
recently published a book of experiments in writing English quantitative
hexameters.
[Footnote: _Ibant Obscuri_. New York, Oxford University Press, 1917.]
Here are half a dozen lines:

  "Midway of all this tract, with secular arms an immense elm
  Reareth a crowd of branches, aneath whose lofty protection
  Vain dreams thickly nestle, clinging unto the foliage on high:
  And many strange creatures of monstrous form and features
  Stable about th' entrance, Centaur and Scylla's abortion,
  And hundred-handed Briareus, and Lerna's wild beast...."

These are lines interesting to the scholar, but they are somehow
"non-English" in their rhythm--not in accordance with "the genius of the
language," as we vaguely but very sensibly say. Neither did the stressed
"dactylic" hexameters of Longfellow, written though they were by a skilful
versifier, quite conform to "the nature of the language."


_7. The Analogy with Music_

One other attempt to explain the difficulties of English rhythm and metre
must at least be mentioned here, namely the "musical" theory of the
American poet and musician, Sidney Lanier. In his _Science of English
Verse_, an acute and very suggestive book, he threw over the whole theory
of stress--or at least, retained it as a mere element of assistance, as in
music, to the marking of time, maintaining that the only necessary element
in rhythm is equal time-intervals, corresponding to bars of music.
According to Lanier, the structure of English blank verse, for instance,
is not an alternation of unstressed with stressed syllables, but a series
of bars of 3/8 time, thus:

[Illustration: Five bars of 3/8 time, each with a short and a long note.]

Thomson, Dabney and other prosodists have followed Lanier's general
theory, without always agreeing with him as to whether blank verse is
written in 3/8 or 2/4 time. Alden, in a competent summary of these various
musical theories as to the basis of English verse,
[Footnote: _Introduction to Poetry_, pp. 190-93. See also Alden's _English
Verse_, Part 3. "The Time-Element in English Verse."]
quotes with approval Mr. T. S. Omond's words: "Musical notes are almost
pure symbols. In theory at least, and no doubt substantially in practice,
they can be divided with mathematical accuracy--into fractions of 1/2,
1/4, 1/8, 1/16, etc.--and the ideal of music is absolute accordance with
time. Verse has other methods and another ideal. Its words are concrete
things, not readily carved to such exact pattern.... The perfection of
music lies in absolute accordance with time, that of verse is continual
slight departures from time. This is why no musical representations of
verse ever seem satisfactory. They assume regularity where none exists."


_8. Prosody and Enjoyment_

It must be expected then, that there will be different preferences in
choosing a nomenclature for modern English metres, based upon the
differences in the individual physical organism of various metrists, and
upon the strictness of their adherence to the significance of stress,
quantity and number of syllables in the actual forms of verse. Adherents
of musical theories in the interpretation of verse may prefer to speak of
"duple time" instead of iambic-trochaic metres, and of "triple" time for
anapests and dactyls. Natural "stressers" may prefer to call iambic and
anapestic units "rising" feet, to indicate the ascent of stress as one
passes from the weaker to the stronger syllables; and similarly, to call
trochaic and dactylic units "falling" feet, to indicate the descent or
decline of stress as the weaker syllable or syllables succeed the
stronger. Or, combining these two modes of nomenclature, one may
legitimately speak of iambic feet as "duple rising,"

  "And never lifted up a single stone";

trochaic as "duple falling,"

  "Here they are, my fifty perfect poems";

anapestic as "triple rising,"

  "But he lived with a lot of wild mates, and they never would let him be
good";

and dactylic as "triple falling";

  "Cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them."

If a line is felt as "metrical," i.e. divided into approximately equal
time-intervals, the particular label employed to indicate the nature of
the metre is unimportant. It may be left to the choice of each student of
metre, provided he uses his terms consistently. The use of the traditional
terminology "iambic," "trochaic," etc., is convenient, and is open to no
objection if one is careful to make clear the sense in which he employs
such ambiguous terms.

It should also be added, as a means of reconciling the apparently warring
claims of stress and quantity in English poetry, that recent
investigations in recording through delicate instruments the actual
time-intervals used by different persons in reading aloud the same lines
of poetry, prove what has long been suspected, namely, the close
affiliation of quantity with stress.
[Footnote: "Syllabic Quantity in English Verse," by Ada F. Snell, _Pub. Of
Mod, Lang. Ass_., September, 1918.]
Miss Snell's experiments show that the foot in English verse is made up of
syllables 90 per cent of which are, in the stressed position, longer than
those in the unstressed. The average relation of short to long syllables,
is, in spite of a good deal of variation among the individual readers,
almost precisely as 2 to 4--which has always been the accepted ratio for
the relation of short to long syllables in Greek and Roman verse. If one
examines English words in a dictionary, the quantities of the syllables
are certainly not "fixed" as they are in Greek and Latin, but the moment
one begins to read a passage of English poetry aloud, and becomes
conscious of its underlying type of rhythm, he fits elastic units of
"feet" into the steadily flowing or pulsing intervals of time.
The "foot" becomes, as it were, a rubber link in a moving bicycle chain.
The revolutions of the chain mark the rhythm; and the stressed or
unstressed or lightly stressed syllables in each "link" or foot,
accommodate themselves, by almost unperceived expansion and contraction,
to the rhythmic beat of the passage as a whole.

Nor should it be forgotten that the "sense" of words, their
meaning-weight, their rhetorical value in certain phrases, constantly
affects the theoretical number of stresses belonging to a given line. In
blank verse, for instance, the theoretical five chief stresses are often
but three or four in actual practice, lighter stresses taking their place
in order to avoid a pounding monotony, and conversely, as in Milton's
famous line,

  "Rocks, caves, lakes, dens, bogs, fens, and shades of death,"

the rhetorical significance of the monosyllables compels an overloading of
stresses which heightens the desired poetic effect. Corson's _Primer of
English Verse_ and Mayor's _English Metres_ give numerous examples from
the blank verse of Milton and Tennyson to illustrate the constant
substitution and shifting of stresses in order to secure variety of music
and suggestive adaptations of sound to sense. It is well known that
Shakspere's blank verse, as he developed in command of his artistic
resources, shows fewer "end-stopped" lines and more "run-on" lines, with
an increasing proportion of light and weak endings. But the same principle
applies to every type of English rhythm. As soon as the dominant
beat--which is commonly, but not always, apparent in the opening measures
of the poem--once asserts itself, the poet's mastery of technique is
revealed through his skill in satisfying the ear with a verbal music which
is never absolutely identical in its time-intervals, its stresses or its
pitch, with the fixed, wooden pattern of the rhythm he is using.

For the human voice utters syllables which vary their duration, stress and
pitch with each reader. Photographs of voice-waves, as printed by Verrier,
Scripture, and many other laboratory workers, show how great is the
difference between individuals in the intervals covered by the upward and
downward slides or "inflections" which indicate doubt or affirmation. And
these "rising" and "falling" and "circumflex" and "suspended" inflections,
which make up what is called "pitch-accent," are constantly varied, like
the duration and stress of syllables, by the emotions evoked in reading.
Words, phrases, lines and stanzas become colored with emotional overtones
due to the feeling of the instant. Poetry read aloud as something sensuous
and passionate cannot possibly conform exactly to a set mechanical pattern
of rhythm and metre. Yet the hand-woven Oriental rug, though lacking the
geometrical accuracy of a rug made by machinery, reveals a more vital and
intimate beauty of design and execution. Many well-known poets--Tennyson
being perhaps the most familiar example--have read aloud their own verses
with a peculiar chanting sing-song which seemed to over-emphasize the
fundamental rhythm. But who shall correct them? And who is entitled to say
that a line like Swinburne's

  "Full-sailed, wide-winged, poised softly forever asway"

is irregular according to the foot-rule of traditional prosody, when it is
probable, as Mr. C. E. Russell maintains, that Swinburne was here
composing in purely musical and not prosodical rhythm?
[Footnote: "Swinburne and Music," by Charles E. Russell, _North American
Review_, November, 1907. See the quotation in the "Notes and
Illustrations" for this chapter.]

Is it not true, furthermore, as some metrical sceptics like to remind us,
that if we once admit the principle of substitution and equivalence, of
hypermetrical and truncated syllables, of pauses taking the place of
syllables, we can very often make one metre seem very much like another?
The question of calling a given group of lines "iambic" or "trochaic," for
instance, can be made quite arbitrary, depending upon where you begin to
count syllables. "Iambic" with initial truncation or "trochaic" with final
truncation? Tweedle-dum or tweedle-dee? Do you count waves from crest to
crest or from hollow to hollow? When you count the links in a bicycle
chain, do you begin with the slender middle of each link or with one of
the swelling ends? So is it with this "iambic" and "trochaic" matter.
Professor Alden, in a suggestive pamphlet,
[Footnote: "The Mental Side of Metrical Form," already cited.]
confesses that these contrasting concepts of rising and falling metre are
nothing more than concepts, alterable at will.

But while the experts in prosody continue to differ and to dogmatize, the
lover of poetry should remember that versification is far older than the
science of prosody, and that the enjoyment of verse is, for millions of
human beings, as unaffected by theories of metrics as the stars are
unaffected by the theories of astronomers. It is a satisfaction to the
mind to know that the stars in their courses are amenable to law, even
though one be so poor a mathematician as to be incapable of grasping and
stating the law. The mathematics of music and of poetry, while heightening
the intellectual pleasure of those capable of comprehending it, is
admittedly too difficult for the mass of men. But no lover of poetry
should refuse to go as far in theorizing as his ear will carry him. He
will find that his susceptibility to the pulsations of various types of
rhythm, and his delight in the intricacies of metrical device, will be
heightened by the mental effort of attention and analysis. The danger is
that the lover of poetry, wearied by the quarrels of prosodists, and
forgetting the necessity of patience, compromise and freedom from
dogmatism, will lose his curiosity about the infinite variety of metrical
effects. But it is this very curiosity which makes his ear finer, even if
his theories may be wrong. Hundreds of metricists admire and envy
Professor Saintsbury's ear for prose and verse rhythms while
disagreeing wholly with his dogmatic theories of the "foot," and his
system of notation. There are sure to be some days and hours when the
reader of poetry will find himself bored and tired with the effort of
attention to the technique of verse. Then he can stop analysing, close his
eyes, and drift out to sea upon the uncomprehended music.

  "The stars of midnight shall be dear
   To her; and she shall lean her ear
   In many a secret place
   Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
   And beauty born of murmuring sound
   Shall pass into her face."



CHAPTER VI


RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE

  "Subtle rhymes, with ruin rife,
  Murmur in the house of life."
    EMERSON

  "When this verse was first dictated to me I consider'd a Monotonous
  Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakspeare, & all writers of
  English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Rhyming, to
  be a necessary and indispensible part of the verse. But I soon found
  that in the mouth of a true Orator, such monotony was not only
  awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have
  produced a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of
  syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its
  fit place: the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts,
  the mild & gentle for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic for
  inferior parts: all are necessary to each other. Poetry Fetter'd
  Fetters the Human Race!"
    WILLIAM BLAKE


_1. Battles Long Ago_

As we pass from the general consideration of Rhythm and Metre to some of
the special questions involved in Rhyme, Stanza and Free Verse, it may be
well to revert to the old distinction between what we called for
convenience the "outside" and the "inside" of a work of art. In the field
of music we saw that this distinction is almost, if not quite,
meaningless, and in poetry it ought not to be pushed too far. Yet it is
useful in explaining the differences among men as they regard, now the
external form of verse, and now its inner spirit, and as they ask
themselves how these two elements are related. Professor Butcher, in his
_Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_,
[Footnote: Page 147.]
describes the natural tendencies of two sorts of men, who are quite as
persistent to-day as ever they were in Greece in looking at one side only
of the question:

  "We need not agree with a certain modern school who would empty all
  poetry of poetical thought and etherealize it till it melts into a
  strain of music; who sing to us we hardly know of what, but in such a
  way that the echoes of the real world, its men and women, its actual
  stir and conflict, are faint and hardly to be discerned. The poetry,
  we are told, resides not in the ideas conveyed, not in the blending
  of soul and sense, but in the sound itself, in the cadence of the
  verse. Yet, false as this view may be, it is not perhaps more false
  than that other which wholly ignores the effect of musical sound and
  looks only to the thought that is conveyed. Aristotle comes
  perilously near this doctrine."

But it is not Aristotle only who permits himself at times to undervalue
the formal element in verse. It is also Sir Philip Sidney, with his famous
"verse being but an ornament and no cause to poetry" and "it is not riming
and versing that maketh a poet." It is Shelley with his "The distinction
between poets and prose writers in a vulgar error.... Plato was
essentially a poet--the truth and splendor of his imagery, and the melody
of his language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive....
Lord Bacon was a poet." It is Coleridge with his "The writings of Plato,
and Bishop Taylor, and the _Theoria Sacra_ of Burnet, furnish undeniable
proofs that poetry of the highest kind may be written without metre."

In such passages as these, how generous are Sidney, Shelley, and Coleridge
to the prose-men! And yet these same poet-critics, in dozens of other
passages, have explained the fundamental justification of metre, rhyme and
stanza as elements in the harmony of verse. Harmony may be attained, it is
true, by rhythms too complicated to be easily scanned in metrical feet,
and by measures which disregard rhyme and stanza; and poets, as well as
critics, by giving exclusive attention to a single element in harmony, are
able to persuade themselves for the moment that all other elements are
relatively negligible. Milton, in his zeal for blank verse, attacked
rhyme, in which he had already proved himself a master, quite as fiercely
as any of our contemporary champions of free verse. Campion, a trained
musician, argued for a quantitative system of English prosody during the
very period when he was composing, in the accentual system, some of the
most exquisite songs in the language. Daniel, whose _Defense of Rhyme_
(1603) was a triumphant reply to Campion's theory, gave courteous
praise to his opponent's practice. Dryden, most flexible-minded of
critics, argues now for, and now against the use of rhymed heroic couplets
in the drama, fitting his theories to the changing currents of
contemporary taste as well as to the varying, self-determined technique of
his own plays. "Never wholly out of the way, nor in it," was Dryden's
happy phrase to describe the artist's freedom, a freedom always conscious
of underlying law.


_2. Rhyme as a Form of Rhythm_

However theory and practice may happen to coincide or to drift apart, the
fundamental law which justifies rhyme and stanza seems to be this: if
rhythm is a primary fact in poetry, and metre is, as Aristotle called it,
sections of rhythm, any device of repeating identical or nearly identical
sounds at measured intervals is an aid to rhythmical effect. Rhyme is thus
a form, an "externalizing" of rhythm. It is structural as well as
decorative, or rather, it is _one way_ of securing structure, of building
verse. There are other devices, of course, for attaining symmetrical
patterns, for conveying an impression of unity in variety. The "parallel"
structure of Hebrew poetry, where one idea and phrase is balanced against
another,

  "I have slain a man to my wounding--
   And a young man to my hurt--"

or the "envelope" structure of many of the Psalms, where the initial
phrase or idea is repeated at the close, after the insertion of
illustrative matter, thus securing a pattern by the "return" of the main
idea--the closing of the "curve"--may serve to illustrate the universality
of the principle of balance and contrast and repetition in the
architecture of verse. For Hebrew poetry, like the poetry of many
primitive peoples, utilized the natural pleasure which the ear takes in
listening for and perceiving again an already uttered sound. Rhyme
is a gratification of expectation, like the repetition of a chord in music
[Footnote: "Most musical compositions are written in quite obvious rhymes;
and the array of familiar and classical works that have not only rhymes
but distinct stanzaic arrangements exactly like those of poetry is worth
remembering. Mendelssohn's 'Spring Song' and Rubinstein's 'Romance in E
Flat' will occur at once as examples in which the stanzas are
unmistakable." C. E. Russell, "Swinburne and Music," _North American
Review_, November, 1907.]
or of colors in a rug. It assists the mind in grasping the sense-rhythm,--
the design of the piece as a whole. It assists the emotions through the
stimulus to the attention, through the reinforcement which it gives to the
pulsations of the psycho-physical organism.

  "And _sweep_ through the _deep_
     While the stormy tempests blow,
   While the battle rages long and loud
     And the stormy tempests blow."

The pulses cannot help quickening as the rhymes quicken.

But in order to perform this structural, rhythmical purpose it is not
necessary that rhyme be of any single recognized type. As long as the
ear receives the pleasure afforded by accordant sound, any of the various
historical forms of rhyme may serve. It may be Alliteration, the
letter-rhyme or "beginning-rhyme" of Old English poetry:

  "_H_im be _h_ealfe stod _h_yse unweaxen,
   _C_niht on ge_c_ampe, se full _c_aflice."

Tennyson imitates it in his "Battle of Brunanburh":

  "Mighty the Mercian,
  Hard was his hand-play,
  Sparing not any of
  Those that with Anlaf,
  Warriors over the
  Weltering waters
  Borne in the bark's-bosom,
  Drew to this island--
  Doomed to the death."

This repetition of initial letters survives in phrases of prose like
"dead and done with," "to have and to hold," and it is utilized in modern
verse to give further emphasis to accentual syllables. But masters of
alliterative effects, like Keats, Tennyson and Verlaine, constantly employ
alliteration in unaccented syllables so as to color the tone-quality of a
line without a too obvious assault upon the ear. The unrhymed songs of
_The Princess_ are full of these delicate modulations of sound.

In Common rhyme, or "end-rhyme" (found--abound), the accented vowel and
all succeeding sounds are repeated, while the consonants preceding the
accented vowel vary. Assonance, in its stricter sense, means the
repetition of an accented vowel (blackness--dances), while the succeeding
sounds vary, but the terms "assonance" and "consonance" are often employed
loosely to signify harmonious effects of tone-color within a line or group
of lines. Complete or "identical" rhymes (fair--affair), which were
legitimate in Chaucer's time, are not now considered admissible in
English. "Masculine" rhymes are end-rhymes of one syllable; "feminine"
rhymes are end-rhymes of two syllables (uncertain--curtain); internal or
"middle-rhymes" are produced by the repetition at the end of a line of a
rhyme-sound already employed within the line.

  "We were the _first_ that ever _burst_
  Into that silent sea."

In general, the more frequent the repetitions of rhyme, the quicker is the
rhythmic movement of the poem, and conversely. Thus, the _In Memoriam_
stanza attains its peculiar effect of retardation by rhyming the first
line with the fourth, so that the ear is compelled to wait for the
expected recurrence of the first rhyme sound.

  "Beside the river's wooded reach,
  The fortress and the mountain ridge,
  The cataract flashing from the bridge,
  The breaker breaking on the beach."

This gives a movement markedly different from that secured by rearranging
the same lines in alternate rhymes:

  "Beside the river's wooded reach,
  The fortress and the mountain ridge,
  The breaker breaking on the beach,
  The cataract flashing from the bridge."

If all the various forms of rhyme are only different ways of emphasizing
rhythm through the repetition of accordant sounds, it follows that the
varying rhythmical impulses of poets and of readers will demand now a
greater and now a less dependence upon this particular mode of rhythmical
satisfaction. Chaucer complained of the scarcity of rhymes in English as
compared with their affluence in Old French, and it is true that rhyming
is harder in our tongue than in the Romance languages. We have had
magicians of rhyme, like Swinburne, whose very profusion of rhyme-sounds
ends by cloying the taste of many a reader, and sending him back to blank
verse or on to free verse. The Spenserian stanza, which calls for one
fourfold set of rhymes, one threefold, and one double, all cunningly
interlaced, is as complicated a piece of rhyme-harmony as the ear of
the average lover of poetry can carry. It is needless to say that there
are born rhymers, who think in rhyme and whose fecundity of imagery is
multiplied by the excitement of matching sound with sound. They are often
careless in their prodigality, inexact in their swift catching at any
rhyme-word that will serve. At the other extreme are the self-conscious
artists in verse who abhor imperfect concordances, and polish their rhymes
until the life and freshness disappear. For sheer improvising cleverness
of rhyme Byron is still unmatched, but he often contents himself with
approximate rhymes that are nearly as bad as some of Mrs. Browning's and
Whittier's. Very different is the deliberate artifice of the following
lines, where the monotony of the rhyme-sound fits the "solemn ennui"
of the trailing peacocks;

                              I
  "From out the temple's pillared portico,
  Thence to the gardens where blue poppies blow
  The gold and emerald peacocks saunter slow,
  Trailing their solemn ennui as they go,
  Trailing their melancholy and their woe.

                              II
  "Trailing their melancholy and their woe,
  Trailing their solemn ennui as they go
  The gold and emerald peacocks saunter slow
  From out the gardens where blue poppies blow
  Thence to the temple's pillared portico."
[Footnote: Frederic Adrian Lopere, "World Wisdom," The International,
September, 1915.]

Rhyme, then, is not merely a "jingle," it is rather, as Samuel Johnson
said of all versification, a "joining music with reason." Its blending of
decorative with structural purpose is in truth "a dictate of nature," or,
to quote E. C. Stedman, "In real, that is, spontaneous minstrelsy, the
fittest assonance, consonance, time, even rime,... _come of themselves
with imaginative thought_."


_3. Stanza_

There are some lovers of poetry, however, who will grant this theoretical
justification of rhyme as an element in the harmony of verse, without
admitting that the actual rhyming stanzas of English verse show
"spontaneous minstrelsy." The word "stanza" or "strophe" means literally
"a resting-place," a halt or turn, that is to say, after a uniform group
of rhymed lines. Alden defines it in his _English Verse_ as "the largest
unit of verse-measure ordinarily recognized. It is based not so much on
rhythmical divisions as on periods either rhetorical or melodic; that is,
a short stanza will roughly correspond to the period of a sentence, and a
long one to that of a paragraph, while in lyrical verse the original idea
was to conform the stanza to the melody for which it was written."
"Normally, then," Alden adds in his _Introduction to Poetry_, "all the
stanzas of a poem are identical in the number, the length, the metre, and
the rime-scheme of the corresponding verses." The question arises,
therefore, whether those units which we call "stanzas" are arbitrary or
vital. Have the lines been fused into their rhymed grouping by passionate
feeling, or is their unity a mere mechanical conformation to a pattern? In
Theodore Watts-Dunton's well-known article on "Poetry" in the
_Encyclopaedia Brittanica_
[Footnote: Now reprinted, with many expansions, in his _Poetry and the
Renascence of Wonder_. E. P. Dutton, New York.]
the phrases "stanzaic law" and "emotional law" are used to represent the
two principles at issue:

  "In modern prosody the arrangement of the rhymes and the length of
  the lines in any rhymed metrical passage may be determined either by
  a fixed stanzaic law, or by a law infinitely deeper--by the law which
  impels the soul, in a state of poetic exultation, to seize hold of
  every kind of metrical aid, such as rhyme, caesura, etc., for the
  purpose of accentuating and marking off each shade of emotion as it
  arises, regardless of any demands of stanza.... If a metrical passage
  does not gain immensely by being written independently of stanzaic
  law, it loses immensely; and for this reason, perhaps, that the great
  charm of the music of all verse, as distinguished from the music of
  prose, is inevitableness of cadence. In regular metres we enjoy the
  pleasure of feeling that the rhymes will inevitably fall under a
  recognized law of couplet or stanza. But if the passage flows
  independently of these, it must still flow inevitably--it must, in
  short, show that it is governed by another and a yet deeper force,
  the inevitableness of emotional expression."

This distinction between "stanzaic law" and "emotional law" is highly
suggestive and not merely in its application to the metres of the famous
regular and irregular odes of English verse. It applies also to the
infinite variety of stanza-patterns which English poetry has taken over
from Latin and French sources and developed through centuries
ofexperimentation, and it affords a key, as we shall see in a moment, to
some of the vexed questions involved in free verse.

Take first the more familiar of the stanza forms of English verse. They
are conveniently indicated by using letters of the alphabet to correspond
with each rhyme-sound, whenever repeated.

Thus the rhymed couplet

  "Around their prows the ocean roars,
  And chafes beneath their thousand oars"

may be marked as "four-stress iambic," rhyming _aa_; the heroic couplet

  "The zeal of fools offends at any time,
  But most of all the zeal of fools in rhyme"

as five-stress iambic, rhyming _aa_. The familiar measure of English
ballad poetry,

  "The King has written a braid letter,
    And signed it wi' his hand,
  And sent it to Sir Patrick Spence,
    Was walking on the sand"

is alternating four-stress and three-stress iambic, rhyming _ab cb_. The
_In Memoriam_ stanza,

  "Now rings the woodland loud and long,
    The distance takes a lovelier hue,
    And drown'd in yonder living blue
  The lark becomes a sightless song"

is four-stress iambic, rhyming _ab ba_.

The Chaucerian stanza rhymes _a b a b b c c_:

  "'Loke up, I seye, and telle me what she is
  Anon, that I may gone aboute thi nede:
  Know iche hire ought? for my love telle me this;
  Thanne wolde I hopen the rather for to spede.'
  Tho gan the veyne of Troilus to blede,
  For he was hit, and wex alle rede for schame;
  'Aha!' quod Pandare, 'here bygynneth game.'"

Byron's "ottava rima" rhymes _a b a b a b c c_:

  "A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping,
    Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye
  Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping
    In sight, then lost amidst the forestry
  Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping
    On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy;
  A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown
  On a fool's head--and there is London Town!"

The Spenserian stanza rhymes _a b a b b c b c c_, with an extra foot in
the final line:

  "Hee had a faire companion of his way,
  A goodly lady clad in scarlot red,
  Purfled with gold and pearle of rich assay;
  And like a Persian mitre on her hed
  Shee wore, with crowns and owches garnished,
  The which her lavish lovers to her gave:
  Her wanton palfrey all was overspred
  With tinsell trappings, woven like a wave,
  Whose bridle rung with golden bels and bosses brave."

In considering these various groups of lines which we call stanzas it is
clear that we have to do with thought-units as well as feeling-units, and
that both thought-units and feeling-units should be harmonized, if
possible, with the demands of beauty and variety of sound as represented
by the rhymes. It is not absurd to speak of the natural "size" of poetic
thoughts. Pope, for instance, often works with ideas of couplet size, just
as Martial sometimes amused himself with ideas of a still smaller epigram
size, or Omar Khayyam with thoughts and fancies that came in quatrain
sizes. Many sonnets fail of effectiveness because the contained thought is
too scanty or too full to receive adequate expression in the fourteen
lines demanded by the traditional sonnet form. They are sometimes only
quatrain ideas, blown up big with words to fill out the fourteen
lines, or, on the contrary, as often with the Elizabethans, they are whole
odes or elegies, remorselessly packed into the fashionable fourteen-line
limit. No one who has given attention to the normal length of phrases and
sentences doubts that there are natural "breathfuls" of words
corresponding to the units of ideas; and when ideas are organized by
emotion, there are waves, gusts, or ripples of words, matching the waves
of feeling. In the ideal poetic "pattern," these waves of idea, feeling
and rhythmic speech would coincide more or less completely; we should have
a union of "emotional law" with "stanzaic law," the soul of poetry would
find its perfect embodiment.

But if we turn the pages of any collection of English poetry, say the
_Golden Treasury_ or the _Oxford Book of English Verse_, we find something
very different from this ideal embodiment of each poetic emotion in a form
delicately moulded to the particular species of emotion revealed. We
discover that precisely similar stanzaic patterns--like similar metrical
patterns--are often used to express diametrically opposite feelings,--let
us say, joy and sorrow, doubt and exultation, victory and defeat. The
"common metre" of English hymnology is thus seen to be a rough mould into
which almost any kind of religious emotion may be poured. If "trochaic"
measures do not always trip it on a light fantastic toe, neither do
"iambic" measures always pace sedately. Doubtless there is a certain
general fitness, in various stanza forms, for this or that poetic purpose:
the stanzas employed by English or Scotch balladry are admittedly
excellent for story-telling; Spenser's favorite stanza is unrivalled
for painting dream-pictures and rendering dream-music, but less available
for pure narration; Chaucer's seven-line stanza, so delicately balanced
upon that fourth, pivotal line, can paint a picture and tell a story too;
Byron's _ottava rima_ has a devil-may-care jauntiness, borrowed, it is
true, from his Italian models, but perfectly fitted to Byron's own mood;
the rhymed couplets of Pope sting and glitter like his antitheses, and the
couplets of Dryden have their "resonance like a great bronze coin thrown
down on marble"; each great artist in English verse, in short, chooses by
instinct the general stanza form best suited to his particular purpose,
and then moulds its details with whatever cunning he may possess. But the
significant point is this: "stanzaic law" makes for uniformity, for the
endless repetition of the chosen pattern, which must still be recognized
as a pattern, however subtly the artist modulates his details; and in
adjusting the infinitely varied material of thought and feeling, phrase
and image, picture and story to the fixed stanzaic design, there are bound
to be gaps and patches, stretchings and foldings of the thought-stuff,--
for even as in humble tailor-craft, this many-colored coat of poetry must
be cut according to the cloth as well as according to the pattern. How
many pages of even the _Oxford Book of English Verse_ are free from some
touch of feebleness, of redundancy, of constraint due to the remorseless
requirements of the stanza? The line must be filled out, whether or not
the thought is quite full enough for it; rhyme must match rhyme, even if
the thought becomes as far-fetched as the rhyming word; the stanza, in
short, demands one kind of perfection as a constantly repeated musical
design, as beauty of form; and another kind of perfection as the
expression of human emotion. Sometimes these two perfections of "form" and
"significance" are miraculously wedded, stanza after stanza, and we have
our "Ode to a Nightingale," or "Ode to Autumn" as the result. (And perhaps
the best, even in this kind, are but shadows, when compared with the
absolute union of truth and beauty as the poetic idea first took rhythmic
form in the brain of the poet.)

Yet more often lovers of poetry must content themselves, not with such
"dictates of nature" as these poems, but with approximations. Each
stanzaic form has its conveniences, its "fatal facility," its natural
fitness for singing a song or telling a story or turning a thought over
and over into music. Intellectual readers will always like the
epigrammatic "snap" of the couplet, and Spenser will remain, largely
because of his choice of stanza, the "poet's poet." Perhaps
the very necessity of fitting rhymes together stimulates as much poetic
activity as it discourages; for many poets have testified that the delight
of rhyming adds energy to the imagination. If, as Shelley said, "the mind
in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an
inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness," why may it not be the
breath of rhyme, as well as any other form of rhythmic energy, which
quickens its drooping flame? And few poets, furthermore, will admit that
they are really in bondage to their stanzas. They love to dance in these
fetters, and even when wearing the same fetters as another poet, they
nevertheless invent movements of their own, so that Mr. Masefield's
"Chaucerian" stanzas are really not so much Chaucer's as Masefield's.

Each Ulysses makes and bends his own bow, after all; it is only the
unsuccessful suitors for the honors of poetic craftsmanship who complain
of its difficulties. Something of our contemporary impatience with fixed
stanzaic forms is due perhaps to the failure to recognize that the greater
poets succeed in making over every kind of poetic pattern in the act of
employing it, just as a Chopin minuet differs from a Liszt minuet,
although both composers are using the same fundamental form of dance
music. We must allow for the infinite variety of creative intention,
technique and result. The true defence of rhyme and stanza against the
arguments of extreme advocates of free verse is to point out that
rhyme and stanza are natural structural devices for securing certain
effects. There are various types of bridges for crossing different kinds
of streams; no one type of bridge is always and everywhere the best. To do
away with rhyme and stanza is to renounce some modes of poetic beauty; it
is to resolve that there shall be one less way of crossing the stream. An
advocate of freedom in the arts may well admit that the artist may bridge
his particular stream in any way he can,--or he may ford it or swim it or
go over in an airplane if he chooses. But some method must be found of
getting his ideas and emotions "across" into the mind and feelings of the
readers of his poetry. If this can adequately be accomplished without
recourse to rhyme and stanza, very well; there is _Paradise Lost_, for
instance, and _Hamlet_. But here we are driven back again upon the
countless varieties of artistic intention and craftsmanship and effect.
Each method--and there are as many methods as there are poets and far
more, for craftsmen like Milton and Tennyson try hundreds of methods in
their time--is only a medium through which the artist is endeavoring to
attain a special result. It is one way--only one, and perhaps not the best
way--of trying to cross the stream.


_4. Free Verse_

Recalling now the discussion of the rhythms of prose in the previous
chapter, and remembering that rhyme and stanza are special forms of
reinforcing the impulse of rhythm, what shall be said of free verse? It
belongs, unquestionably, in that "neutral zone" which some readers, in Dr.
Patterson's phrase, instinctively appropriate as "prose experience," and
others as "verse experience." It renounces metre--or rather endeavors to
renounce it, for it does not always succeed. It professes to do away with
rhyme and stanza, although it may play cunningly upon the sounds of like
and unlike words, and it may arrange phrases into poetic paragraphs,
which, aided by the art of typography, secure a kind of stanzaic effect.
It cannot, however, do away with the element of rhythm, with ordered time.
The moment free verse ceases to be felt as rhythmical, it ceases to be
felt as poetry. This is admitted by its advocates and its opponents
alike. The real question at issue then, is the manner in which free verse
may secure the effects of rhythmic unity and variety, without, on the one
hand, resorting to the obvious rhythms of prose, or on the other hand,
without repeating the recognized patterns of verse. There are many
competent critics who maintain with Edith Wyatt that "on an earth where
there is nothing to wear but clothes, nothing to eat but food, there is
also nothing to read but prose and poetry." "According to the results of
our experiments," testifies Dr. Patterson, "there is no psychological
meaning to claims for a third _genre_ between regular verse and prose,
except in the sense of a jumping back and forth from one side of the fence
to the other."
[Footnote: _The Rhythm of Prose_, p. 77.]
And in the preface to his second edition, after having listened to Miss
Amy Lowell's readings of free verse, Dr. Patterson remarks: "What is
achieved, as a rule, in Miss Lowell's case, is emotional prose,
emphatically phrased, excellent and moving. _Spaced prose_, we may call
it."

Now "spaced prose" is a useful expression, inasmuch as it calls attention
to the careful emphasis and balance of phrases which up so much of the
rhetorical structure of free verse, and it also serves to remind us of the
part which typography plays in "spacing" these phrases, and stressing for
the eye their curves and "returns." But we are all agreed that
typographical appeals to the eye are infinitely deceptive in blurring the
distinction between verse and prose, and that the trained ear must be the
only arbiter as to poetical and pseudo-poetical effects. Ask a lover of
Walt Whitman whether "spaced prose" is the right label for "Out of the
Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and he will scoff at you. He will maintain that
following the example of the rich broken rhythms of the English Bible, the
example of Ossian, Blake, and many another European experimenter during
the Romantic epoch, Whitman really succeeded in elaborating a mode of
poetical expression, nearer for the most part to recitative than to
aria, yet neither pure declamation nor pure song: a unique embodiment of
passionate feeling, a veritable "neutral zone," which refuses to let
itself be annexed to either "prose" or "verse" as those terms are
ordinarily understood, but for which "free verse" is precisely the right
expression. _Leaves of Grass_ (1855) remains the most interesting of all
experiments with free verse, written as it was by an artist whose natural
rhythmical endowment was extraordinary, and whose technical curiosity and
patience in modulating his tonal effects was unwearied by failures and
undiscouraged by popular neglect. But the case for free verse does not,
after all, stand or fall with Walt Whitman. His was merely the most
powerful poetic personality among the countless artificers who have
endeavored to produce rhythmic and tonal beauty through new structural
devices.

Readers who are familiar with the experiments of contemporary poets will
easily recognize four prevalent types of "free verse":

(a) Sometimes what is printed as "free verse" is nothing but prose
disguised by the art of typography, i.e. judged by the ear, it is made up
wholly of the rhythms of prose.

(b) Sometimes the prose rhythms predominate, without excluding a mixture
of the recognized rhythms of verse.

(c) Sometimes verse rhythms predominate, and even fixed metrical feet are
allowed to appear here and there.

(d) Sometimes verse rhythms and metres are used exclusively, although in
new combinations which disguise or break up the metrical pattern.

A parody by F. P. A. in _The Conning Tower_ affords a convenient
illustration of the "a" type:

ADD SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY

Peoria, Ill., Jan. 24.--The Spoon River levee, which protected thousands
of acres of farm land below Havana, Ill., fifty-five miles south of here,
broke this morning.

A score or more of families fled to higher ground. The towns of Havana,
Lewiston and Duncan Mills are isolated. Two dozen head of cattle are
reported drowned on the farm of John Himpshell, near Havana.--Associated
Press dispatch.

  Edgar Lee Masters wrote a lot of things
  About me and the people who
  Inhabited my banks.
  All of them, all are sleeping on the hill.
  Herbert Marshall, Amelia Garrick, Enoch Dunlap,
  Ida Frickey, Alfred Moir, Archibald Highbie and the rest.
  Me he gave no thought to--
  Unless, perhaps, to think that I, too, was asleep.
  Those people on the hill, I thought,
  Have grown famous;
  But nobody writes about me.
  I was only a river, you know,
  But I had my pride,
  So one January day I overflowed my banks;
  It wasn't much of a flood, Mr. Masters,
  But it put me on the front page
  And in the late dispatches
  Of the Associated Press.

It is clear that the quoted words of the Associated Press dispatch from
Peoria are pure prose, devoid of rhythmical pattern, devoted to a plain
statement of fact. So it is with the imaginary speech of the River. Not
until the borrowed fourth line:

  "All of them, all are sleeping on the hill,"

do we catch the rhythm (and even the metre) of verse, and F. P. A. is
here imitating Mr. Masters's way of introducing a strongly rhythmical and
even metrical line into a passage otherwise flatly "prosaic" in its
time-intervals. But "free verse" adopts many other cadences of English
prose besides this "formless" structure which goes with matter-of-fact
statement. It also reproduces the neat, polished, perhaps epigrammatic
sentence which crystallizes a fact or a generalization; the more emotional
and "moving" period resulting from heightened feeling, and finally the
frankly imitative and ornamented cadences of descriptive and highly
impassioned prose. Let us take some illustrations from Sidney Lanier's
_Poem Outlines_, a posthumously published collection of some of his
sketches for poems, "jotted in pencil on the backs of envelopes, on the
margins of musical programmes, or little torn scraps of paper."

  "The United States in two hundred years
    has made Emerson out of a witch-burner."

This is polished, graphic prose. Here is an equally graphic, but more
impassioned sentence, with the staccato rhythm and the alliterative
emphasis of good angry speech:

    _To the Politicians_

  "You are servants. Your thoughts are the thoughts of cooks curious to
  skim perquisites from every pan, your quarrels are the quarrels of
  scullions who fight for the privilege of cleaning the pot with most
  leavings in it, your committees sit upon the landings of back-stairs,
  and your quarrels are the quarrels of kitchens."

But in the following passage, apparently a first draft for some lines in
_Hymns of the Marshes_, Lanier takes a strongly rhythmical, heavily
punctuated type of prose, as if he were writing a Collect:

  "The courses of the wind, and the shifts thereof, as also what way the
  clouds go; and that which is happening a long way off; and the full face
  of the sun; and the bow of the Milky Way from end to end; as also the
  small, the life of the fiddler-crab, and the household of the marsh-hen;
  and more, the translation of black ooze into green blade of marsh-grass,
  which is as if filth bred heaven: This a man seeth upon the marsh."

In that rhapsody of the marsh there is no recognizable metrical scheme, in
spite of the plainly marked rhythm, but in the following symbolic sketch
the imitation of the horse's ambling introduces an element of regular
metre:

  "Ambling, ambling round the ring,
   Round the ring of daily duty,
   Leap, Circus-rider, man, through the paper hoop of death,
   --Ah, lightest thou, beyond death, on this same slow-ambling,
     padded horse of life."

And finally, in such fragments as the following, Lanier uses a regular
metre of "English verse"--it is true with a highly irregular third line--

                    "And then
  A gentle violin mated with the flute,
  And both flew off into a wood of harmony,
  Two doves of tone."

It is clear that an artist in words, in jotting down thoughts and images
as they first emerge, may instinctively use language which is subtly
blended of verse and prose, like many rhapsodical passages in the private
journals of Thoreau and Emerson. When duly elaborated, these passages
usually become, in the hands of the greater artists, either one thing or
the other, i.e. unmistakable prose or unmistakable verse. But it remains
true, I think, that there is another artistic instinct which impels
certain poets to blend the types in the endeavor to reach a new and hybrid
beauty.
[Footnote: Some examples of recent verse are printed in the "Notes and
Illustrations" for this chapter.]

Take these illustrations of the "b" type--i.e. prose rhythms predominant,
with some admixture of the rhythms of verse:

  "I hear footsteps over my head all night.
  They come and go. Again they come and again they go all night.
  They come one eternity in four paces and they go one eternity in four
    paces, and between the coming and the going there is Silence and Night
    and the Infinite.
  For infinite are the nine feet of a prison cell, and endless is the
    march of him who walks between the yellow brick wall and the red iron
    gate, thinking things that cannot be chained and cannot be locked, but
    that wander far away in the sunlit world, in their wild pilgrimage
    after destined goals.
  Throughout the restless night I hear the footsteps over my head.
  Who walks? I do not know. It is the phantom of the jail, the sleepless
    brain, a man, the man, the Walker.
  One--two--three--four; four paces and the wall."
[Footnote: From Giovanitti's "The Walker."]

Or take this:

  "Jerusalem a handful of ashes blown by the wind, extinct,
  The Crusaders' streams of shadowy midnight troops sped with the sunrise,
  Amadis, Tancred, utterly gone, Charlemagne, Roland, Oliver gone,
  Palmerin, ogre, departed, vanish'd the turrets that Usk from its waters
    reflected,
  Arthur vanish'd with all his knights, Merlin and Lancelot and Galahad,
    all gone, dissolv'd utterly like an exhalation;
  Pass'd! Pass'd! for us, forever pass'd, that once so mighty world, now
    void, inanimate, phantom world,
  Embroider'd, dazzling, foreign world, with all its gorgeous legends,
    myths,
  Its kings and castles proud, its priests and warlike lords and courtly
    dames,
  Pass'd to its charnel vault, coffin'd with crown and armor on,
  Blazon'd with Shakspere's purple page,
  And dirged by Tennyson's sweet sad rhyme."
[Footnote: Whitman, "Song of the Exposition."]

Here are examples of the "c" type--i.e. predominant verse rhythms, with
occasional emphasis upon metrical feet:

  "Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight?
  Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?
  List to the yarn, as my grandmother's father the sailor told it to me.

  "Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,)
  His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and
    never was, and never will be;
  Along the lower'd eve he came horribly raking us.

       *       *       *       *       *
  "Our frigate takes fire,
  The other asks if we demand quarter?
  If our colors are struck and the fighting done?

  "Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain,
  _We have not struck_, he composedly cries, _we have just begun our part
    of the fighting_.

       *       *       *       *       *

  "One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are
    sinking.

  "Serene stands the little captain,
  He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low,
  His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns.
  Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us."
[Footnote: Whitman. "Song of Myself."]

Read William Blake's description of the Bastille, in his recently printed
poem on "The French Revolution":

  "'Seest thou yonder dark castle, that moated around, keeps this city of
    Paris in awe?
  Go, command yonder tower, saying: "Bastille, depart! and take thy
    shadowy course;
  Overstep the dark river, thou terrible tower, and get thee up into the
    country ten miles.
  And thou black southern prison, move along the dusky road to Versailles;
    there
  Frown on the gardens--and, if it obey and depart, then the King will
    disband
  This war-breathing army; but, if it refuse, let the Nation's Assembly
    thence learn
  That this army of terrors, that prison of horrors, are the bands of the
    murmuring kingdom."'

  "Like the morning star arising above the black waves, when a shipwrecked
    soul sighs for morning,
  Thro' the ranks, silent, walk'd the Ambassador back to the Nation's
    Assembly, and told
  The unwelcome message. Silent they heard; then a thunder roll'd round
    loud and louder;
  Like pillars of ancient halls and ruins of times remote, they sat.
  Like a voice from the dim pillars Mirabeau rose; the thunders subsided
    away;
  A rushing of wings around him was heard as he brighten'd, and cried out
    aloud:
  'Where is the General of the Nation?' The walls re-echo'd: 'Where is the
    General of the Nation?'"

And here are passages made up exclusively of the rhythms and metres of
verse, in broken or disguised patterns ("d" type):

  "Under a stagnant sky,
  Gloom out of gloom uncoiling into gloom,
  The River, jaded and forlorn,
  Welters and wanders wearily--wretchedly--on;
  Yet in and out among the ribs
  Of the old skeleton bridge, as in the piles
  Of some dead lake-built city, full of skulls,
  Worm-worn, rat-riddled, mouldy with memories,
  Lingers to babble, to a broken tune
  (Once, O the unvoiced music of my heart!)
  So melancholy a soliloquy
  It sounds as it might tell
  The secret of the unending grief-in-grain,
  The terror of Time and Change and Death,
  That wastes this floating, transitory world."
[Footnote: W. E. Henley, "To James McNeill Whistler." ]

Or take this:

  "They see the ferry
  On the broad, clay-laden
  Lone Chorasmian stream;--thereon,
  With snort and strain,
  Two horses, strongly swimming, tow
  The ferry-boat, with woven ropes
  To either bow
  Firm-harness'd by the mane; a chief,
  With shout and shaken spear,
  Stands at the prow, and guides them; but astern
  The cowering merchants in long robes
  Sit pale beside their wealth
  Of silk-bales and of balsam-drops,
  Of gold and ivory,
  Of turquoise-earth and amethyst,
  Jasper and chalcedony,
  And milk-barr'd onyx-stones.
  The loaded boat swings groaning
  In the yellow eddies;
  The Gods behold them."
[Footnote: Arnold, "The Strayed Reveller."]


_5. Discovery and Rediscovery_

It is not pretended that the four types of free verse which have been
illustrated are marked by clear-cut generic differences. They shade into
one another. But they are all based upon a common sensitiveness to the
effects of rhythmic prose, a common restlessness under what is felt to be
the restraint of metre and rhyme, and a common endeavor to break down the
conventional barrier which separates the characteristic beauty of prose
speech from the characteristic beauty of verse. In this endeavor to
obliterate boundary lines, to secure in one art the effects hitherto
supposed to be the peculiar property of another, free verse is only one
more evidence of the widespread "confusion of the genres" which marks
contemporary artistic effort. It is possible, with the classicists, to
condemn outright this blurring of values.
[Footnote: See, for instance, Irving Babbitt, _The New Laokoon_. Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1910.]
One may legitimately maintain, with Edith Wyatt, that the traditional
methods of English verse are to the true artist not oppressions but
liberations. She calls it "a fallacious idea that all individual and all
realistic expression in poetry is annulled by the presence of distinctive
musical discernment, by the movement of rhyme with its keen heightening of
the impulse of rhythm, by the word-shadows of assonance, by harmonies,
overtones and the still beat of ordered time, subconsciously perceived but
precise as the sense of the symphony leader's flying baton. To readers, to
writers for whom the tonal quality of every language is an intrinsic value
these faculties of poetry serve not at all as cramping oppressions, but as
great liberations for the communication of truth."
[Footnote: _New Republic_, August 24, 1918.]
But many practitioners of free verse would reply that this is not a matter
for theorizing, but of individual preference, and that in their endeavor
to communicate new modes of feeling, new aspects of beauty, they have a
right to the use of new forms, even if those new forms be compounded out
of the wreck of old ones. This argument for freedom of experiment is
unanswerable; the true test of its validity lies in the results secured.
That free verse has now and then succeeded in creating lovely flowering
hybrids seems to me as indubitable as the magical tricks which Mr. Burbank
has played with flowers and fruits. But the smiling Dame Nature sets her
inexorable limits to "Burbanking"; she allows it to go about so far, and
no farther. Freakish free verse, like freakish plants and animals, gets
punished by sterility. Some of the "imagist" verse patterns are uniquely
and intricately beautiful. Wrought in a medium which is neither wholly
verse nor wholly prose, but which borrows some of the beauty peculiar to
each art, they are their own excuse for being. And nevertheless they may
not prove fertile. It may be that they have been produced by "pushing a
medium farther than it will go."

It must be admitted, furthermore, that a great deal of contemporary free
verse has been written by persons with an obviously incomplete command
over the resources of expression. Max Eastman has called it "Lazy Verse,"
the product of "aboriginal indolence"; and he adds this significant
distinction, "In all arts it is the tendency of those who are ungrown to
confuse the expression of intense feeling with the intense expression of
feeling--which last is all the world will long listen to." Shakspere,
Milton, Keats are masters of concentrated, intensest expression: their
verse, at its best, is structural as an oak. Those of us who have read
with keen momentary enjoyment thousands of pages of the "New Verse,"
are frequently surprised to find how little of it stamps itself upon the
memory. Intense feeling has gone into these formless forms, very
certainly, but the medium soaks up the feeling like blotting-paper. In
order to live, poetry must be plastic, a stark embodiment of emotion, and
not a solution of emotion.

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

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

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

     "Have the elder races halted?
  Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
  We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
     Pioneers! O pioneers!"




        PART II

THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR


  "O hearken, love, the battle-horn!
   The triumph clear, the silver scorn!
   O hearken where the echoes bring.
   Down the grey disastrous morn,
   Laughter and rallying!"
     WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY



CHAPTER VII

THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY


  "'Lyrical,' it may be said, implies a form of musical utterance
  in words governed by overmastering emotion and set free by a
  powerfully concordant rhythm."
    ERNEST RHYS, _Lyric Poetry_


That "confusion of the genres" which characterizes so much of contemporary
art has not obliterated the ancient division of poetry into three chief
types, namely, lyric, epic and dramatic. We still mean by these words very
much what the Greeks meant: a "lyric" is something sung, an "epic" tells
a story, a "drama" sets characters in action. Corresponding to these
general purposes of the three kinds of poetry, is the difference which
Watts-Dunton has discussed so suggestively: namely, that in the lyric the
author reveals himself fully, while in the "epic" or narrative poem the
author himself is but partly revealed, and in the drama the author is
hidden behind his characters. Or, putting this difference in another way,
the same critic points out that the true dramatists possess "absolute"
vision, i.e. unconditioned by the personal impulses of the poet himself,
whereas the vision of the lyrist is "relative," conditioned by his own
situation and mood. The pure lyrist, says Watts-Dunton, has one voice and
sings one tune; the epic poets and quasi-dramatists have one voice but can
sing several tunes, while the true dramatists, with their objective,
"absolute" vision of the world, have many tongues and can sing in all
tunes.


_1. A Rough Classification_

Passing over the question of the historical origins of those various
species of poetry, such as the relation of early hymnic songs and
hero-songs to the epic, and the relation of narrative material and method
to the drama, let us try to arrange in some sort of order the kinds of
poetry with which we are familiar. Suppose we follow Watts-Dunton's hint,
and start, as if it were from a central point, with the Pure Lyric, the
expression of the Ego in song. Shelley's "Stanzas Written in Dejection
near Naples," Coleridge's "Ode to Dejection," Wordsworth's "She dwelt
among the untrodden ways," Tennyson's "Break--Break" will serve for
illustrations. These are subjective, personal poems. Their vision
is "relative" to the poet's actual circumstances. Yet in a "dramatic
lyric" like Byron's "Isles of Greece" or Tennyson's "Sir Galahad" it is
clear that the poet's vision is not occupied primarily with himself, but
with another person. In a dramatic monologue like Tennyson's "Simeon
Stylites" or Browning's "The Bishop orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's
Church" it is not Tennyson and Browning themselves who are talking, but
imaginary persons viewed objectively, as far as Tennyson and Browning were
capable of such objectivity. The next step would be the Drama, preoccupied
with characters in action--the "world of men," in short, and not the
personal subjective world of the highly sensitized lyric poet.

Let us now move away from that pure lyric centre in another direction. In
a traditional ballad like "Sir Patrick Spens," a modern ballad like
Tennyson's "The Revenge," or Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," is not the
poet's vision becoming objectified, directed upon events or things outside
of the circle of his own subjective emotion? In modern epic verse, like
Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur," Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum," Morris's
"Sigurd the Volsung," and certainly in the "Aeneid" and the "Song of
Roland," the poet sinks his own personality, as far as possible, in the
objective narration of events. And in like manner, the poet may turn from
the world of action to the world of repose, and portray Nature as
enfolding and subduing the human element in his picture. In Keats's "Ode
to Autumn," Shelley's "Autumn," in Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper,"
Browning's "Where the Mayne Glideth," we find poets absorbed in the
external scene or object and striving to paint it. It is true that the
born lyrists betray themselves constantly, that they suffuse both the
world of repose and the world of action with the coloring of their own
unquiet spirits. They cannot keep themselves wholly out of the story they
are telling or the picture they are painting; and it is for this reason
that we speak of "lyrical" passages even in the great objective dramas,
passages colored with the passionate personal feelings of the poet. For he
cannot be wholly "absolute" even if he tries: he will invent favorite
characters and make them the mouthpiece of his own fancies: he will devise
favorite situations, and use them to reveal his moral judgment of men and
women, and his general theory of human life.


_2. Definitions_

While we must recognize, then, that the meaning of the word "lyrical" has
been broadened so as to imply, frequently, a quality of poetry rather than
a mere form of poetry, let us go back for a moment to the original
significance of the word. Derived from "lyre," it meant first a song
written for musical accompaniment, say an ode of Pindar; then a poem whose
form suggests this original musical accompaniment; then, more loosely, a
poem which has the quality of music, and finally, purely personal poetry.
[Footnote: See the definitions in John Erskine's _Elizabethan Lyric_, E.
B. Heed's _English Lyrical Poetry_, Ernest Rhys's _Lyric Poetry_, F. E.
Schelling's _The English Lyric_, John Drinkwater's _The Lyric_, C. E.
Whitmore in _Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass._, December, 1918.]
"All songs, all poems following classical lyric forms; all short poems
expressing the writer's moods and feelings in rhythm that suggests music,
are to be considered lyrics," says Professor Reed. "The lyric is concerned
with the poet, his thoughts, his emotions, his moods, and his passions....
With the lyric subjective poetry begins," says Professor Schelling. "The
characteristic of the lyric is that it is the product of the pure poetic
energy unassociated with other energies," says Mr. Drinkwater. These are
typical recent definitions. Francis T. Palgrave, in the Preface to the
_Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics_, while omitting to stress
the elements of musical quality and of personal emotion, gives a working
rule for anthologists which has proved highly useful. He held the term
"lyrical" "to imply that each poem shall turn on a single thought, feeling
or situation." The critic Scherer also gave an admirable practical
definition when he remarked that the lyric "reflects a situation or a
desire." Keats's sonnet "On first looking into Chapman's Homer," Charles
Kingsley's "Airlie Beacon" and Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" (_Oxford
Book of Verse_, Nos. 634, 739 and 743) are suggestive illustrations of
Scherer's dictum.


_3. General Characteristics_

But the lyric, however it may be defined, has certain general
characteristics which are indubitable. The lyric "vision," that is to say,
the experience, thought, emotion which gives its peculiar quality to lyric
verse, making it "simple, sensuous, passionate" beyond other species of
poetry, is always marked by freshness, by egoism, and by genuineness.

To the lyric poet all must seem new; each sunrise "_herrlich wie am ersten
Tag._" "Thou know'st 'tis common," says Hamlet's mother, speaking of his
father's death, "Why seems it so particular with thee?" But to men of the
lyrical temperament everything is "particular." Age does not alter their
exquisite sense of the novelty of experience. Tennyson's lines on "Early
Spring," written at seventy-four, Browning's "Never the Time and the
Place" written at seventy-two, Goethe's love-lyrics written when he was
eighty, have all the delicate bloom of adolescence. Sometimes this
freshness seems due in part to the poet's early place in the development
of his national literature: he has had, as it were, the first chance at
his particular subject. There were countless springs, of course, before a
nameless poet, about 1250, wrote one of the first English lyrics for which
we have a contemporary musical score:

  "Sumer is icumen in,
   Lhude sing cuccu."

But the words thrill the reader, even now, as he hears in fancy that
cuckoo's song,

  "Breaking the silence of the seas
   Beyond the farthest Hebrides."

Or, the lyric poet may have the luck to write at a period when settled,
stilted forms of poetical expression are suddenly done away with. Perhaps
he may have helped in the emancipation, like Wordsworth and Coleridge in
the English Romantic Revival, or Victor Hugo in the France of 1830. The
new sense of the poetic possibilities of language reacts upon the
imaginative vision itself. Free verse, in our own time, has profited by
this rejuvenation of the poetic vocabulary, by new phrases and cadences to
match new moods. Sometimes an unwonted philosophical insight makes all
things new to the poet who possesses it. Thus Emerson's vision of the
"Eternal Unity," or Browning's conception of Immortality, afford the very
stuff out of which poetry may be wrought. Every new experience, in short,
like falling in love, like having a child, like getting "converted,"
[Footnote: See William James, _The Varieties of Religious Experience_.]
gives the lyric poet this rapturous sense of living in a world hitherto
unrealized. The old truisms of the race become suddenly "particular" to
him. "As for man, his days are as grass. As a flower of the field, so he
flourisheth." That was first a "lyric cry" out of the depths of some fresh
individual experience. It has become stale through repetition, but many a
man, listening to those words read at the burial of a friend, has seemed,
in his passionate sense of loss, to hear them for the first time.

Egoism is another mark of the lyric poet. "Of every poet of this class,"
remarks Watts-Dunton, "it may be said that his mind to him 'a kingdom is,'
and that the smaller the poet the bigger to him is that kingdom." He
celebrates himself. Contemporary lyrists have left no variety of physical
sensation unnoted: they tell us precisely how they feel and look when they
take their morning tub. Far from avoiding that "pathetic fallacy" which
Ruskin analysed in a famous chapter,
[Footnote: _Modern Painters_, vol. 3, chap. 12.]
and which attributes to the external world qualities which belong only to
the mind itself, they revel in it. "Day, like our souls, is _fiercely
dark_," sang Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer. Hamlet, it will be remembered,
could be lyrical enough upon occasion, but he retained the power of
distinguishing between things as they actually were and things as they
appeared to him in his weakness and his melancholy. "This goodly frame,
the earth, seems _to me_ a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy,
the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof
fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing _to me_ than a
foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!... And yet, _to me_,
what is this quintessence of dust?"

Nevertheless this lyric egoism has certain moods in which the individual
identifies himself with his family or tribe:

  "O Keith of Ravelstone,
   The sorrows of thy line!"

School and college songs are often, in reality, tribal lyrics. The
choruses of Greek tragedies dealing with the guilt and punishment of a
family, the Hebrew lyrics chanting, like "The Song of Deborah," the
fortunes of a great fight, often broaden their sympathies so as to
include, as in "The Persians" of Aeschylus, the glory or the downfall of a
race. And this sense of identification with a nation or race implies no
loss, but often an amplification of the lyric impulse. Alfred Noyes's
songs about the English, D'Annunzio's and Hugo's splendid chants of the
Latin races, Kipling's glorification of the White Man, lose nothing of
their lyric quality because of their nationalistic or racial inspiration.
Read Wilfrid Blunt's sonnet on "Gibraltar" (_Oxford Book of Verse_,
No. 821):

  "Ay, this is the famed rock which Hercules
   And Goth and Moor bequeath'd us. At this door
   England stands sentry. God! to hear the shrill
   Sweet treble of her fifes upon the breeze,
   And at the summons of the rock gun's roar
   To see her red coats marching from the hill!"

Are patriotic lyrics of this militant type destined to disappear, as
Tolstoy believed they ought to disappear, with the breaking-down of the
barriers of nationality, or rather with the coming of

  "One common wave of thought and joy,
   Lifting mankind again"

over the barriers of nationality? Certainly there is already a type of
purely humanitarian, altruistic lyric, where the poet instinctively thinks
in terms of "us men" rather than of "I myself." It appeared long ago in
that rebellious "Titanic" verse which took the side of oppressed mortals
as against the unjust gods. Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters" is a modern echo of
this defiant or despairing cry of the "ill-used race of men." The songs of
Burns reveal ever-widening circles of sympathy,--pure personal egoism,
then songs of the family and of clan and of country-side, then passion for
Scotland, and finally this fierce peasant affection for his own passes
into the glorious

  "It's comin' yet for a' that,
   That man to man the world o'er
   Shall brithers be for a' that."

One other general characteristic of the lyric mood needs to be emphasized,
namely, its _genuineness_. It is impossible to feign

            "the lyric gush,
  And the wing-power, and the rush
  Of the air."

Second-rate, imitative singers may indeed assume the role of genuine lyric
poets, but they cannot play it without detection. It is literally true
that natural lyrists like Sappho, Burns, Goethe, Heine, "sing as the bird
sings." Once endowed with the lyric temperament and the command of
technique, their cry of love or longing, of grief or patriotism, is the
inevitable resultant from a real situation or desire. Sometimes, like
children, they do not tell us very clearly what they are crying about, but
it is easy to discover whether they are, like children, "making believe."


_4. The Objects of the Lyric Vision_

Let us look more closely at some of the objects of the lyric vision; the
sources or material, that is to say, for the lyric emotion. Goethe's
often-quoted classification is as convenient as any: the poet's vision, he
says, may be directed upon Nature, Man or God.

And first, then, upon Nature. One characteristic of lyric poetry is the
clearness with which single details or isolated objects in Nature may be
visualized and reproduced. The modern reflective lyric, it is true, often
depends for its power upon some philosophical generalization from a single
instance, like Emerson's "Rhodora" or Wordsworth's "Small Celandine." It
may even attempt a sort of logical or pseudo-logical deduction from given
premises, like Browning's famous

  "Morning's at seven;
   The hillside's dew-pearled;
   The lark's on the wing:
   The snail's on the thorn;
   God's in his Heaven--
   _All's right with the world!_"

The imagination cannot be denied this right to synthesize and to
interpret, and nevertheless Nature offers even to the most unphilosophical
her endless profusion of objects that awaken delight. She does not insist
that the lyric poet should generalize unless he pleases. Moth and snail
and skylark, daisy and field-mouse and water-fowl, seized by an eye that
is quick to their poetic values, their interest to men, furnish material
enough for lyric feeling. The fondness of Romantic poets for isolating a
single object has been matched in our day by the success of the Imagists
in painting a single aspect of some phenomenon--

  "Light as the shadow of the fish
   That falls through the pale green water--"

any aspect, in short, provided it affords the "romantic quiver," the
quick, keen sense of the beauty in things. What an art-critic said of the
painter W. M. Chase applies equally well to many contemporary Imagists who
use the forms of lyric verse: "He saw the world as a display of beautiful
surfaces which challenged his skill. It was enough to set him painting to
note the nacreous skin of a fish, or the satiny bloom of fruit, or the
wind-smoothed dunes about Shinnecock, or the fine specific olive of a
woman's face.... He took objects quite at their face value, and rarely
invested them with the tenderness, mystery and understanding that comes
from meditation and remembered feelings.... We get in him a fine, bare
vision, and must not expect therewith much contributary enrichment from
mind and mood."
[Footnote: _The Nation_, November 2, 1916.]
Our point is that this "fine, bare vision" is often enough for a lyric. It
has no time for epic breadth of detail, for the rich accumulation of
harmonious images which marks Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum" or Keats's "Eve
of St. Agnes."

The English Romantic poets were troubled about the incursion of scientific
fact into the poet's view of nature. The awful rainbow in heaven might be
turned, they thought, through the curse of scientific knowledge, into the
"dull catalogue of common things." But Wordsworth was wiser than this. He
saw that if the scientific fact were emotionalized, it could still serve
as the stuff of poetry. Facts could be transformed into truths. No aspect
of Tennyson's lyricism is more interesting than his constant employment of
the newest scientific knowledge of his day, for instance, in geology,
chemistry and astronomy. He set his facts to music. Eugene Lee-Hamilton's
poignant sonnet about immortality is an illustration of the ease with
which a lyric poet may find material in scientific fact, if appropriated
and made rich by feeling.
[Footnote: Quoted in chap. VIII, section 7.]

If lyric poetry shows everywhere this tendency to humanize its "bare
vision" of Nature, it is also clear that the lyric, as the most highly
personalized species of poetry, exhibits an infinite variety of visions of
human life. Any anthology will illustrate the range of observation, the
complexity of situations and desires, the constant changes in key, as the
lyric attempts to interpret this or that aspect of human emotion. Take for
example, the Elizabethan love-lyric. Here is a single human passion,
expressing itself in the moods and lyric forms of one brief generation of
our literature. Yet what variety of personal accent, what kaleidoscopic
shiftings of mind and imagination, what range of lyric beauty! Or take the
passion for the wider interests of Humanity, expressed in the lyrics of
Schiller and Burns, running deep and turbid through Revolutionary
and Romantic verse, and still coloring--perhaps now more strongly than
ever--the stream of twentieth-century poetry. Here is a type of lyric
emotion where self-consciousness is lost, absorbed in the wider
consciousness of kinship, in the dawning recognition of the oneness of the
blood and fate of all nations of the earth.

The purest type of lyric vision is indicated in the third word of Goethe's
triad. It is the vision of God. Here no physical fact intrudes or mars.
Here thought, if it be complete thought, is wholly emotionalized. Such
transcendent vision, as in the Hebrew lyrists and in Dante, is itself
worship, and the lyric cry of the most consummate artist among English
poets of the last generation is simply an echo of the ancient voices:

  "Hallowed be Thy Name--Hallelujah!"

If Tennyson could not phrase anew the ineffable, it is no wonder that most
hymn-writers fail. They are trying to express in conventionalized
religious terminology and in "long and short metre" what can with
difficulty be expressed at all, and if at all, by the unconscious art of
the Psalms or by a sustained metaphor, like "Crossing the Bar" or the
"Recessional." The medieval Latin hymns clothed their transcendent themes,
their passionate emotions, in the language of imperial Rome. The modern
sectaries succeed best in their hymnology when they choose simple ideas,
not too definite in content, and clothe them, as Whittier did, in words of
tender human association, in parables of longing and of consolation.


_5. The Lyric Imagination_

The material thus furnished by the lyric poet's experience, thought and
emotion is reshaped by an imagination working simply and spontaneously.
The lyrist is born and not made, and he cannot help transforming the
actual world into his own world, like Don Quixote with the windmills and
the serving-women. Sometimes his imagination fastens upon a single trait
or aspect of reality, and the resultant metaphor seems truer than any
logic.

  "Death lays his _icy hand_ on Kings."

  "I wandered _lonely as a cloud_."

Sometimes his imagination fuses various aspects of an object into a
composite effect:

  "A lily of a day
  Is fairer far in May,
  Although it fall and die that night;
  It was the _plant and flower of light_."

The lyric emotion, it is true, does not always catch at imagery. It may
deal directly with the fact, as in Burns's immortal

  "If we ne'er had met sae kindly,
  If we ne'er had loved sae blindly,
  Never loved, and never parted,
  We had ne'er been broken-hearted."

The lyric atmosphere, heavy and clouded with passionate feeling, idealizes
objects as if they were seen through the light of dawn or sunset. It is
never the dry clear light of noon.

  "She was _a phantom_ of delight."

  "Thy soul was _like a star_, and dwelt apart,
  Thou hadst a voice whose sound was _like the sea_,
  Pure as _the naked heavens_...."

This idealization is often not so much a magnification of the object as a
simplification of it. Confusing details are stripped away. Contradictory
facts are eliminated, until heart answers to heart across the welter of
immaterialities.

Although the psychologists, as has been already noted, are now little
inclined to distinguish between the imagination and the fancy, it remains
true that the old distinction between superficial or "fanciful"
resemblances, and deeper or "imaginative" likenesses, is a convenient one
in lyric poetry. E. C. Stedman, in his old age, was wont to say that our
younger lyrists, while tuneful and fanciful enough, had no imagination or
passion, and that what was needed in America was some adult male verse.
The verbal felicity and richness of fancy that characterized the
Elizabethan lyric were matched by its sudden gleams of penetrative
imagination, which may be, after all, only the "fancy" taking a deeper
plunge. In the familiar song from _The Tempest_, for example, we have in
the second and third lines examples of those fanciful conceits in which
the age delighted, but that does not impair the purely imaginative beauty
of the last three lines of the stanza,--the lines that are graven upon
Shelley's tombstone in Rome:

  "Full fathom five thy father lies;
  Of his bones are coral made;
  Those are pearls that were his eyes:
  Nothing of him that doth fade
  But doth suffer a sea-change
  Into something rich and strange."

So it was that Hawthorne's "fancy" first won a public for his stories,
while it is by his imagination that he holds his place as an artist. For
the deeply imaginative line of lyric verse, like the imaginative
conception of novelist or dramatist, often puzzles or repels a poet's
contemporaries. Jeffrey could find no sense in Wordsworth's superb couplet
in the "Ode to Duty":

  "Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
  And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are
    fresh and strong."

And oddly enough, Emerson, the one man upon this side of the Atlantic from
whom an instinctive understanding of those lines was to be expected, was
as much perplexed by them as Jeffrey.


_6. Lyric Expression_

Is it possible to formulate the laws of lyric expression? "I do not mean
by expression," said Gray, "the mere choice of words, but the whole dress,
fashion, and arrangement of a thought."
[Footnote: Gray's _Letters_, vol. 2, p. 333. (Gosse ed.)]
Taking expression, in this larger sense, as the final element in that
threefold process by which poetry comes into being, and which has been
discussed in an earlier chapter, we may assert that there are certain
general laws of lyric form. One of them is the law of brevity. It is
impossible to keep the lyric pitch for very long. The rapture turns to
pain. "I need scarcely observe," writes Poe in his essay on "The Poetic
Principle," "that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites,
by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this
elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychical
necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle
a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a
composition of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at the
very utmost, it flags--fails--a revulsion ensues--and then the poem is, in
effect, and in fact, no longer such."

In another passage, from the essay on "Hawthorne's 'Twice-Told Tales,'"
Poe emphasizes this law of brevity in connection with the law of unity of
impression. It is one of the classic passages of American literary
criticism:

  "Were we bidden to say how the highest genius could be most
  advantageously employed for the best display of its own powers, we
  should answer, without hesitation--in the composition of a rhymed poem,
  not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour. Within this
  limit alone can the highest order of true poetry exist. We need only
  here say, upon this topic, that, in almost all classes of composition,
  the unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance.
  It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in
  productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting. We may
  continue the reading of a prose composition, from the very nature of
  prose itself, much longer than we can preserve, to any good purpose, in
  the perusal of a poem. This latter, if truly fulfilling the demands of
  the poetic sentiment, induces an exaltation of the soul which cannot be
  long sustained. All high excitements are necessarily transient. Thus a
  long poem is a paradox. And, without unity of impression, the deepest
  effects cannot be brought about. Epics were the offspring of an
  imperfect sense of Art, and their reign is no more. A poem _too_ brief
  may produce a vivid, but never an intense or enduring impression.
  Without a certain continuity of effort--without a certain duration or
  repetition of purpose--the soul is never deeply moved."

Gray's analysis of the law of lyric brevity is picturesque, and too little
known:

  "The true lyric style, with all its flights of fancy, ornaments, and
  heightening of expression, and harmony of sound, is in its nature
  superior to every other style; which is just the cause why it could not
  be borne in a work of great length, no more than the eye could bear to
  see all this scene that we constantly gaze upon,--the verdure of the
  fields and woods, the azure of the sea-skies, turned into one dazzling
  expanse of gems. The epic, therefore, assumed a style of graver colors,
  and only stuck on a diamond (borrowed from her sister) here and there,
  where it best became her.... To pass on a sudden from the lyric glare to
  the epic solemnity (if I may be allowed to talk nonsense)...."
[Footnote: Gray's _Letters_, vol. 2, p. 304. (Gosse ed.)]

It is evident that the laws of brevity and unity cannot be disassociated.
The unity of emotion which characterizes the successful lyric corresponds
to the unity of action in the drama, and to the unity of effect in the
short story. It is this fact which Palgrave stressed in his emphasis upon
"some single thought, feeling, or situation." The sonnets, for instance,
that most nearly approach perfection are those dominated by one thought.
This thought may be turned over, indeed, as the octave passes into the
sextet, and may be viewed from another angle, or applied in an unexpected
way. And yet the content of a sonnet, considered as a whole, must be as
integral as the sonnet's form. So must it be with any song. The various
devices of rhyme, stanza and refrain help to bind into oneness of form a
single emotional reflection of some situation or desire.

Watts-Dunton points out that there is also a law of simplicity of
grammatical structure which the lyric disregards at its peril. Browning
and Shelley, to mention no lesser names, often marred the effectiveness of
their lyrics by a lack of perspicuity. If the lyric cry is not easily
intelligible, the sympathy of the listener is not won. Riddle-poems have
been loved by the English ever since Anglo-Saxon times, but the
intellectual satisfaction of solving a puzzle may be purchased at the cost
of true poetic pleasure. Let us quote Gray once more, for he had an
unerring sense of the difficulty of moulding ideas into "pure, perspicuous
and musical form."

  "Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical,
  is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry. This I have always aimed
  at, and never could attain; the necessity of rhyming is one great
  obstacle to it: another and perhaps a stronger is, that way you have
  chosen of casting down your first ideas carelessly and at large, and
  then clipping them here and there, and forming them at leisure; this
  method, after all possible pains, will leave behind it in some places a
  laxity, a diffuseness; the frame of a thought (otherwise well invented,
  well turned, and well placed) is often weakened by it. Do I talk
  nonsense, or do you understand me?"
[Footnote: Gray's _Letters_, vol. 2, p. 352. (Gosse ed.)]

Poe, whose theory of poetry comprehends only the lyric, and indeed chiefly
that restricted type of lyric verse in which he himself was a master,
insisted that there was a further lyric law,--the law of vagueness or
indefiniteness. "I know," he writes in his "Marginalia," "that
indefiniteness is an element of the true music--I mean of the true musical
expression. Give to it any undue decision--imbue it with any very
determinate tone--and you deprive it, at once, of its ethereal, its ideal,
its intrinsic and essential character. You dispel its luxury of dream. You
dissolve the atmosphere of the mystic upon which it floats. You exhaust it
of its breath of faëry. It now becomes a tangible and easily appreciable
idea--a thing of the earth, earthy."

This reads like a defence of Poe's own private practice, and yet many
poets and critics are inclined to side with him. Edmond Holmes, for
instance, goes quite as far as Poe. "The truth is that poetry, which is
the expression of large, obscure and indefinable feelings, finds its
appropriate material in _vague_ words--words of large import and with many
meanings and shades of meaning. Here we have an almost unfailing test for
determining the poetic fitness of words, a test which every true poet
unconsciously, but withal unerringly, applies. Precision, whether in the
direction of what is commonplace or of what is technical, is always
unpoetical."
[Footnote: _What is Poetry_, p. 77. London and New York, 1900.]
This doctrine, it will be observed, is in direct opposition to the Imagist
theory of "hardness and economy of speech; the exact word," and it also
would rule out the highly technical vocabulary of camp and trail,
steamship and jungle, with which Mr. Kipling has greatly delighted our
generation. No one who admires the splendid vitality of "McAndrew's Hymn"
is really troubled by the slang and lingo of the engine-room.

One of the most charming passages in Stedman's _Nature and Elements of
Poetry_ (pp. 181-85) deals with the law of Evanescence. The "flowers that
fade," the "airs that die," "the snows of yester-year," have in their very
frailty and mortality a haunting lyric value. Don Marquis has written a
poem about this exquisite appeal of the transient, calling it "The
Paradox":

  "'T is evanescence that endures;
  The loveliness that dies the soonest has the longest life."

But we touch here a source of lyric beauty too delicate to be analysed in
prose. It is better to read "Rose Aylmer," or to remember what Duke Orsino
says in Twelfth Night:

                  "Enough; no more:
  'T is not so sweet now as it was before."


7._ Expression and Impulse_

A word must be added, nevertheless, about lyric expression as related to
the lyric impulse. No one pretends that there is such a thing as a set
lyric pattern.

  "There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
  And every single one of them is right."

No two professional golfers, for instance, take precisely the same stance.
Each man's stance is the expression, the result, of his peculiar physical
organization and his muscular habits. There are as many "styles" as there
are players, and yet each player strives for "style," i.e. economy and
precision and grace of muscular effort, and each will assert that the
chief thing is to "keep your eye on the ball" and "follow through." "And
every single one of them is right."

Apply this analogy to the organization of a lyric poem. Its material, as
we have seen, is infinitely varied. It expresses all conceivable "states
of soul." Is it possible, therefore, to lay down any general formula for
it, something corresponding to the golfer's "keep your eye on the ball"
and "follow through"? John Erskine, in his book on _The Elizabethan
Lyric_, ventures upon this precept: "Lyric emotion, in order to express
itself intelligibly, must first reproduce the cause of its existence. If
the poet will go into ecstasies over a Grecian urn, to justify himself he
must first show us the urn." Admitted. Can one go farther? Mr. Erskine
attempts it, in a highly suggestive analysis:
"Speaking broadly, all successful lyrics have three parts. In the first
the emotional stimulus is given--the object, the situation, or the thought
from which the song arises. In the second part the emotion is developed to
its utmost capacity, until as it begins to flag the intellectual element
reasserts itself. In the third part the emotion is finally resolved into a
thought, a mental resolution, or an attribute."
[Footnote: _The Elizabethan Lyric_, p. 17.]
Let the reader choose at random a dozen lyrics from the _Golden Treasury_,
and see how far this orderly arrangement of the thought-stuff of the lyric
is approximated in practice. My own impression is that the critic
postulates more of an "intellectual element" than the average English song
will supply. But at least here is a clear-cut statement of what one may
look for in a lyric. It shows how the lyric impulse tends to mould lyric
expression into certain lines of order.

Most of the narrower precepts governing lyric form follow from the general
principles already discussed. The lyric vocabulary, every one admits,
should not seem studied or consciously ornate, for that breaks the law of
spontaneity. It may indeed be highly finished, the more highly in
proportion to its brevity, but the clever word-juggling of such
prestidigitators as Poe and Verlaine is perilous. Figurative language must
spring only from living, figurative thought, otherwise the lyric falls
into verbal conceits, frigidity, conventionality. Stanzaic law must follow
emotional law, just as Kreisler's accompanist must keep time with
Kreisler. All the rich devices of rhyme and tone-color must heighten
and not cloy the singing quality. But why lengthen this list of truisms?
The combination of genuine lyric emotion with expertness of technical
expression is in reality very rare. Goethe's "Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh"
and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" are miracles of art, yet one was scribbled in
a moment, and the other dreamed in an opium slumber. The lyric is the
commonest, and yet, in its perfection, the rarest type of poetry; the
earliest, and yet the most modern; the simplest, and yet in its laws of
emotional association, perhaps the most complex; and it is all these
because it expresses, more intimately than other types of verse, the
personality of the poet.



CHAPTER VIII

RELATIONSHIPS AND TYPES OF THE LYRIC

  "_Milk-Woman_. What song was it, I pray? Was it 'Come, shepherds, deck
  your heads'? or, 'As at noon Dulcina rested'? or, 'Phillida flouts me'?
  or, 'Chevy Chase'? or, 'Johnny Armstrong'? or, 'Troy Town'?"
    ISAAC WALTON, _The Complete Angler_

We have already considered, at the beginning of the previous chapter, the
general relationship of the three chief types of poetry. Lyric, epic and
drama, i.e. song, story and play, have obviously different functions to
perform. They may indeed deal with a common fund of material. A given
event, say the settlement of Virginia, or the episode of Pocahontas,
provides situations and emotions which may take either lyric or narrative
or dramatic shape. The mental habits and technical experience of the poet,
or the prevalent literary fashions of his day, may determine which general
type of poetry he will employ. There were born lyrists, like Greene in the
Elizabethan period, who wrote plays because the public demanded drama, and
there have been natural dramatists who were compelled, in a period when
the theatre fell into disrepute, to give their material a narrative form.
But we must also take into account the dominant mood or quality of certain
poetic minds. Many passages in narrative and dramatic verse, for instance,
while fulfilling their primary function of telling a story or throwing
characters into action, are colored by what we have called the lyric
quality, by that passionate, personal feeling whose natural mode of
expression is in song. In Marlowe's _Tamburlaine_, for instance, or Victor
Hugo's _Hernani_, there are superb pieces of lyric declamation, in which
we feel that Marlowe and Hugo themselves--not the imaginary Tamburlaine
and Hernani--are chanting the desires of their own hearts. Arnold's
"Sohrab and Rustum," after finishing its tragic story of the son slain by
the unwitting father, closes with a lyric description of the majestic Oxus
stream flowing on to the Aral sea. Objective as it all seems, this close
is intensely personal, permeated with the same tender stoicism which
colors Arnold's "Dover Beach" and "A Summer Night." The device of using a
Nature picture at the end of a narrative, to heighten, by harmony or
contrast, the mood induced by the story itself, was freely utilized
by Tennyson in his _English Idylls_, such as "Audley Court," "Edwin
Morris," "Love and Duty," and "The Golden Year." It adds the last touch of
poignancy to Robert Frost's "Death of the Hired Man." These descriptive
passages, though lacking the song form, are as purely lyrical in their
function as the songs in _The Princess _or the songs in _The Winter's
Tale_.


_1. The Blending of Types_

While the scope of the present volume, as explained in the Preface,
precludes any specific study of drama and epic, the reader must bear in
mind that the three main types of poetry are not separated, in actual
practice, by immovably hard and fast lines. Pigeonhole classifications of
drama, epic and lyric types are highly convenient to the student for
purposes of analysis. But the moment one reads a ballad like "Edward,
Edward" (_Oxford_, No. 373) or "Helen of Kirconnell" (_Oxford_, No. 387)
the pigeon-hole distinctions must be subordinated to the actual fact that
these ballads are a blend of drama, story and song. The "form" is lyrical,
the stuff is narrative, the mode of presentation is often that of purely
dramatic dialogue.

Take a contemporary illustration of this blending of types. Mr. Vachel
Lindsay has told us the origins of his striking poem "The Congo." He was
already in a "national-theme mood," he says, when he listened to a sermon
about missionaries on the Congo River. The word "Congo" began to haunt
him. "It echoed with the war-drums and cannibal yells of Africa." Then,
for a list of colors for his palette, he had boyish memories of Stanley's
_Darkest Africa_, and of the dances of the Dahomey Amazons at the World's
Fair in Chicago. He had seen the anti-negro riots in Springfield,
Illinois. He had gone through a score of negro-saloons--"barrel-houses"--
on Eleventh Avenue, New York, and had "accumulated a jungle impression
that remains with me yet." Above all, there was Conrad's _Heart of
Darkness_. "I wanted to reiterate the word Congo--and the several refrains
in a way that would echo stories like that. I wanted to suggest
the terror, the reeking swamp-fever, the forest splendor, the
black-lacquered loveliness, and above all the eternal fatality of Africa,
that Conrad has written down with so sure a hand. I do not mean to say,
now that I have done, that I recorded all these things in rhyme. But every
time I rewrote 'The Congo' I reached toward them. I suppose I rewrote it
fifty times in these two months, sometimes three times in one day."

It is not often that we get so veracious an account of the making
of a poem, so clear a conception of the blending of sound-motives,
color-motives, story-stuff, drama-stuff, personal emotion, into a single
whole.

Nor is there any clear separation of types when we strive to look back to
the primitive origins of these various forms of poetry. In the opinion of
many scholars, the origins are to be traced to a common source in the
dance. "Dances, as overwhelming evidence, ethnological and sociological,
can prove, were the original stuff upon which dramatic, lyric and epic
impulses wove a pattern that is traced in later narrative ballads mainly
as incremental repetition. Separation of its elements, and evolution to
higher forms, made the dance an independent art, with song, and then
music, ancillary to the figures and the steps; song itself passed to lyric
triumphs quite apart from choral voice and choral act; epic went its
artistic way with nothing but rhythm as memorial of the dance, and the
story instead of dramatic situation; drama retained the situation, the
action, even the chorus and the dance, but submitted them to the shaping
and informing power of individual genius."
[Footnote: Gummere, _The Popular Ballad_, p. 106.]
In another striking passage, Professor Gummere asks us to visualize "a
throng of people without skill to read or write, without ability to
project themselves into the future, or to compare themselves with the
past, or even to range their experience with the experience of other
communities, gathered in festal mood, and by loud song, perfect rhythm and
energetic dance, expressing their feelings over an event of quite local
origin, present appeal and common interest. Here, in point of evolution,
is the human basis of poetry, the foundation courses of the pyramid."


_2. Lyrical Element in Drama_

We cannot here attempt to trace, even in outline, the course of this
historic evolution of genres. But in contemporary types of both dramatic
and narrative poetry, there may still be discovered the influence of lyric
form and mood. We have already noted how the dramatist, for all of his
supposed objectivity, cannot refrain from coloring certain persons and
situations with the hues of his own fancy. Ibsen, for instance, injects
his irony, his love for symbolism, his theories for the reconstruction of
society, into the very blood and bone of his characters and into the
structure of his plots. So it is with Shaw, with Synge, with Hauptmann,
with Brieux. Even if their plays are written in prose, these men
are still "makers," and the prose play may be as highly subjective in
mood, as definitely individual in phrasing, as full of atmosphere, as if
it were composed in verse.

But the lyric possibilities of the drama are more easily realized if we
turn from the prose play to the play in verse, and particularly to those
Elizabethan dramas which are not only poetical in essence, but which
utilize actual songs for their dramatic value. No less than thirty-six of
Shakspere's plays contain stage-directions for music, and his marvelous
command of song-words is universally recognized. The English stage had
made use of songs, in fact, ever since the liturgical drama of the Middle
Ages. But Shakspere's unrivalled knowledge of _stage-craft_, as well as
his own instinct for harmonizing lyrical with theatrical effects, enabled
him to surpass all of his contemporaries in the art of using songs to
bring actors on and off the stage, to anticipate following action, to
characterize personages, to heighten climaxes, and to express motions
beyond the reach of spoken words.
[Footnote: These points are fully discussed in J. Robert Moore's Harvard
dissertation (unpublished) on The Songs in the English Drama.]
The popularity of such song-forms as the "madrigal," which was sung
without musical accompaniment, made it easy for the public stage to cater
to the prevalent taste. The "children of the Chapel" or "of Paul's," who
served as actors in the early Elizabethan dramas, were trained choristers,
and songs were a part of their stock in trade. Songs for sheer
entertainment, common enough upon the stage when Shakspere began to write,
turned in his hands into exquisite instruments of character revelation and
of dramatic passion, until they became, on the lips of an Ophelia or a
Desdemona, the most touching and poignant moments of the drama. "Music
within" is a frequent stage direction in the later Elizabethan plays, and
if one remembers the dramatic effectiveness of the Easter music,
off-stage, in Goethe's _Faust_, or the horn in _Hernani_, one can
understand how Wagner came to believe that a blending of music with poetry
and action, as exhibited in his "music-dramas," was demanded by the ideal
requirements of dramatic art. Wagner's theory and practice need not be
rehearsed here. It is sufficient for our purpose to recall the
indisputable fact that in some of the greatest plays ever written, lyric
forms have contributed richly and directly to the total dramatic effect.


_3. The Dramatic Monologue_

There is still another _genre_ of poetry, however, where the
inter-relations of drama, of narrative, and of lyric mood are peculiarly
interesting. It is the dramatic monologue. The range of expressiveness
allowed by this type of poetry was adequately shown by Browning and
Tennyson, and recent poets like Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost
and Amy Lowell have employed it with consummate skill. The dramatic
monologue is a dynamic revelation of a soul in action, not a mere static
bit of character study. It chooses some representative and specific
occasion,--let us say a man's death-bed view of his career, as in "The
Bishop orders his Tomb" or the first "Northern Farmer." It is something
more than a soliloquy overheard. There is a listener, who, though without
a speaking part, plays a very real role in the dialogue. For the dramatic
monologue is in essence a dialogue of which we hear only the chief
speaker's part, as in "My Last Duchess," or in E. A. Robinson's "Ben
Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford." It is as if we were watching and
listening to a man telephoning. Though we see and hear but one person, we
are aware that the talk is shaped to a certain extent by the personality
at the other end of the line. In Tennyson's "Rizpah," for example, the
characteristics of the well-meaning, Bible-quoting parish visitor
determine some of the finest lines in the old mother's response. In
Browning's "Andrea del Sarto" the painter's wife, Lucrezia, says never a
word, but she has a more intense physical presence in that poem than many
of the _dramatis personae_ of famous plays. Tennyson's "Ulysses" and "Sir
Galahad" and "The Voyage of Maeldune" are splendid soliloquies and nothing
more. The first "Locksley Hall" is likewise a soliloquy, but in the second
"Locksley Hall" and "To-Morrow," where scraps of talk from the unseen
interlocutor are caught up and repeated by the speaker in passionate
rebuttal, we have true drama of the "confrontation" type. We see a whole
soul in action.

Now this intense, dynamic fashion of revealing character through narrative
talk--and it is commonly a whole life-story which is condensed within the
few lines of a dramatic monologue--touches lyricism at two points. The
first is the fact that many dramatic monologues use distinctively lyric
measures. The six-stress anapestic line which Tennyson preferred for his
later dramatic monologues like "Rizpah" is really a ballad measure, and is
seen as such to its best advantage in "The Revenge." But in his monologues
of the pure soliloquy type, like "St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad," the metre
is brilliantly lyrical, and the lyric associations of the verse are
carried over into the mood of the poem. And the other fact to be
remembered is that the poignant self-analysis and self-betrayal of the
dramatic monologue, its "egoism" and its ultimate and appalling
sincerities, are a part of the very nature of the lyric impulse. These
revealers of their souls may use the speaking, rather than the singing
voice, but their tones have the deep, rich lyric intimacy.


4. _Lyric and Narrative_

In narrative poetry, no less than in drama, we must note the intrusion of
the lyric mood, as well as the influence of lyric forms. Theoretically,
narrative or "epic" poetry is based upon an objective experience.
Something has happened, and the poet tells us about it. He has heard or
read, or possibly taken part in, an event, and the event, rather than the
poet's thought or feeling about it, is the core of the poem. But as soon
as he begins to tell his tale, we find that he is apt to "set it out" with
vivid description. He is obliged to paint a picture as well as to spin a
yarn, and not even Homer and Virgil--"objective" as they are supposed to
be---can draw a picture without betraying something of their attitude and
feeling towards their material. Like the messenger in Greek drama,
their voices are shaken by what they have seen or heard. In the popular
epic like the Nibelungen story, there is more objectivity than in the epic
of art like _Jerusalem Delivered_ or _Paradise Lost_. We do not know who
put together in their present form such traditional tales as the _Lay of
the Nibelungs_ and _Beowulf_, and the personal element in the narrative is
only obscurely felt, whereas _Jerusalem Delivered_ is a constant
revelation of Tasso, and the personality of Milton colors every line in
_Paradise Lost_. When Matthew Arnold tells us that Homer is rapid, plain,
simple and noble, he is depicting the characteristics of a poet as well as
the impression made by the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. Those general traits
of epic poetry which have been discussed ever since the Renaissance, like
"breadth," and "unity" and the sustained "grand" style, turn ultimately
upon the natural qualities of great story-tellers. They are not mere
rhetorical abstractions.

The narrative poet sees man as accomplishing a deed, as a factor in an
event. His primary business is to report action, not to philosophize or to
dissect character or to paint landscape. Yet so sensitive is he to the
environing circumstances of action, and so bent upon displaying the
varieties of human motive and conduct, that he cannot help reflecting in
his verse his own mental attitude toward the situations which he depicts.
He may surround these situations, as we have seen, with all the beauties
and pomps and terrors of the visible world. In relating "God's ways to
man" he instinctively justifies or condemns. He cannot even tell a story
exactly as it was told to him: he must alter it, be it ever so slightly,
to make it fit his general conceptions of human nature and human fate. He
gives credence to one witness and not to another. His imagination plays
around the noble and base elements in his story until their original
proportions are altered to suit his mind and purpose. Study the Tristram
story, as told by Gottfried of Strassburg, by Malory, Tennyson,
Arnold, Swinburne and Wagner, and you will see how each teller betrays his
own personality through these instinctive processes of transformation of
his material. It is like the Roman murder story told so many times over in
Browning's _Ring and the Book_: the main facts are conceded by each
witness, and yet the inferences from the facts range from Heaven to Hell.

Browning is of course an extreme instance of this irruption of the poet's
personality upon the stuff of his story. He cannot help lyricising and
dramatizing his narrative material, any more than he can help making all
his characters talk "Browningese." But Byron's tales in verse show the
same subjective tendency. He was so little of a dramatist that all of his
heroes, like Poe's, are images of himself. No matter what the raw material
of his narrative poems may be, they become uniformly "Byronic" as he
writes them down. And all this is "lyricism," however disguised. William
Morris, almost alone among modern English poets, seemed to stand gravely
aloof from the tales he told, as his master Chaucer stood smilingly aloof.
Yet the "tone" of Chaucer is perceived somehow upon every page, in spite
of his objectivity.

The whole history of medieval verse Romances, indeed, illustrates this
lyrical tendency to rehandle inherited material. Tales of love, of
enchantment, of adventure, could not be held down to prosaic fact. Whether
they dealt with "matter of France," or "matter of Brittany," whether a
brief "lai" or a complicated cycle of stories like those about Charlemagne
or King Arthur, whether a merry "fabliau" or a beast-tale like "Reynard
the Fox," all the Romances allow to the author a margin of mystery, an
opportunity to weave his own web of brightly colored fancies. A specific
event or legend was there, of course, as a nucleus for the story, but the
sense of wonder, of strangeness in things, of individual delight in
brocading new patterns upon old material, dominated over the sense of
fact. "Time," said Shelley, "which destroys the beauty and the use of the
story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest
them, augments that of poetry, and forever develops new and wonderful
applications of the eternal truth which it contains....  A story of
particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which
should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which
is distorted."

And in modern narrative verse, surely, the line between "epic" quality and
"lyric" quality is difficult to draw. Choose almost at random a half-dozen
story-telling poems from the _Oxford Book of English Verse_, say "The
Ancient Mariner," "The Burial of Sir John Moore," "La Belle Dame sans
Merci," "Porphyria's Lover," "The Forsaken Merman," "He Fell among
Thieves." Each of these poems narrates an event, but what purely lyric
quality is there which cannot be found in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and
"The Ancient Mariner"? And does not each of the other poems release and
excite the lyric mood?

We must admit, furthermore, that narrative measures and lyric measures are
frequently identical, and help to carry over into a story a singing
quality. Ballad measures are an obvious example. Walter Scott's facile
couplets were equally effective for story and for song. Many minor species
of narrative poetry, like verse satire and allegory, are often composed in
traditional lyric patterns. Even blank verse, admirably suited as it is
for story-telling purposes, yields in its varieties of cadence many a bar
of music long associated with lyric emotion. Certainly the blank verse of
Wordsworth's "Michael" is far different in its musical values from the
blank verse, say, of Tennyson's _Princess_--perhaps truly as different as
the metre of _Sigurd the Volsung_ is from that of _The Rape of the Lock_.
The perfect matching of metrical form to the nature of the narrative
material, whether that material be traditional or firsthand, simple or
complex, rude or delicate, demands the finest artistic instinct. Yet it
appears certain that many narrative measures affect us fully as
much through their intimate association with the moods of song as through
their specific adaptiveness to the purposes of narrative.


_5. The Ballad_

The supreme illustration of this blending of story and song is the ballad.
The word "ballad," like "ode" and "sonnet," is very ancient and has been
used in various senses. We think of it to-day as a song that tells a
story, usually of popular origin. Derived etymologically from _ballare_,
to dance, it means first of all, a "dance-song," and is the same word as
"ballet." Solomon's "Song of Songs" is called in the Bishops' Bible of
1568 "The Ballet of Ballets of King Solomon." But in Chaucer's time a
"ballad" meant primarily a French form of lyric verse,--not a narrative
lyric specifically. In the Elizabethan period the word was used loosely
for "song." Only after the revival of interest in English and Scottish
popular ballads in the eighteenth century has the word come gradually to
imply a special type of story-telling song, with no traces of individual
authorship, and handed down by oral tradition. Scholars differ as to
the precise part taken by the singing, dancing crowd in the composition
and perpetuation of these traditional ballads. Professor Child,
the greatest authority upon English and Scottish balladry, and
Professors Gummere, Kittredge and W. M. Hart have emphasized the
element of "communal" composition, and illustrated it by many types of
song-improvisation among savage races, by sailors' "chanties," and negro
"work-songs." It is easy to understand how a singing, dancing crowd
carries a refrain, and improvises, through some quick-tongued individual,
a new phrase, line or stanza of immediate popular effect; and it is also
easy to perceive, by a study of extant versions of various ballads, such
as Child printed in glorious abundance, to see how phrases, lines and
stanzas get altered as they are passed from lip to lip of unlettered
people during the course of centuries. But the actual historical
relationship of communal dance-songs to such narrative lyrics as were
collected by Bishop Percy, Ritson and Child is still under debate.
[Footnote: See Louise Pound, "The Ballad and the Dance," _Pub. Mod. Lang.
Ass._, vol. 34, No. 3 (September, 1919), and Andrew Lang's article on
"Ballads" in Chambers' _Cyclopedia of Eng. Lit._, ed. of 1902.]

"All poetry," said Professor Gummere in reply to a critic of his theory of
communal composition of ballads, "springs from the same poetic impulse,
and is due to individuals; but the conditions under which it is made,
whether originally composed in a singing, dancing throng and submitted to
oral tradition, or set down on paper by the solitary and deliberate poet,
have given birth to that distinction of 'popular' and 'artistic,' or
whatever the terms may be, which has obtained in some form with nearly all
writers on poetry since Aristotle." Avoiding questions that are still in
controversy, let us look at some of the indubitable characteristics of the
"popular" ballads as they are shown in Child's collection.
[Footnote: Now reprinted in a single volume of the "Cambridge Poets"
(Houghton Mifflin Company), edited with an introduction by G. L.
Kittredge.]
They are impersonal. There is no trace whatever of individual authorship.
"This song was made by Billy Gashade," asserts the author of the immensely
popular American ballad of "Jesse James." But we do not know what "Billy
Gashade" it was who first made rhymes about Robin Hood or Johnny
Armstrong, or just how much help he had from the crowd in composing them.
In any case, the method of such ballads is purely objective. They do not
moralize or sentimentalize. There is little description, aside from the
use of set, conventional phrases. They do not "motivate" the story
carefully, or move logically from event to event. Rather do they "flash
the story at you" by fragments, and then leave you in the dark. They
leap over apparently essential points of exposition and plot structure;
they omit to assign dialogue to a specific person, leaving you to guess
who is talking. Over certain bits of action or situation they linger as if
they hated to leave that part of the story. They make shameless use of
"commonplaces," that is, stock phrases, lines or stanzas which are
conveniently held by the memory and which may appear in dozens of
different ballads. They are not afraid of repetition,--indeed the theory
of choral collaboration implies a constant use of repetition and refrain,
as in a sailor's "chanty." One of their chief ways of building a situation
or advancing a narrative is through "incremental repetition," as Gummere
termed it, i.e. the successive additions of some new bits of fact as the
bits already familiar are repeated.

  "'Christine, Christine, tread a measure for me!
  A silken sark I will give to thee.'

  "'A silken sark I can get me here,
  But I'll not dance with the Prince this year.'

  "'Christine, Christine, tread a measure for me,
  Silver-clasped shoes I will give to thee!'

  "'Silver-clasped shoes,'" etc.

American cowboy ballads show the same device:

  "I started up the trail October twenty-third,
  I started up the trail _with the 2-U herd_."

Strikingly as the ballads differ from consciously "artistic" narrative in
their broken movement and allusive method, the contrast is even more
different if we consider the naive quality of their refrains. Sometimes
the refrain is only a sort of musical accompaniment:

  "There was an old farmer in Sussex did dwell,
      (_Chorus of Whistlers_)
  There was an old farmer in Sussex did dwell
  And he had a bad wife, as many knew well.
      (_Chorus of Whistlers_)"

Or,

  "The auld Deil cam to the man at the pleugh,
             _Rumchy ae de aidie_."

Sometimes the words of the choral refrain have a vaguely suggestive
meaning:

    "There were three ladies lived in a bower,
      _Eh vow bonnie_
    And they went out to pull a flower,
      _On the bonnie banks of Fordie_."

Sometimes the place-name, illustrated in the last line quoted, is
definite:

  "There was twa sisters in a bower,
     _Edinburgh, Edinburgh_,
  There was twa sisters in a bower,
    _Stirling for aye_
  There was twa sisters in a bower,
  There came a knight to be their wooer,
    _Bonny Saint Johnston stands upon Tay_."

But often it is sheer faëry-land magic:

  "He's ta'en three locks o' her yellow hair,
     _Binnorie, O Binnorie_!
  And wi' them strung his harp sae rare
     _By the bonnie milldams o' Binnorie_."
              (_Oxford_, No.376.)

It is through the choral refrains, in fact, that the student of lyric
poetry is chiefly fascinated as he reads the ballads. Students of epic
and drama find them peculiarly suggestive in their handling of narrative
and dramatic material, while to students of folklore and of primitive
society they are inexhaustible treasures. The mingling of dance-motives
and song-motives with the pure story-element may long remain obscure, but
the popular ballad reinforces, perhaps more persuasively than any type of
poetry, the conviction that the lyrical impulse is universal and
inevitable. As Andrew Lang, scholar and lover of balladry, wrote
long ago: "Ballads sprang from the very heart of the people and flit from
age to age, from lip to lip of shepherds, peasants, nurses, of all the
class that continues nearest to the state of natural man. The whole soul
of the peasant class breathes in their burdens, as the great sea resounds
in the shells cast up on the shores. Ballads are a voice from secret
places, from silent peoples and old times long dead; and as such they stir
us in a strangely intimate fashion to which artistic verse can never
attain."
[Footnote: _Encyclopaedia Brittanica_, article "Ballads."]


_6. The Ode_

If the ballad is thus an example of "popular" lyricism, with a narrative
intention, an example of "artistic" lyricism is found in the Ode. Here
there is no question of communal origins or of communal influence upon
structure. The ode is a product of a single artist, working not naively,
but consciously, and employing a highly developed technique. Derived from
the Greek verb meaning "to sing," the word "ode" has not changed its
meaning since the days of Pindar, except that, as in the case of the word
"lyric" itself, we have gradually come to grow unmindful of the original
musical accompaniment of the song. Edmund Gosse, in his collection of
_English Odes_, defines the ode as "any strain of enthusiastic and exalted
lyrical verse directed to a fixed purpose and dealing progressively with
one dignified theme." Spenser's "Epithalamium" or marriage ode,
Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," Tennyson's elegiac
and encomiastic "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," Lowell's
"Harvard Commemoration Ode," are among the most familiar examples of the
general type.

English poetry has constantly employed, however, both of the two metrical
species of odes recognized by the ancients. The first, made up of uniform
stanzas, was called "Aeolian" or "Horatian,"--since Horace imitated the
simple, regular strophes of his Greek models. The other species of ode,
the "Dorian," is more complex, and is associated with the triumphal odes
of Pindar. It utilizes groups of voices, and its divisions into so-called
"strophe," "antistrophe" and "epode" (sometimes called fancifully "wave,"
"answering wave" and "echo") were determined by the movements of the
groups of singers upon the Greek stage, the "singers moving to one side
during the strophe, retracing their steps during the antistrophe (which
was for that reason metrically identical with the strophe), and standing
still during the epode."
[Footnote: See Bronson's edition of the poems of Collins. Athenaeum
Press.]

It must be observed, however, that the English odes written in strictly
uniform stanzas differ greatly in the simplicity of the stanzaic pattern.
Andrew Marvell's "Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland,"
Collins's "Ode to Evening," Shelley's "To a Skylark," and Wordsworth's
"Ode to Duty" are all in very simple stanza forms. But Collins's "Ode on
the Superstitions of the Highlands," Shelley's "Ode to Liberty" and
Coleridge's "Ode to France" follow very complicated patterns, though all
the stanzas are alike. The English "Horatian" ode, then, while exhibiting
the greatest differences in complexity of stanzaic forms, is
"homostrophic."

To understand the "Pindaric" English ode, we must remember that a few
scholars, like Ben Jonson, Congreve and Gray, took peculiar pleasure in
reproducing the general effect of the Greek strophic arrangement of
"turn," "counterturn" and "pause." Ben Jonson's "Ode to Sir Lucius Cary
and Sir H. Morison" (_Oxford_, No. 194) has been thought to be the first
strictly Pindaric ode in English, and Gray's "Bard" and "Progress of
Poesy" (_Oxford_, Nos. 454, 455) are still more familiar examples of this
type. But the great popularity of the so-called "Pindaric" ode in English
in the seventeenth century was due to Cowley, and to one of those periodic
loyalties to lawlessness which are characteristic of the English. For
Cowley, failing to perceive that Pindar's apparent lawlessness was
due to the corruption of the Greek text and to the modern ignorance of the
rules of Greek choral music, made his English "Pindaric" odes an outlet
for rebellion against all stanzaic law. The finer the poetic frenzy, the
freer the lyric pattern! But, alas, rhetoric soon triumphed over
imagination, and in the absence of metrical restraint the ode grew
declamatory, bombastic, and lowest stage of all, "official," the last
refuge of laureates who felt obliged to produce something sonorous in
honor of a royal birthday or wedding. This official ode persisted long
after the pseudo-Pindaric flag was lowered and Cowley had become
neglected.

With the revival of Romantic imagination, however, came a new interest in
the "irregular" ode, whose strophic arrangement ebbs and flows without
apparent restraint, subject only to what Watts-Dunton termed "emotional
law." Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" moves in
obedience to its own rhythmic impulses only, like Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"
and Emerson's "Bacchus." Metrical variety can nowhere be shown more freely
and gloriously than in the irregular ode: there may be any number of lines
in each strophe, and often the strophe itself becomes dissolved into
something corresponding to the "movement" of a symphony. Masterpieces like
William Vaughn Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation" and Francis Thompson's
"Hound of Heaven" reveal of course a firm intellectual grasp upon the
underlying theme of the ode and upon the logical processes of its
development. But although we may follow with keen intellectual
delight these large, free handlings of a lyrical theme, there are few
readers of poetry whose susceptibility to complicated combinations of
rhyme-sound allows them to perceive the full verbal beauty of the great
irregular odes. Even in such regular strophes as those of Keats's "Grecian
Urn," who remembers that the rhyme scheme of the first stanza is unlike
that of the following stanzas? Or that the second stanza of the "Ode to a
Nightingale" runs on four sounds instead of five? Let the reader test his
ear by reading aloud the intricate sound-patterns employed in such elegies
as Arnold's "Scholar Gypsy" (_Oxford_, No. 751) or Swinburne's "Ave atque
Vale" (_Oxford_, No. 810), and then let him go back to "Lycidas"
(_Oxford_, No. 317), the final test of one's responsiveness to the
blending of the intellectual and the sensuous elements in poetic beauty.
If he is honest with himself, he will probably confess that neither his
ear nor his mind can keep full pace with the swift and subtle demands made
upon both by the masters of sustained lyric energy. But he will also
become freshly aware that the ode is a supreme example of that union of
excitement with a sense of order, of liberty with law, which gives Verse
its immortality.


_7. The Sonnet_

The sonnet, likewise, is a lyric form which illustrates the delicate
balance between freedom and restraint. Let us look first at its structure,
and then at its capacity for expressing thought and feeling.

Both name and structure are Italian in origin, "sonetto" being the
diminutive of "suono," sound. Dante and Petrarch knew it as a special
lyric form intended for musical accompaniment. It must have fourteen
lines, neither more nor less, with five beats or "stresses" to the line.
Each line must end with a rhyme. In the arrangement of the rhymes the
sonnet is made up of two parts, or rhyme-systems: the first eight lines
forming the "octave," and the last six the "sestet." The octave is made up
of two quatrains and the sestet of two tercets. There is a main pause in
passing from the octave to the sestet, and frequently there are minor
pauses in passing from the first quatrain to the second, and from the
first tercet to the last.

Almost all of Petrarch's sonnets follow this rhyme-scheme: for the octave,
_a b b a a b b a_; for the sestet, either _c d e c d e_ or _c d c d c d_.
This strict "Petrarchan" form has endured for six centuries. It has been
adopted by poets of every race and language, and it is used to-day as
widely or more widely than ever. While individual poets have constantly
experimented with different rhyme-schemes, particularly in the sestet, the
only really notable invention of a new sonnet form was made by the
Elizabethans. Puttenham's _Arte of English Poesie_ (1589) declares that
"Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and Henry Earl of Surrey, having travelled
into Italy and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of
the Italian poesie,... greatly polished our rude and homely manner of
vulgar poesie.... Their conceits were lofty, their style stately, their
conveyance cleanly, their terms proper, their metre sweet and
well-proportioned, in all imitating very naturally and studiously their
Master Francis Petrarch."

This is charming, but as a matter of fact both Wyatt and Surrey, with
natural English independence, broke away from the strict Petrarchan rhyme
form. Wyatt liked a final couplet, and Surrey used a rhyme-scheme which
was later adopted by Shakspere and is known to-day as the "Shaksperean"
form of sonnet: namely, three quatrains made up of alternate rhymes--a
separate rhyme-scheme for each quatrain--and a closing couplet. The rhymes
consequently run thus: _a b a b c d c d e f e f g g_. To the Petrarchan
purist this is clearly no sonnet at all, in spite of its fourteen
five-beat, rhyming lines. For the distinction between octave and sestet
has disappeared, there is a threefold division of the first twelve lines,
and the final couplet gives an epigrammatic summary or "point" which
Petrarch took pains to avoid.

The difference will be still more clearly manifest if we turn from a
comparison of rhyme-structure to the ordering of the thought in the
Petrarchan sonnet. Mark Pattison, a stout "Petrarchan," lays down these
rules in the Preface to his edition of Milton's Sonnets:
[Footnote: D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1883.]

  "a. A sonnet, like every other work of art, must have its unity. It must
  be the expression of one, and only one, thought or feeling.

  "b. This thought or mood should be led up to, and opened in the early
  lines of the sonnet; strictly, in the first quatrain; in the second
  quatrain the hearer should be placed in full possession of it.

  "c. After the second quatrain there should be a pause, not full, nor
  producing the effect of a break, as of one who had finished what he had
  got to say, and not preparing a transition to a new subject, but as of
  one who is turning over what has been said in the mind to enforce it
  further.

  "d. The opening of the second system, strictly the first tercet, should
  turn back upon the thought or sentiment, take it up and carry it forward
  to the conclusion.

  "e. The conclusion should be a resultant, summing the total of the
  suggestion in the preceding lines, as a lakelet in the hills gathers
  into a still pool the running waters contributed by its narrow area of
  gradients.

  "f. While the conclusion should leave a sense of finish and
  completeness, it is necessary to avoid anything like epigrammatic point.
  By this the sonnet is distinguished from the epigram. In the epigram the
  conclusion is everything; all that goes before it is only there for the
  sake of the surprise of the end, or _dénouement_, as in a logical
  syllogism the premisses are nothing but as they necessitate the
  conclusion. In the sonnet the emphasis is nearly, but not quite, equally
  distributed, there being a slight swell, or rise, about its middle. The
  sonnet must not advance by progressive climax, or end abruptly; it
  should subside, and leave off quietly."

Miss Lockwood, in the Introduction to her admirable collection of English
sonnets,
[Footnote: _Sonnets, English and American_, selected by Laura E. Lockwood.
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916.]
makes a still briefer summary of the thought-scheme of the regular Italian
sonnet: it "should have a clear and unified theme, stated in the first
quatrain, developed or proved in the second, confirmed or regarded from a
new point of view in the first tercet, and concluded in the second tercet.
It had thus four parts, divided unevenly into two separate systems, eight
lines being devoted to placing the thought before the mind, and six to
deducing the conclusion from that thought."

A surprisingly large number of sonnets are built upon simple formulas like
"As"--for the octave--and "So"--for the sestet--(see Andrew Lang's "The
Odyssey," _Oxford_, No. 841); or "When" and "Then" (see Keats's "When I
have fears that I may cease to be," _Oxford_, No. 635). A situation plus a
thought gives a mood; or a mood plus an event gives a mental resolve, etc.
The possible combinations are infinite, but the law of logical relation
between octave and sestet, premise and conclusion, is immutable.

Let the reader now test these laws of sonnet form and thought by reading
aloud one of the most familiarly known of all English sonnets--Keats's "On
First Looking into Chapman's Homer":

  "Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
  And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
  Round many western islands have I been
  Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
  Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
  That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
  Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
  Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
  Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
  When a new planet swims into his ken;
  Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
  He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
  Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
  Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

Read next another strictly Petrarchan sonnet, where the thought divisions
of quatrains and tercets are marked with exceptional clearness, Eugene
Lee-Hamilton's disillusioned "Sea-Shell Murmurs":

  "The hollow sea-shell that for years hath stood
    On dusty shelves, when held against the ear
    Proclaims its stormy parent; and we hear
  The faint far murmur of the breaking flood.

  "We hear the sea. The sea? It is the blood
    In our own veins, impetuous and near,
    And pulses keeping pace with hope and fear
  And with our feelings' every shifting mood.

  "Lo, in my heart I hear, as in a shell,
    The murmur of a world beyond the grave,
  Distinct, distinct, though faint and far it be.

  "Thou fool; this echo is a cheat as well,--
    The hum of earthly instincts; and we crave
  A world unreal as the shell-heard sea."

And now read aloud one of the best-known of Shakspere's sonnets, where he
follows his favorite device of a threefold statement of his central
thought, using a different image in each quatrain, and closing with a
personal application of the idea:

  "That time of year thou mayst in me behold
  When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
  Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
  Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
  In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
  As after sunset fadeth in the west;
  Which by and by black night doth take away,
  Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
  In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
  That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
  As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
  Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
  This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
  To love that well which thou must leave ere long."

Where there is beauty such as this, it is an impertinence to insist that
Shakspere has not conformed to the special type of beauty represented in
the Petrarchan sonnet. He chose not to conform. He won with other tactics.
If the reader will analyse the form and thought of the eighty sonnets in
the _Oxford Book_, or the two hundred collected by Miss Lockwood, he will
feel the charm of occasional irregularity in the handling of both the
Petrarchan and the Shaksperean sonnet. But he is more likely, I think, to
become increasingly aware that whatever restraints are involved in
adherence to typical forms are fully compensated by the rich verbal beauty
demanded by the traditional arrangement of rhymes.

For the sonnet, an intricately wrought model of the reflective lyric,
requires a peculiarly intimate union of thinking and singing. It may be,
as it often was in the Elizabethan period, too full of thought to allow
free-winged song, and it may also be too full of uncontrolled, unbalanced
emotion to preserve fit unity of thought. Conversely, there may not be
enough thought and emotion to fill the fourteen lines: the idea not being
of "sonnet size." The difficult question as to whether there is such a
thing as an "average-sized" thought and lyrical reflection upon it has
been touched upon in an earlier chapter. The limit of a sentence, says
Mark Pattison, "is given by the average capacity of human apprehension....
The limit of a sonnet is imposed by the average duration of an
emotional mood....  May we go so far as to say that fourteen lines is the
average number which a thought requires for its adequate embodiment before
attention must collapse?"

The proper distribution of thought and emotion, that is, the balance of
the different parts of a sonnet, is also a very delicate affair. It is
like trimming a sailboat. Wordsworth defended Milton's frequent practice
of letting the thought of the octave overflow somewhat into the sestet,
believing it "to aid in giving that pervading sense of intense unity in
which the excellence of the sonnet has always seemed to me mainly to
consist." Most lovers of the sonnet would differ here with these masters
of the art. Whether the weight of thought and feeling can properly be
shifted to a final couplet is another debatable question, and critics will
always differ as to the artistic value of the "big" line or "big" word
which marks the culmination of emotion in many a sonnet. The strange or
violent or sonorous word, however splendid in itself, may not fit the
curve of the sonnet in which it appears: it may be like a big red apple
crowded into the toe of a Christmas stocking.

Nor must the sonnet lean towards either obscurity--the vice of Elizabethan
sonnets, or obviousness--the vice of Wordsworth's sonnets after 1820. The
obscure sonnet, while it may tempt the reader's intellectual ingenuity,
affords no basis for his emotion, and the obvious sonnet provides no
stimulus for his thought. Conventionality of subject and treatment,
like the endless imitation of Italian and French sonnet-motives and
sonnet-sequences, sins against the law of lyric sincerity. In no lyric
form does mechanism so easily obtrude itself. A sonnet is either, like
Marlowe's raptures, "all air and fire," or else it is a wooden toy.



CHAPTER IX

RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL

  "Unless there is a concurrence between the contemporary idioms and
  rhythms of a period, with the individual idiom of the lyrist, half
  the expressional force of his ideas will be lost."
    ERNEST RHYS, Foreword to _Lyric Poetry_

We have been considering the typical qualities and forms of lyric poetry.
Let us now attempt a rapid survey of some of the conditions which have
given the lyric, in certain races and periods and in the hands of certain
individuals, its peculiar power.


_1. Questions that are involved_

A whole generation of so-called "scientific" criticism has come and gone
since Taine's brilliant experiments with his formula of "race, period and
environment" as applied to literature. Taine's _English Literature_
remains a monument to the suggestiveness and to the dangers of his method.
Some of his countrymen, notably Brunetière in the _Evolution de la Poésie
Lyrique en France au XIX Siècle_, and Legouis in the _Défense de la Poésie
Française_, have discussed more cautiously and delicately than Taine
himself the racial and historic conditions affecting lyric poetry in
various periods.

The tendency at present, among critics of poetry, is to distrust formulas
and to keep closely to ascertainable facts, and this tendency is surely
more scientific than the most captivating theorizing. For one thing, while
recognizing, as the World War has freshly compelled us to recognize, the
actuality of racial differences, we have grown sceptical of the old
endeavors to classify races in simple terms, as Madame de Staël attempted
to do, for instance, in her famous book on Germany. We endeavor to
distinguish, more accurately than of old, between ethnic, linguistic and
political divisions of men. We try to look behind the name at the thing
itself: we remember that "Spanish" architecture is Arabian, and a good
deal of "Gothic" is Northern French. We confess that we are only at the
beginning of a true science of ethnology. "It is only in their degree of
physical and mental evolution that the races of men are different,"
says Professor W. Z. Ripley, author of _Races in Europe_. The late
Professor Josiah Royce admitted: "I am baffled to discover just what the
results of science are regarding the true psychological and moral meaning
of race differences.... All men in prehistoric times are surprisingly
alike in their minds, their morals and their arts....  We do not
scientifically know what the true racial varieties of mental type really
are."
[Footnote: See Royce's _Race-Questions_. New York, 1908.]

I have often thought of these utterances of my colleagues, as I have
attempted to teach something about lyric poetry in Harvard classrooms
where Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, Irish, French, German, Negro, Russian,
Italian and Armenian students appear in bewildering and stimulating
confusion. Precisely what is their racial reaction to a lyric of Sappho?
To an Anglo-Saxon war-song of the tenth century? To a Scotch ballad? To
one of Shakspere's songs? Some specific racial reaction there must be,
one imagines, but such capacity for self-expression as the student
commands is rarely capable of giving more than a hint of it.

And what real response is there, among the majority of contemporary
lovers of poetry, to the delicate shades of feeling which color the
verse of specific periods in the various national literatures? We all use
catch-words, and I shall use them myself later in this chapter, in the
attempt to indicate the changes in lyric atmosphere as we pass, for
instance, from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean age, or from the "Augustan"
to the Romantic epoch in English literature. Is this sensitiveness to the
temper of various historic periods merely the possession of a few hundred
professional scholars, who have trained themselves, like Walter Pater, to
live in some well-chosen moment of the past and to find in their
hyper-sensitized responsiveness to its voices a sort of consolation prize
for their isolation from the present? Race-mindedness is common, no doubt,
but difficult to express in words: historic-mindedness, though more
capable of expression, is necessarily confined to a few. Is the response
to the poetry of past epochs, then, chiefly a response of the individual
reader to an individual poet, and do we cross the frontiers of race and
language and historic periods with the main purpose of finding a man after
our own heart? Or is the secret of our pleasure in the poetry of alien
races and far-off times simply this: that nothing human is really alien,
and that poetry through its generalizing, universalizing power, reveals to
us the essential oneness of mankind?


_2. Graphic Arts and the Lyric_

A specific illustration may suggest an answer. An American collector of
Japanese prints recognizes in these specimens of Oriental craftsmanship
that mastery of line and composition which are a part of the universal
language of the graphic arts. Any human being, in fact, who has developed
a sensitiveness to artistic beauty will receive a measure of delight from
the work of Japanese masters. A few strokes of the brush upon silk, a bit
of lacquer work, the decoration of a sword-hilt, are enough to set his eye
dancing. But the expert collector soon passes beyond this general
enthusiasm into a quite particular interest in the handicraft of special
artists,--a Motonobu, let us say, or a Sesshiu. The collector finds his
pleasure in their individual handling of artistic problems, their unique
faculties of eye and hand. He responds, in a word, both to the
cosmopolitan language employed by every practitioner of the fine arts, and
to the local idiom, the personal accent, of, let us say, a certain
Japanese draughtsman of the eighteenth century.

And now take, by way of confirmation and also of contrast, the attitude of
an American lover of poetry toward those specimens of Japanese and Chinese
lyrics which have recently been presented to us in English translations.
The American's ignorance of the riental languages cuts him off from any
appreciation of the individual handling of diction and metre. A Lafcadio
Hearn may write delightfully about that special seventeen syllable form of
Japanese verse known as the _hokku_. Here is a _hokku_ by Basho, one of
the most skilled composers in that form. Hearn prints it with the
translation,
[Footnote: _Kwaidan_, p. 188. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904.]
and explains that the verses are intended to suggest the joyous feeling of
spring-time:

    "Oki, oki yo!
  Waga tomo ni sen
    Néru--kocho!"

(Wake up! Wake up!--I will make thee my comrade, thou sleeping butterfly.)
An Occidental reader may recognize, through the translation, the charm of
the poetic image, and he may be interested in a technical lyric form
hitherto new to him, but beyond this, in his ignorance of Japanese, he
cannot go. Here is a lyric by Wang Ch'ang-Ling, a Chinese poet of the
eighth century:

    _Tears in the Spring_
[Footnote: These Chinese lyrics are quoted from _The Lute of Jade_,
London, 1909. The translations are by L. Cranmer-Byng.]

  "Clad in blue silk and bright embroidery
  At the first call of Spring the fair young bride,
  On whom as yet Sorrow has laid no scar,
  Climbs the Kingfisher's Tower. Suddenly
  She sees the bloom of willows far and wide,
  And grieves for him she lent to fame and war."

And here is another spring lyric by Po Chü-I (A.D. 772-846), as clear and
simple as anything in the Greek Anthology:

    _The Grass_
[Footnote: These Chinese lyrics are quoted from _The Lute of Jade_,
London, 1909. The translations are by L. Cranmer-Byng.]

  "How beautiful and fresh the grass returns!
  When golden days decline, the meadow burns;
  Yet autumn suns no hidden root have slain,
  The spring winds blow, and there is grass again.

  "Green rioting on olden ways it falls:
  The blue sky storms the ruined city walls;
  Yet since Wang Sun departed long ago,
  When the grass blooms both joy and fear I know."

The Western reader, although wholly at the mercy of the translator,
recognizes the pathos and beauty of the scene and thought expressed by the
Chinese poet. But all that is specifically Chinese in lyric form is lost
to him.

I have purposely chosen these Oriental types of lyric because they
represent so clearly the difference between the universal language of the
graphic arts and the more specialized language of poetry. The latter is
still able to convey, even through translation, a suggestion of the
emotions common to all men; and this is true of the verse which lies
wholly outside the line of that Hebrew-Greek-Roman tradition which has
affected so profoundly the development of modern European literature. Yet
to express "_ce que tout le monde pense_"--which was Boileau's version of
Horace's "_propria communia dicere_"--is only part of the function of
lyric poetry. To give the body of the time the form and pressure of
individual feeling, of individual artistic mastery of the language of
one's race and epoch;--this, no less than the other, is the task and the
opportunity of the lyric poet.


_3. Decay and Survival_

To appreciate the triumph of whatever lyrics have survived, even when
sheltered by the protection of common racial or cultural traditions, one
must remember that the overwhelming majority of lyrics, like the majority
of artistic products of all ages and races and stages of civilization, are
irretrievably lost. Weak-winged is song! A book like Gummere's _Beginnings
of Poetry_, glancing as it does at the origins of so many national
literatures and at the rudimentary poetic efforts of various races that
have never emerged from barbarism, gives one a poignant sense of the
prodigality of the song-impulse compared with the slenderness of the
actual survivals. Autumn leaves are not more fugitive. Even when preserved
by sacred ritual, like the Vedas and the Hebrew Psalter, what we possess
is only an infinitesimal fraction of what has perished. The Sibyl tears
leaf after leaf from her precious volume and scatters them to the winds.
How many glorious Hebrew war-songs of the type presented in the "Song of
Deborah" were chanted only to be forgotten! We have but a handful of the
lyrics of Sappho and of the odes of Pindar, while the fragments of lyric
verse gathered up in the _Greek Anthology_ tantalize us with their
reminder of what has been lost beyond recall.

Yet if we keep to the line of Hebrew-Greek-Roman tradition, we are equally
impressed with the enduring influence of the few lyrics that have
survived. The Hebrew lyric, in its diction, its rhythmical patterns, and
above all in its flaming intensity of spirit, bears the marks of racial
purity, of mental vigor and moral elevation. It became something even more
significant, however, than the spiritual expression of a chosen race. The
East met the West when these ancient songs of the Hebrew Psalter were
adopted and sung by the Christian Church. They were translated, in the
fourth century, into the Latin of the Vulgate. Many an Anglo-Saxon gleeman
knew that Latin version. It moulded century after century the liturgy of
the European world. It influenced Tyndale's English version of the Psalms,
and this has in turn affected the whole vocabulary and style of the modern
English lyric. There is scarcely a page of the _Oxford Book of English
Verse_ which does not betray in word or phrase the influence of the
Hebrew Psalter.

Or take that other marvelous example of the expression of emotion in terms
of bodily sensation, the lyric of the Greeks. Its clarity and unity, its
dislike of vagueness and excess, its finely artistic restraint, are
characteristic of the race. The simpler Greek lyrical measures were taken
over by Catullus, Horace and Ovid, and though there were subtle qualities
of the Greek models which escaped the Roman imitators, the Greco-Roman or
"classic" restraint of over-turbulent emotions became a European heritage.
It is doubtless true, as Dr. Henry Osborn Taylor has pointed out,
[Footnote: See his _Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages_, chap. 9, and
particularly the passage quoted in the "Notes and Illustrations" to chap.
v of this volume.]
that the Greek and Roman classical metres became in time inadequate to
express the new Christian spirit "which knew neither clarity nor measure."
"The antique sense of form and proportion, the antique observance of the
mean and avoidance of extravagance and excess, the antique dislike for the
unlimited or the monstrous, the antique feeling for literary unity, and
abstention from irrelevancy, the frank love for all that is beautiful or
charming, for the beauty of the body and for everything connected with the
joy of mortal life, the antique reticence as to hopes or fears of what was
beyond the grave,--these qualities cease in medieval Latin poetry."


_4. Lyrics of Western Europe_

The racial characteristics of the peoples of Western Europe began to show
themselves even in their Latin poetry, but it is naturally in the rise of
the vernacular literatures, during the Middle Ages, that we trace the
signs of thnic differentiation. Teuton and Frank and Norseman, Spaniard or
Italian, betray their blood as soon as they begin to sing in their own
tongue. The scanty remains of Anglo-Saxon lyrical verse are colored with
the love of battle and of the sea, with the desolateness of lonely wolds,
with the passion of loyalty to a leader. Read "Deor's Lament," "Widsith,"
"The Wanderer," "The Sea-farer," or the battle-songs of Brunanburh and
Maldon in the Anglo-Saxon _Chronicle_.
[Footnote: See Cook and Tinker, _Select Translations from Old English
Poetry_ (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, _Early English Poems_
(New York, 1911).]
The last strophe of "Deor's Lament," our oldest English lyric, ends with
the line:

  _"Thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg"_
  _"That he surmounted, so this may I!"_

The wandering Ulysses says something like this, it is true, in a line of
the _Odyssey_, but to feel its English racial quality one has only to read
after it Masefield's "To-morrow":

  "Oh yesterday our little troop was ridden through and through,
  Our swaying, tattered pennons fled, a broken beaten few,
  And all a summer afternoon they hunted us and slew;
                   _But to-morrow,
  By the living God, we 'II try the game again_!"

When Taillefer, knight and minstrel, rode in front of the Norman line at
the battle of Hastings, "singing of Charlemagne and of Roland and of
Oliver and the vassals who fell at Roncevaux," he typified the coming
triumphs of French song in England.
[Footnote: See E. B. Reed, _English Lyrical Poetry_, chap. 2. 1912.]
French lyrical fashions would have won their way, no doubt, had there been
no battle of Hastings. The banners of William the Conqueror had been
blessed by Rome. They represented Europe, and the inevitable flooding of
the island outpost of "Germania" by the tide of European civilization.
_Chanson_ and _carole_, dance-songs, troubadour lyrics, the _ballade_,
_rondel_ and _Noël_, amorous songs of French courtiers, pious hymns of
French monks, began to sing themselves in England. The new grace and
delicacy is upon every page of Chaucer. What was first Provençal and then
French, became English when Chaucer touched it. From the shadow and
grimness and elegiac pathos of Old English poetry we come suddenly into
the light and color and gayety of Southern France.
[Footnote: See the passage from Legouis quoted in the "Notes and
Illustrations" for this chapter.]
In place of Caedmon's terrible picture of Hell--"ever fire or frost"--or
Dunbar's "Lament for the Makers" (_Oxford_, No. 21) with its refrain:

  "_Timor Mortis conturbat me,_"

or the haunting burden of the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" (_Oxford_, No. 381),

  "This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
    _--Every nighte and alle,_
  Fire and sleet and candle-lighte,
    _And Christe receive thy saule_,"

we now find English poets echoing _Aucassin and Nicolette_:

  "In Paradise what have I to win? Therein I seek not to enter, but only
  to have Nicolette, my sweet lady that I love so well. For into Paradise
  go none but such folk as I shall tell thee now: Thither go these same
  old priests, and halt old men and maimed, who all day and night cower
  continually before the altars and in the crypts; and such folk as wear
  old amices and old clouted frocks, and naked folk and shoeless, and
  covered with sores, perishing of hunger and thirst and of cold, and of
  little ease. These be they that go into Paradise; with them I have
  naught to make. But into Hell would I fain go; for into Hell fare the
  goodly clerks, and goodly knights that fall in tourneys and great wars,
  and stout men at arms, and all men noble. With these would I liefly go.
  And thither pass the sweet ladies and courteous that have two lovers or
  three, and their lords also thereto. Thither goes the gold and the
  silver, the cloth of vair and cloth of gris, and harpers and makers, and
  the prince of this world. With these I would gladly go, let me but have
  with me Nicolette, my sweetest lady."


_5. The Elizabethan Lyric_

The European influence came afresh to England, as we have seen, with those
"courtly makers" who travelled into France and Italy and brought back the
new-found treasures of the Renaissance. Greece and Rome renewed, as they
are forever from time to time renewing, their hold upon the imagination
and the art of English verse. Sometimes this influence of the classics has
worked toward contraction, restraint, acceptance of human limitations and
of the "rules" of art. But in Elizabethan poetry the classical influence
was on the side of expansion. In that release of vital energy which
characterized the English Renaissance, the rediscovery of Greece and Rome
and the artistic contacts with France and Italy heightened the confidence
of Englishmen, revealed the continuity of history and gave new faith in
human nature. It spelled, for the moment at least, liberty rather than
authority. It stimulated intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm. Literary
criticism awoke to life in the trenchant discussions of the art of poetry
by Gascoigne and Sidney, by Puttenham, Campion and Daniel. The very titles
of the collections of lyrics which followed the famous _Tottel's
Miscellany_ of 1557 flash with the spirit of the epoch: _A Paradise of
Dainty Devices, A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions, A Handfull
of Pleasant Delights, The Phoenix Nest, England's Helicon_, Davison's
_Poetical Rhapsody._

Bullen, Schelling, Rhys, Braithwaite, and other modern collectors of the
Elizabethan lyric have ravaged these volumes and many more, and have shown
how the imported Italian pastoral tallied with the English idyllic mood,
how the study of prosody yielded rich and various stanzaic effects, how
the diffusion of the passion for song through all classes of the community
gave a marvelous singing quality to otherwise thin and mere "dildido"
lines. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch and his friends have revived the music of the
Elizabethan song-books, and John Erskine and other scholars have
investigated the relation of the song-books--especially the songs composed
by musicians such as Byrd, Dowland and Campion--to the form and quality of
the surviving lyric verse. But one does not need a knowledge of the
Elizabethan lute and viol, and of the precise difference between a
"madrigal" and a "catch" or "air" in order to perceive the tunefulness
of a typical Elizabethan song:

 "I care not for these ladies,
  That must be woode and praide:
  Give me kind Amarillis,
  The wanton countrey maide.
  Nature art disdaineth,
  Here beautie is her owne.
    Her when we court and kisse,
    She cries, Forsooth, let go:
    But when we come where comfort is,
    She never will say No."

It is not that the spirit of Elizabethan lyric verse is always care-free,
even when written by prodigals such as Peele and Greene and Marlowe. Its
childlike grasping after sensuous pleasure is often shadowed by the sword,
and by quick-coming thoughts of the brevity of mortal things. Yet it is
always spontaneous, swift, alive. Its individual voices caught the tempo
and cadence of the race and epoch, so that men as unlike personally as
Spenser, Marlowe and Donne are each truly "Elizabethan." Spenser's
"vine-like" luxuriance, Marlowe's soaring energy, Donne's grave realistic
subtleties, illustrate indeed that note of individualism which is never
lacking in the great poetic periods. This individualism betrays itself in
almost every song of Shakspere's plays. For here is English race, surely,
and the very echo and temper of the Renaissance, but with it all there is
the indescribable, inimitable _timbre_ of one man's singing voice.


_6. The Reaction_

If we turn, however, from the lyrics of Shakspere to those of Ben Jonson
and of the "sons of Ben" who sang in the reigns of James I and Charles I,
we become increasingly conscious of a change in atmosphere. The moment of
expansion has passed. The "first fine careless rapture" is over. Classical
"authority" resumes its silent, steady pressure. Scholars like to remember
that the opening lines of Ben Jonson's "Drink to me only with thine eyes"
are a transcript from the Greek. In his "Ode to Himself upon the Censure
of his _New Inn_" in 1620 Jonson, like Landor long afterward, takes
scornful refuge from the present in turning back to Greece and Rome:

  "Leave things so prostitute,
     And take the Alcaic lute;
   Or thine own Horace, or Anacreon's lyre;
     Warm thee by Pindar's fire."

The reaction in lyric form showed itself in the decay of sonnet, pastoral
and madrigal, in the neglect of blank verse, in the development of the
couplet. Milton, in such matters as these, was a solitary survival of the
Elizabethans. Metrical experimentation almost ceased, except in the hands
of ingenious recluses like George Herbert. The popular metre of the
Caroline poets was the rhymed eight and six syllable quatrain:

  "Yet this inconstancy is such
     As thou too shalt adore;
   I could not love thee, Dear, so much
     Loved I not Honour more."

The mystics like Crashaw, Vaughan and Traherne wished and secured a wider
metrical liberty, and it is, in truth, these complicated patterns of the
devotional lyric of the seventeenth century that are of greatest interest
to the poets of our own day. But contemporary taste, throughout the
greater portion of that swiftly changing epoch, preferred verse that
showed a conservative balance in thought and feeling, in diction and
versification. Waller, with his courtier-like instinct for what was
acceptable, took the middle of the road, letting Cowley and Quarles
experiment as fantastically as they pleased. Andrew Marvell, too, a
Puritan writing in the Restoration epoch, composed as "smoothly"
as Waller. Herrick, likewise, though fond of minor metrical experiments,
celebrated his quiet garden pleasures and his dalliance with amorous
fancies in verse of the true Horatian type. "Intensive rather than
expansive, fanciful rather than imaginative, and increasingly restrictive
in its range and appeal": that is Professor Schelling's expert summary of
the poetic tendencies of the age.

And then the lyric impulse died away in England. Dryden could be
magnificently sonorous in declamation and satire, but he lacked the
singing voice. Pope likewise, though he "lisped in numbers," could never,
for all of his cleverness, learn to sing. The age of the Augustans, in the
first quarter of the eighteenth century, was an age of prose, of reason,
of good sense, of "correctness." The decasyllabic couplet, so resonant in
Dryden, so admirably turned and polished by Pope, was its favorite
measure. The poets played safe. They took no chances with "enthusiasm,"
either in mood or metrical device. What could be said within the
restraining limits of the couplet they said with admirable point, vigor
and grace. But it was speech, not song.


7. _The Romantic Lyric_

The revolt came towards the middle of the century, first in the lyrics of
Collins, then in Gray. The lark began to soar and sing once more in
English skies. New windows were opened in the House of Life. Men looked
out again with curiosity, wonder and a sense of strangeness in the
presence of beauty. They saw Nature with new eyes; found a new richness in
the Past, a new picturesque and savor in the life of other races,
particularly in the wild Northern and Celtic strains of blood. Life grew
again something mysterious, not to be comprehended by the "good sense" of
the Augustans, or expressible in the terms of the rhymed couplet. Instead
of the normal, poets sought the exceptional, then the strange, the
far-away in time or place, or else the familiar set in some unusual
fantastic light. The mood of poetry changed from tranquil sentiment to
excited sentiment or "sensibility," and then to sheer passion. The forms
of poetry shifted from the conventional to the revival of old measures
like blank verse and the Spenserian stanza, then to the invention of new
and freer forms, growing ever more lyrical. Poetic diction rebelled
against the Augustan conventions, the stereotyped epithets, the frigid
personifications. It abandoned the abstract and general for the specific
and the picturesque. It turned to the language of real life, and then,
dissatisfied, to the heightened language of passion. If one reads Cowper,
Blake, Burns and Wordsworth, to say nothing of poets like Byron and
Shelley who wrote in the full Romantic tide of feeling, one finds that
this poetry has discovered new themes. It portrays the child, the peasant,
the villager, the outcast, the slave, the solitary person, even the idiot
and the lunatic. There is a new human feeling for the individual, and for
the endless, the poignant variety of "states of soul." Browning, by and
by, is to declare that "states of soul" are the only things worth a poet's
attention.

Now this new individuality of themes, of language, of moods, assisted in
the free expression of lyricism, the release of the song-impulse of the
"single, separate person." The Romantic movement was revelatory, in a
double sense. "Creation widened in man's view"; and there was equally a
revelation of individual poetic energy which gave the Romantic lyric an
extraordinary variety and beauty of form. There was an exaggerated
individualism, no doubt, which marked the weak side of the whole movement:
a deliberate extravagance, a cultivated egoism. Vagueness has its
legitimate poetic charm, but in England no less than in Germany or France
lyric vagueness often became incoherence. Symbolism degenerated into
meaninglessness. But the fantastic and grotesque side of Romantic
individualism should not blind us to the central fact that a rich
personality may appear in a queer garb. Victor Hugo, like his young
friends of the 1830's, loved to make the gray-coated citizens of Paris
stare at his scarlet, but the personality which could create such lyric
marvels as the _Odes et Ballades_ may be forgiven for its eccentricities.
William Blake was eccentric to the verge of insanity, yet he opened, like
Whitman and Poe, new doors of ivory into the wonder-world.

Yet a lyrist like Keats, it must be remembered, betrayed his personality
not so much through any external peculiarity of the Romantic temperament
as through the actual texture of his word and phrase and rhythm. Examine
his brush-work microscopically, as experts in Italian painting examine the
brushstrokes and pigments of some picture attributed to this or that
master: you will see that Keats, like all the supreme masters of poetic
diction, enciphered his lyric message in a language peculiarly his own. It
is for us to decipher it as we may. He used, of course, particularly in
his earlier work, some of the stock-epithets, the stock poetic
"properties" of the Romantic school, just as the young Tennyson, in his
volume of 1827, played with the "owl" and the "midnight" and the "solitary
mere," stock properties of eighteenth-century romance. Yet Tennyson, like
Keats, and for that matter like Shakspere, passed through this imitative
phase into an artistic maturity where without violence or extravagance or
eccentricity he compelled words to do his bidding. Each word bears the
finger-print of a personality.

Now it is precisely this revelation of personality which gave zest,
throughout the Romantic period, to the curiosity about the poetry of alien
races. It will be remembered that Romanticism followed immediately upon a
period of cosmopolitanism, and that it preceded that era of intense
nationalism which came after the Napoleonic wars. Even in that
intellectual "United States of Europe," about 1750--when nationalistic
differences were minimized, "enlightenment" was supreme and "propria
communia dicere" was the literary motto--there was nevertheless a rapidly
growing curiosity about races and literatures outside the charmed circle
of Western Europe. It was the era of the Oriental tale, of Northern
mythology. Then the poets of England, France and Germany began their
fruitful interchange of inspiration. Walter Scott turned poet when he
translated Burger's "Lenore." Goethe read Marlowe's _Dr. Faustus_.
Wordsworth and Coleridge visited Germany not in search of general
eighteenth-century "enlightenment," but rather in quest of some peculiar
revelation of truth and beauty. In the full tide of Romanticism,
Protestant Germany sought inspiration in Italy and Spain, as Catholic
France sought it in Germany and England. A new sense of race-values
was evident in poetry. It may be seen in Southey, Moore, and Byron, in
Hugo's _Les Orientales_ and in Leconte de Lisle's _Poèmes Barbares_.
Modern music has shown the same tendency: Strauss of Vienna writes waltzes
in Arab rhythms, Grieg composes a Scotch symphony, Dvorák writes an
American national anthem utilizing negro melodies. As communication
between races has grown easier, and the interest in race-characteristics
more intense, it would be strange indeed if lovers of lyric poetry did not
range far afield in their search for new complexities of lyric feeling.


_8. The Explorer's Pleasure_

This explorer's pleasure in discovering the lyrics of other races was
never more keen than it is to-day. Every additional language that one
learns, every new sojourn in a foreign country, enriches one's own
capacity for sharing the lyric mood. It is impossible, of course, that any
race or period should enter fully into the lyric impulses of another.
Educated Englishmen have known their Horace for centuries, but it can be
only a half-knowledge, delightful as it is. France and England, so near in
miles, are still so far away in instinctive comprehension of each other's
mode of poetical utterance! No two nations have minds of quite the same
"fringe." No man, however complete a linguist, has more than one real
mother tongue, and it is only in one's mother tongue that a lyric
sings with all its over-tones. And nevertheless, life offers few purer
pleasures than may be found in listening to the half-comprehended songs
uttered by alien lips indeed, but from hearts that we know are like our
own.

  "This moment yearning and thoughtful sitting alone,
  It seems to me there are other men in other lands
     yearning and thoughtful,
  It seems to me I can look over and behold them in
     Germany, Italy, France, Spain,
  Or far, far away, in China, or in Russia or Japan,
     talking other dialects,
  And it seems to me if I could know those men I
     should become attached to them as I do to
     men in my own lands,
  O I know we should be brethren and lovers,
  I know I should be happy with them."


9. _A Test_

If the reader is willing to test his own responsiveness, not to the alien
voices, but to singers of his own blood in other epochs, let him now read
aloud--or better, recite from memory--three of the best-known English
poems: Milton's "Lycidas," Gray's "Elegy" and Wordsworth's "Ode to
Immortality." The first was published in 1638, the second in 1751, and the
third in 1817. Each is a "central" utterance of a race, a period and an
individual. Each is an open-air poem, written by a young Englishman; each
is lyrical, elegiac--a song of mourning and of consolation. "Lycidas" is
the last flawless music of the English Renaissance, an epitome of
classical and pastoral convention, yet at once Christian, political and
personal. Beneath the quiet perfection of Gray's "Elegy" there is the
undertone of passionate sympathy for obscure lives: passionate, but
restrained. Wordsworth knows no restraint of form or feeling in
his great "Ode"; its germinal idea is absurd to logic, but not to the
imagination. This elegy, like the others, is a "lyric cry" of a man, an
age, and a race; "enciphered" like them, with all the cunning of which the
artist was capable; and decipherable only to those who know the language
of the English lyric.

There may be readers who find these immortal elegies wearisome, staled by
repetition, spoiled by the critical glosses of generations of
commentators. In that case, one may test his sense of race, period
and personality by a single quatrain of Landor, who is surely not
over-commented upon to-day:

  "From you, Ianthe, little troubles pass
  Like little ripples down a sunny river;
  Your pleasures spring like daisies in the grass,
  Cut down, and up again as blithe as ever."

Find the classicist, the aristocrat, the Englishman, and the lover in that
quatrain!

Or, if Landor seems too remote, turn to Amherst, Massachusetts, and read
this amazing elegy in a country churchyard written by a New England
recluse, Emily Dickinson:

  "This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies,
      And Lads and Girls;
   Was laughter and ability and sighing,
      And frocks and curls.
   This passive place a Summer's nimble mansion,
      Where Bloom and Bees
   Fulfilled their Oriental Circuit,
      Then ceased like these."



CHAPTER X

THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC


  "And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other
  affections, of desire and pain and pleasure which are held to be
  inseparable from every action--in all of them poetry feeds and waters
  the passions instead of withering and starving them; she lets them rule
  instead of ruling them as they ought to be ruled, with a view to the
  happiness and virtue of mankind."
    PLATO'S _Republic_, Book 10

  "A man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away
  from it, 'Be damned!' It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this
  same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very
  wretched generation of ours."
    CARLYLE _to_ EMERSON, _August 29, 1842_


Let us turn finally to some phases of the contemporary lyric. We shall not
attempt the hazardous, not to say impossible venture of assessing the
artistic value of living poets. "Poets are not to be ranked like
collegians in a class list," wrote the wise John Morley long ago.
Certainly they cannot be ranked until their work is finished. Nor is it
possible within the limits of this chapter to attempt, upon a smaller
scale, anything like the task which has been performed so interestingly by
books like Miss Lowell's _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_, Mr.
Untermeyer's _New Era in American Poetry_, Miss Wilkinson's _New Voices_,
and Mr. Lowes's _Convention and Revolt_. I wish rather to remind the
reader, first, of the long-standing case against the lyric, a case
which has been under trial in the court of critical opinion from Plato's
day to our own; and then to indicate, even more briefly, the lines of
defence. It will be clear, as we proceed, that contemporary verse in
America and England is illustrating certain general tendencies which not
only sharpen the point of the old attack, but also hearten the spirit of
the defenders of lyric poetry.


1. _Plato's Moralistic Objection_

Nothing could be more timely, as a contribution to a critical battle which
is just now being waged,
[Footnote: See the Introduction and the closing chapter of Stuart P.
Sherman's _Contemporary Literature_. Holt, 1917.]
than the passage from Plato's _Republic_ which furnishes the motto for the
present chapter. It expresses one of those eternal verities which each
generation must face as best it may: "Poetry feeds and waters the passions
instead of withering and starving them; she lets them rule instead of
ruling them." "Did we not imply," asks the Athenian Stranger in Plato's
_Laws_, "that the poets are not always quite capable of knowing what is
good or evil?" "There is also," says Socrates in the Phoedrus, "a third
kind of madness, which is the possession of the Muses; this enters into a
delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric and
all other members." This Platonic notion of lyric "inspiration" and
"possession" permeates the immortal passage of the _Ion_:

  "For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful
  poems not as works of art, but because they are inspired and possessed.
  And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right
  mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are
  composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of
  music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens
  who draw milk and honey from the rivers, when they are under the
  influence of Dionysus, but not when they are in their right mind. And
  the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves tell us;
  for they tell us that they gather their strains from honied fountains
  out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; thither, like the bees, they
  wing their way. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and
  holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired
  and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has
  not attained to this state, he is powerless and is to utter his oracles.
  Many are the noble words in which poets speak of actions like your own
  Words about Homer; but they do not speak of them by any rules of art:
  only when they make that to which the Muse impels them are their
  inventions inspired; and then one of them will make dithyrambs, another
  hymns of praise, another choral strains, another epic or iambic
  verses--and he who is good at one is not good at any other kind of
  verse: for not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he
  learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one
  theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets,
  and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy
  prophets, in order that we who hear them may know that they speak not of
  themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of
  unconsciousness, but that God is the speaker, and that through them he
  is conversing with us."
[Footnote: Plato's _Ion_, Jowett's translation.]

The other Platonic notion about poetry being "imitation" colors the
well-known section of the third book of the _Republic_, which warns
against the influence of certain effeminate types of lyric harmony:

  "I answered: Of the harmonies I know nothing, but I want to have one
  warlike, which will sound the word or note which a brave man utters in
  the hour of danger and stern resolve, or when his cause is failing and
  he is going to wounds or death or is overtaken by some other evil, and
  at every such crisis meets fortune with calmness and endurance; and
  another which may be used by him in times of peace and freedom of
  action, when there is no pressure of necessity--expressive of entreaty
  or persuasion, of prayer to God, or instruction of man, or again, of
  willingness to listen to persuasion or entreaty and advice; and which
  represents him when he has accomplished his aim, not carried away by
  success, but acting moderately and wisely, and acquiescing in the event.
  These two harmonies I ask you to leave; the strain of necessity and the
  strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the
  fortunate, the strain of courage, and the strain of temperance; these,
  I say, leave."

So runs the famous argument for "the natural rhythms of a manly life," and
conversely, the contention that "the absence of grace and rhythm and
harmony is closely allied to an evil character." While it is true that the
basis for this argument has been modified by our abandonment of the Greek
aesthetic theories of "inspiration" and "imitation," Plato's moralistic
objection to lyric effeminacy and lyric naturalism is widely shared by
many of our contemporaries. They do not find the "New Poetry," lovely as
it often is, altogether "manly." They find on the contrary that some of it
is what Plato calls "dissolute," i.e. dissolving or relaxing the fibres of
the will, like certain Russian dance-music. I asked an American composer
the other day: "Is there anything at all in the old distinction between
secular and sacred music?" "Certainly," he replied; "secular music
excites, sacred music exalts." If this distinction is sound, it is plain
that much of the New Poetry aims at excitement of the senses for its
own sake--or in Plato's words, at "letting them rule, instead of ruling
them as they ought to be ruled." Or, to use the severe words of a
contemporary critic: "They bid us be all eye, no mind; all sense, no
thought; all chance, all confusion, no order, no organization, no fabric
of the reason."

However widely we may be inclined to differ with such moralistic judgments
as these, it remains true that plenty of idealists hold them, and it is
the idealists, rather than the followers of the senses, who have kept the
love of poetry alive in our modern world.


_2. A Rationalistic Objection_

But the Philistines, as well as the Platonists, have an indictment to
bring against modern verse, and particularly against the lyric. They find
it useless and out of date. Macaulay's essay on Milton (1825) is one of
the classic expressions of "Caledonian" rationalism:

  "We think that as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily
  declines.... Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his
  purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive
  and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms.
  Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of
  a half-civilized people is poetical....  In proportion as men know more
  and think more, they look less at individuals, and more at classes. They
  therefore make better theories and worse poems.... In an enlightened age
  there will be much intelligence, much science, much philosophy,
  abundance of just classification and subtle analysis, abundance of wit
  and eloquence, abundance of verses and even of good ones, but little
  poetry." In the essay on Dryden (1828) Macaulay renews the charge:
  "Poetry requires not an examining but a believing freedom of mind.... As
  knowledge is extended and as the reason develops itself, the imitative
  arts decay."

Even Macaulay, however, is a less pungent and amusing advocate of
rationalism than Thomas Love Peacock in _The Four Ages of Poetry_.
[Footnote: Reprinted in A. S. Cook's edition of Shelley's _Defense of
Poetry_. Boston, 1891.]

A few sentences must suffice:

  "A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He
  lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings,
  associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and
  exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a
  crab, backward.... The highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable
  into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of
  exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment; and can
  therefore serve only to ripen a splendid lunatic like Alexander, a
  puling driveler like Werter, or a morbid dreamer like Wordsworth. It can
  never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor in any class of life a
  useful or rational man. It cannot claim the slightest share in any one
  of the comforts and utilities of life, of which we have witnessed so
  many and so rapid advances.... We may easily conceive that the day is
  not distant when the degraded state of every species of poetry will be
  as generally recognized as that of dramatic poetry has long been; and
  this not from any decrease either of intellectual power or intellectual
  acquisition, but because intellectual power and intellectual acquisition
  have turned themselves into other and better channels, and have
  abandoned the cultivation and the fate of poetry to the degenerate fry
  of modern rimesters, and their Olympic judges, the magazine critics, who
  continue to debate and promulgate oracles about poetry as if it were
  still what it was in the Homeric age, the all-in-all of intellectual
  progression, and as if there were no such things in existence as
  mathematicians, historians, politicians, and political economists, who
  have built into the upper air of intelligence a pyramid, from the summit
  of which they see the modern Parnassus far beneath them, and knowing how
  small a place it occupies in the comprehensiveness of their prospect,
  smile at the little ambition and the circumscribed perceptions with
  which the drivelers and mountebanks upon it are contending for the
  poetical palm and the critical chair."

No one really knows whether Peacock was wholly serious in this diatribe,
but inasmuch as it produced Shelley's _Defense of Poetry_ "as an
antidote"--as Shelley said--we should be grateful for it. Both Peacock and
Macaulay wrote nearly a century ago, but their statements as to the
uselessness of poetry, as compared with the value of intellectual exertion
in other fields, is wholly in the spirit of twentieth-century rationalism.
Few readers of this book may hold that doctrine, but they will meet it on
every side; and they will need all they can remember of Sidney and Shelley
and George Woodberry "as an antidote."


3. _An Aesthetic Objection_

In Aristotle's well-known definition of Tragedy in the fifth section of
the _Poetics_, there is one clause, and perhaps only one, which has been
accepted without debate. "A Tragedy, then, is an artistic imitation of an
action that is serious, complete in itself, _and of an adequate
magnitude_." Does a lyric possess "an adequate magnitude?" As the
embodiment of a single aspect of feeling, and therefore necessarily brief,
the lyric certainly lacks "mass." As an object for aesthetic
contemplation, is the average lyric too small to afford the highest and
most permanent pleasure? "A long poem," remarks A. C. Bradley in his
_Oxford Lectures on Poetry_,
[Footnote: London, 1909. The passage cited is from the chapter on "The
Long Poem in the Age of Wordsworth."]
"requires imaginative powers superfluous in a short one, and it would be
easy to show that it admits of strictly poetic effects of the highest
value which the mere brevity of a short one excludes." Surely the lyric,
like the short story, cannot see life steadily and whole. It reflects, as
we have seen, a single situation or desire. "Short swallow-flights of
song"; piping "as the linnet sings"; have not the lyric poets themselves
confessed this inherent shortcoming of their art in a thousand similes?
Does not a book of lyrics often seem like a plantation of carefully tended
little trees, rather than a forest? The most ardent collector of
butterflies is aware that he is hunting only butterflies and not big game.
Mr. John Gould Fletcher's _Japanese Prints_ is a collection of the
daintiest lyric fragments, lovely as a butterfly's wing. But do such
lyrics lack "adequate magnitude"?

It seems to the present writer that this old objection is a real one, and
that it is illustrated afresh by contemporary poetry, but that it is not
so much an argument against the lyric as such, as it is an explanation of
the ineffectiveness of certain lyric poems. This defect is not primarily
that they lack "magnitude," but rather that they lack an adequate basis in
our emotional adjustment to the fact or situation upon which they turn.
The reader is not prepared for the effect which they convey. The art of
the drama was defined by the younger Dumas as the art of preparation. Now
the lyrics which are most effective in primarily dramatic compositions,
let us say the songs in "Pippa Passes" or Ariel's songs in _The Tempest_,
are those where the train of emotional association or contrast has been
carefully laid and is waiting to be touched off. So it is with the
markedly lyrical passages in narrative verse--say the close of "Sohrab and
Rustum." When a French actress sings the "Marseillaise" to a theatre
audience in war-time, or Sir Harry Lauder, dressed in kilts, sings
to a Scottish-born audience about "the bonny purple heather," or a
marching regiment strikes up "Dixie," the actual song is only the release
of a mood already stimulated. But when one comes upon an isolated lyric
printed as a "filler" at the bottom of a magazine page, there is no train
of emotional association whatever. There is no lyric mood waiting to
respond to a "lyric cry." To overcome this obstacle, Walter Page and other
magazine editors, a score of years ago, made the experiment of printing
all the verse together, instead of scattering it according to the
exigencies of the "make-up." Miss Monroe's _Poetry_, _Contemporary Verse_,
and the other periodicals devoted exclusively to poetry, easily avoid this
handicap of intruding prose. One turns their pages as he turns leaves of
music until he finds some composition in accordance with his mood of the
moment. The long poem or the drama creates an undertone of feeling
in which the lyrical mood may easily come to its own, based and reinforced
as it is by the larger poetical structure. The isolated magazine lyric, on
the other hand, is like one swallow trying to make a summer. Even the
lyrics collected in anthologies are often "mutually repellent particles,"
requiring through their very brevity and lack of relation with one
another, a perpetual re-focussing of the attention, a constant re-creation
of lyric atmosphere. These conditions have been emphasized, during the
last decade, by that very variety of technical experimentation, that
increased range and individualism of lyric effort, which have renewed the
interest in American poetry.


4. _Subjectivity as a Curse_

I have often thought of a conversation with Samuel Asbury, a dozen years
ago, about a friend of ours, a young Southern poet of distinct promise,
who had just died. Like many Southern verse-writers of his generation, he
had lived and written under the inspiration of Poe. Asbury surprised me by
the almost bitter remark that Poe's influence had been a blight upon the
younger Southern poets, inasmuch as it had tended to over-subjectivity, to
morbid sensibility, and to a pre-occupation with purely personal emotions.
He argued, as he has since done so courageously in his _Texas Nativist_,
[Footnote: Published by the author at College Station, Texas.]
that more objective forms of poetry, particularly epic and dramatic
handling of local and historic American material, was far healthier stuff
for a poet to work with.

This objection to the lyric as an encourager of subjective excitement, of
egoistic introspection, like the other objections already stated, is one
of old standing. Goethe remarked that the subjectivity of the smaller
poets was of no significance, but that they were interested in nothing
really objective. But though this indictment of over-individualism has
often been drawn, our own times are a fresh proof of its validity. If the
revelation of personality unites men, the stress upon mere individuality
separates them, and there are countless poets of the day who glory in
their eccentric individualism without remembering that it is only through
a richly developed personality that poetry gains any universal values.
"Nothing in literature is so perishable as eccentricity, with regard to
which each generation has its own requirements and its own standard of
taste; and the critic who urges contemporary poets to make their work as
individual as possible is deliberately inviting them to build their
structures on sand instead of rock."
[Footnote: Edmond Holmes, _What is Poetry_, p. 68.]
Every reader of contemporary poetry is aware that along with its
exhilarating freshness and force there has been a display of singularity
and of silly nudity both of body and mind. Too intimate confidences have
been betrayed in the lyric confessional. It is a fine thing to see a
Varsity eight take their dip in the river at the end of an afternoon's
spin. Those boys strip well. But there are middle-aged poets who strip
very badly. Nature never intended them to play the role of Narcissus.
Dickens wrote great novels in a room so hung with mirrors that he could
watch himself in the act of composition. But that is not the best sort of
writing-room for lyric poets, particularly in a decade when acute
self-consciousness, race-consciousness and even coterie-consciousness are
exploited for commercial purposes, and the "lutanists of October" are duly
photographed at their desks.


5. _Mere Technique_

There is one other count in the old indictment of the lyric which is sure
to be emphasized whenever any generation, like our own, shows a new
technical curiosity about lyric forms. It is this: that mere technique
will "carry" a lyric, even though thought, passion and imagination be
lacking. This charge will inevitably be made from time to time, and not
merely by the persons who naturally tend to stress the content-value of
poetry as compared with its form-value. It was Stedman, who was peculiarly
susceptible to the charm of varied lyric form, who remarked of some of
Poe's lyrics, "The libretto (i.e. the sense) is nothing, the score is all
in all." And it must be admitted that the "libretto" of "Ulalume," for
instance, is nearly or quite meaningless to many lovers of poetry who
value the "score" very highly. In a period marked by enthusiasm for new
experiments in versification, new feats of technique, the borderland
between real conquests of novel territory and sheer nonsense verse
becomes very hazy. The _Spectra_ hoax, perpetrated so cleverly in 1916 by
Mr. Ficke and Mr. Witter Bynner, fooled many of the elect.
[Footnote: See Untermeyer's _New Era_, etc., pp. 320-23.]
I have never believed that Emerson meant to decry Poe when he referred to
him as "the jingle-man." Emerson's memory for names was faulty, and he was
trying to indicate the author of the

  "tintinnabulation of the bells."

That Poe was a prestidigitator with verse, and may be regarded solely with
a view to his professional expertness, is surely no ground for disparaging
him as a poet. But it is the kind of penalty which extraordinary technical
expertness has to pay in all the arts. Many persons remember Paganini only
as the violinist who could play upon a single string. Every "_amplificolor
imperii_"--every widener of the bounds of the empire of poetry, like
Vachel Lindsay with his experiments in chanted verse, Robert Frost with
his subtle renderings of the cadences of actual speech, Miss Amy Lowell
with her doctrine of "curves" and "returns" and polyphony--runs the risk
of being regarded for a while as a technician and nothing more. Ultimately
a finer balance is struck between the claims of form and content: the
ideas of a poet, his total vision of life, his contribution to the thought
as well as to the craftsmanship of his generation, are thrown into the
scale. Victor Hugo is now seen to be something far other than the mere
amazing lyric virtuoso of the _Odes et Ballades_ of 1826. Walt Whitman
ultimately gets judged as Walt Whitman, and not merely as the inventor
of a new type of free verse in 1855. A rough justice is done at last, no
doubt, but for a long time the cleverest and most original manipulators of
words and tunes are likely to be judged by their virtuosity alone.


_6. The Lines of Defence_

The objections to lyric poetry which have just been rehearsed are of
varying degrees of validity. They have been mentioned here because they
still affect, more or less, the judgment of the general public as it
endeavors to estimate the value of the contemporary lyric. I have little
confidence in the taste of professed admirers of poetry who can find no
pleasure in contemporary verse, and still less confidence in the taste of
our contemporaries whose delight in the "new era" has made them deaf to
the great poetic voices of the past. I am sorry for the traditionalist who
cannot enjoy Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson and Edgar Lee
Masters and Carl Sandburg. He is, in my opinion, in a parlous state. But
the state of the young rebel who cannot enjoy "Lycidas" and "The Progress
of Poesy" and the "Ode to Dejection" is worse than parlous. It is
hopeless.

It is not for him, therefore, that these final paragraphs are written, but
rather for those lovers of poetry who recognize that it transcends all
purely moralistic and utilitarian, as it does all historical and technical
considerations,--that it lifts the reader into a serene air where beauty
and truth abide, while the perplexed generations of men appear and
disappear. Sidney and Campion and Daniel pleaded its cause for the
Elizabethans, Coleridge and Wordsworth and Shelley defended it against the
Georgian Philistines, Carlyle, Newman and Arnold championed it through
every era of Victorian materialism. In the twentieth century, critics like
Mackail and A. C. Bradley and Rhys, poets like Newbolt and Drinkwater and
Masefield--to say nothing of living poets and critics among our own
countrymen--have spoken out for poetry with a knowledge, a sympathy and an
eloquence unsurpassed in any previous epoch. The direct "Defence of
Poetry" may safely be left to such men as these.

I have chosen, rather, the line of indirect vindication of poetry, and
particularly of the lyric, which has been attempted in this book. We have
seen that the same laws are perpetually at work in poetry as in all the
other arts; that we have to do with the transmission of a certain kind of
feeling through a certain medium; that the imagination remoulds the
material proffered by the senses, and brings into order the confused and
broken thoughts of the mind, until it presents the eternal aspect of
things through words that dance to music. We have seen that the study of
poetry leads us back to the psychic life of primitive races, to the
origins of language and of society, and to the underlying spirit of
institutions and nationalities, so that even a fragment of surviving lyric
verse may be recognized as a part of those unifying and dividing
forces that make up the life of the world. We have found poetry,
furthermore, to be the great personal mode of literary expression, a
revelation of noble personality as well as base, and that this personal
mode of expression has continued to hold its own in the modern world. The
folk-epic is gone, the art-epic has been outstripped by prose fiction, and
the drama needs a theatre. But the lyric needs only a _poet_, who can
compose in any of its myriad forms. No one who knows contemporary
literature will deny that the lyric is now interpreting the finer spirit
of science, the drift of social progress, and above all, the instincts of
personal emotion. Through it to-day, as never before in the history of
civilization, the heart of a man can reach the heart of mankind. It is
inconceivable that the lyric will not grow still more significant
with time, freighted more and more deeply with thought and passion and
touched with a richer and more magical beauty. Some appreciation of it, no
matter how inadequate, should be a part of the spiritual possessions of
every civilized man.'

  "Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen;
   Dein Sinn ist zu, dein Herz ist todt!
   Auf! bade, Schüler, unverdrossen
   Die ird'sche Brust im Morgenrothl"




    NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS


I add here some suggestions to teachers who may wish to use this book in
the classroom. In connection with each chapter I have indicated the more
important discussions of the special topic. There is also some additional
illustrative material, and I have indicated a few hints for classroom
exercises, following methods which have proved helpful in my own
experience as a teacher.

I have tried to keep in mind the needs of two kinds of college courses in
poetry. One of them is the general introductory course, which usually
begins with the lyric rather than with the epic or the drama, and which
utilizes some such collection as the _Golden Treasury_ or the _Oxford Book
of English Verse_. Any such collection of standard verse, or any of the
anthologies of recent poetry, like those selected by Miss Jessie B.
Rittenhouse or Mr. W. S. Braithwaite, should be constantly in use in the
classroom as furnishing concrete illustration of the principles discussed
in books like mine.

The other kind of course which I have had in mind is the one dealing with
the works of a single poet. Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson,
Browning, are among the poets most frequently chosen for this sort of
study. I have found it an advantage to carry on the discussion of the
general principles of poetic imagination and expression in connection with
the close textual study of the complete work of any one poet. It is hoped
that this book may prove helpful for such a purpose.


CHAPTER I

This chapter aims to present, in as simple a form as possible, some of the
fundamental questions in aesthetic theory as far as they bear upon the
study of poetry. James Sully's article on "Aesthetics" in the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Sidney Colvin's article on "The Fine
Arts," afford a good preliminary survey of the field. K. Gordon's
_Aesthetics_, E. D. Puffer's _Psychology of Beauty_, Santayana's _Sense of
Beauty_, Raymond's _Genesis of Art Form_, and Arthur Symons's _Seven
Arts_, are stimulating books. Bosanquet's _Three Lectures on Aesthetic_ is
commended to those advanced students who have not time to read his
voluminous _History of Aesthetic_, just as Lane Cooper's translation of
_Aristotle on the Art of Poetry_ may be read profitably before taking up
the more elaborate discussions in Butcher's _Aristotle's Theory of Poetry
and Fine Art_. In the same way, Spingarn's _Creative Criticism_ is a good
preparation for Croce's monumental _Aesthetics_. The student should
certainly make some acquaintance with Lessing's _Laokoon_, and he will
find Babbitt's _New Laokoon_ a brilliant and trenchant survey of the old
questions.

It may be, however, that the teacher will prefer to pass rapidly over the
ground covered in this chapter, rather than to run the risk of confusing
his students with problems admittedly difficult. In that case the
classroom discussions may begin with chapter II. I have found, however,
that the new horizons which are opened to many students in connection with
the topics touched upon in chapter I more than make up for some temporary
bewilderment.


CHAPTER II

The need here is to look at an old subject with fresh eyes. Teachers who
are fond of music or painting or sculpture can invent many illustrations
following the hint given in the Orpheus and Eurydice passage in the text.
Among recent books, Fairchild's _Making of Poetry_ and Max Eastman's
_Enjoyment of Poetry_ are particularly to be commended for their
unconventional point of view. See also Fairchild's pamphlet on _Teaching
of Poetry in the High School_, and John Erskine's paper on "The Teaching
of Poetry" (_Columbia University Quarterly_, December, 1915). Alfred
Hayes's "Relation of Music to Poetry" (_Atlantic_, January, 1914) is
pertinent to this chapter. But the student should certainly familiarize
himself with Theodore Watts-Dunton's famous article on "Poetry" in
the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, now reprinted with additions in his
_Renascence of Wonder_. He should also read A. C. Bradley's chapter on
"Poetry for its Own Sake" in the _Oxford Lectures on Poetry_, Neilson's
_Essentials of Poetry_, Stedman's _Nature and Elements of Poetry_, as well
as the classic "Defences" of Poetry by Philip Sidney, Shelley, Leigh Hunt
and George E. Woodberry. For advanced students, R. P. Cowl's _Theory of
Poetry in England_ is a useful summary of critical opinions covering
almost every aspect of the art of poetry, as it has been understood by
successive generations of Englishmen.


CHAPTER III

This chapter, like the first, will be difficult for some students. They
may profitably read, in connection with it, Professor Winchester's chapter
on "Imagination" in his _Literary Criticism_, Neilson's discussion of
"Imagination" in his _Essentials of Poetry_, the first four chapters of
Fairchild, chapters 4, 13, 14, and 15 of Coleridge's _Biographia
Literaria_, and Wordsworth's Preface to his volume of Poems of 1815. See
also Stedman's chapter on "Imagination" in his _Nature and Elements of
Poetry_.

Under section 2, some readers may be interested in Sir William Rowan
Hamilton's account of his famous discovery of the quaternion analysis, one
of the greatest of all discoveries in pure mathematics:

  "Quaternions started into life, or light, full grown,
  on Monday, the 16th of October, 1843, as I was walking
  with Lady Hamilton to Dublin, and came up to
  Brougham Bridge, which my boys have since called the
  Quaternion Bridge. That is to say, I then and there
  felt the galvanic circuit of thought _close_, and the sparks
  which fell from it were the _fundamental equations between
  i, j, k; exactly such_ as I have used them ever since.
  I pulled out on the spot a pocket-book, which still exists,
  and made an entry on which, _at the very moment_, I felt
  that it might be worth my while to expend the labor of
  at least ten (or it might be fifteen) years to come. But
  then it is fair to say that this was because I felt a _problem_
  to have been at that moment _solved_--an intellectual
  want relieved--which had _haunted_ me for at least
  ifteen years before_. Less than an hour elapsed before I
  had asked and obtained leave of the Council of the
  Royal Irish Academy, of which Society I was, at that
  time, the President--to _read_ at the _next General Meeting_
  a _Paper_ on Quaternions; which I accordingly _did_, on
  November 13, 1843."

The following quotation from Lascelles-Abercrombie's study of Thomas Hardy
presents in brief compass the essential problem dealt with in this
chapter. It is closely written, and should be read more than once.

  "Man's intercourse with the world is necessarily formative. His
  experience of things outside his consciousness is in the manner of a
  chemistry, wherein some energy of his nature is mated with the energy
  brought in on his nerves from externals, the two combining into
  something which exists only in, or perhaps we should say closely around,
  man's consciousness. Thus what man knows of the world is what has been
  _formed_ by the mixture of his own nature with the streaming in of the
  external world. This formative energy of his, reducing the in-coming
  world into some constant manner of appearance which may be appreciable
  by consciousness, is most conveniently to be described, it seems, as an
  unaltering imaginative desire: desire which accepts as its material, and
  fashions itself forth upon, the many random powers sent by the world to
  invade man's mind. That there is this formative energy in man may easily
  be seen by thinking of certain dreams; those dreams, namely, in which
  some disturbance outside the sleeping brain (such as a sound of knocking
  or a bodily discomfort) is completely formed into vivid trains of
  imagery, and in that form only is presented to the dreamer's
  consciousness. This, however, merely shows the presence of the active
  desire to shape sensation into what consciousness can accept; the dream
  is like an experiment done in the isolation of a laboratory; there are
  so many conflicting factors when we are awake that the events of sleep
  must only serve as a symbol or diagram of the intercourse of mind with
  that which is not mind--intercourse which only takes place in a region
  where the outward radiations of man's nature combine with the
  irradiations of the world. Perception itself is a formative act; and all
  the construction of sensation into some orderly, coherent idea of the
  world is a further activity of the central imaginative desire. Art is
  created, and art is enjoyed, because in it man may himself completely
  express and exercise those inmost desires which in ordinary experience
  are by no means to be completely expressed. Life has at last been
  perfectly formed and measured to man's requirements; and in art man
  knows himself truly the master of his existence. It is this sense of
  mastery which gives man that raised and delighted consciousness of self
  which art provokes."


CHAPTER IV

I regret that Professor Lowes's brilliant discussion of "Poetic Diction"
in his _Convention and Revolt_ did not appear until after this chapter was
written. There are stimulating remarks on Diction in Fairchild and
Eastman, in Raleigh's _Wordsworth_, in L. A. Sherman's _Analytics of
Literature_, chapter 6, in Raymond's _Poetry as a Representative Art_, and
in Hudson Maxim's _Science of Poetry_. Coleridge's description of
Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction in the _Biographia Literaria_ is
famous. Walt Whitman's _An American Primer_, first published in the
_Atlantic_ for April, 1904, is a highly interesting contribution to the
subject.

No theoretical discussion, however, can supply the place of a close study,
word by word, of poems in the classroom. It is advisable, I think, to
follow such analyses of the diction of Milton, Keats and Tennyson by a
scrutiny of the diction employed by contemporary poets like Edgar Lee
Masters and Carl Sandburg.

The following passages in prose and verse, printed without the authors'
names, are suggested as an exercise in the study of diction:

1. "The falls were in plain view about a mile off, but very distinct,
   and no roar--hardly a murmur. The river tumbling green and white, far
   below me; the dark, high banks, the plentiful umbrage, many bronze
   cedars, in shadow; and tempering and arching all the immense
   materiality, a clear sky overhead, with a few white clouds, limpid,
   spiritual, silent. Brief, and as quiet as brief, that picture--a
   remembrance always afterward."

2. "If there be fluids, as we know there are, which, conscious of a
   coming wind, or rain, or frost, will shrink and strive to hide
   themselves in their glass arteries; may not that subtle liquor of the
   blood perceive, by properties within itself, that hands are raised to
   waste and spill it; and in the veins of men run cold and dull as his
   did, in that hour!"

3. "On a flat road runs the well-train'd runner,
   He is lean and sinewy with muscular legs,
   He is thinly clothed, he leans forward as he runs,
   With lightly closed fists and arms partially rais'd."

4. "The feverish heaven with a stitch in the side,
          Of lightning."

5. "Out of blue into black is the scheme of the skies, and their dews are
   the wine of the bloodshed of things."

6. "Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves
   And barren chasms, and all to left and right
   The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based
   His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
   Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels."

7. "As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
    In leprosy; their dry blades pricked the mud
    Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.
  One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,
  Stood stupefied, however he came there:
    Thrust out past service from the devil's stud."

8. "For the main criminal I have no hope
   Except in such a suddenness of fate.
   I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
   I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
   Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:
   But the night's black was burst through by a
     blaze--
   Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and
     bore,
   Through her whole length of mountain visible:
   There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
   And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.
   So may the truth be flashed out by one blow,
   And Guido see, one instant, and be saved."


CHAPTER V

A fresh and clear discussion of the principles governing Rhythm and
Metre may be found in C. E. Andrews's _Writing and Reading of Verse_.
The well-known books by Alden, Corson, Gummere, Lewis, Mayor, Omond,
Raymond and Saintsbury are indicated in the Bibliography. Note also
the bibliographies given by Alden and Patterson.

I have emphasized in this chapter the desirability of compromise in some
hotly contested disputes over terminology and methods of metrical
notation. Perhaps I have gone farther in this direction than some teachers
will wish to go. But all classroom discussion should be accompanied by
oral reading of verse, by the teacher and if possible by pupils, and the
moment oral interpretations begin, it will be evident that "a satisfied
ear" is more important than an exact agreement upon methods of notation.

I venture to add here, for their suggestiveness, a few passages about
Rhythm and Metre, and finally, as an exercise in the study of the
prevalence of the "iambic roll" in sentimental oratory, an address by
Robert G. Ingersoll.

1. "Suppose that we figure the nervous current which corresponds to
consciousness as proceeding, like so many other currents of nature, in
_waves_--then we do receive a new apprehension, if not an explanation, of
the strange power over us of successive strokes.... Whatever things occupy
our attention--events, objects, tones, combinations of tones, emotions,
pictures, images, ideas--our consciousness of them will be heightened by
the rhythm as though it consisted of waves."
    EASTMAN, _The Enjoyment of Poetry_, p. 93.

2. "Rhythm of pulse is the regular alternation of units made up of beat
and pause; rhythm in verse is a measured or standardized arrangement of
sound relations. The difference between rhythm of pulse and rhythm in
verse is that the one is known through touch, the other through hearing;
as rhythm, they are essentially the same kind of thing. Viewed generally
and externally, then, verse is language that is beaten into measured
rhythm, or that has some type of uniform or standard rhythmical
arrangement."
    FAIRCHILD, _The Making of Poetry_, p. 117.

3. "A Syllable is a body of sound brought out with an independent, single,
and unbroken breath (Sievers). This syllable may be _long_ or _short_,
according to the time it fills; compare the syllables in _merrily_ with
the syllables in _corkscrew_. Further, a syllable may be _heavy_ or
_light_ (also called _accented_ or _unaccented_) according as it receives
more or less force or _stress_ of tone: compare the two syllables of
_treamer_. Lastly, a syllable may have increased or diminished _height-_of
tone,--_pitch: cf._ the so-called 'rising inflection' at the end of a
question. Now, in spoken language, there are infinite degrees of length,
of stress, of pitch....

"It is a well-known property of human speech that it keeps up a ceaseless
change between accented and unaccented syllables. A long succession of
accented syllables becomes unbearably monotonous; a long succession of
unaccented syllables is, in effect, impossible. Now when the ear detects
at regular intervals a recurrence of accented syllables, varying with
unaccented, it perceives _Rhythm_. Measured intervals of time are the
basis of all verse, and their _regularity_ marks off poetry from prose; so
that Time is thus the chief element in Poetry, as it is in Music and in
Dancing. From the idea of measuring these time-intervals, we derive the
name Metre; Rhythm means pretty much the same thing,--'a flowing,' an
even, measured motion. This rhythm is found everywhere in nature: the beat
of the heart, the ebb and flow of the sea, the alternation of day and
night. Rhythm is not artificial, not an invention; it lies at the heart of
things, and in rhythm the noblest emotions find their noblest expression."
    GUMMERE, _Handbook of Poetics_, p. 133.

4. "It was said of Chopin that in playing his waltzes his left hand kept
absolutely perfect time, while his right hand constantly varied the rhythm
of the melody, according to what musicians call _tempo rubato_,'stolen' or
distorted time. Whether this is true in fact, or even physically possible,
has been doubted; but it represents a perfectly familiar possibility of
the mind. Two streams of sound pass constantly through the inner ear of
one who understands or appreciates the rhythm of our verse: one, never
actually found in the real sounds which are uttered, is the absolute
rhythm, its equal time-intervals moving on in infinitely perfect
progression; the other, represented by the actual movement of the verse,
is constantly shifting by quickening, retarding, strengthening or
weakening its sounds, yet always hovers along the line of the perfect
rhythm, and bids the ear refer to that perfect rhythm the succession of
its pulsations."
    ALDEN, _An Introduction to Poetry_, p. 188.

5. "Many lines in Swinburne cannot be scanned at all except by the Lanier
method, which reduces so-called feet to their purely musical equivalents
of time bars. What, for instance, can be made by the formerly accepted
systems of prosody of such hexameters as

  'Full-sailed, wide-winged, poised softly forever asway?'

The usual explanation of this line is that Mr. Swinburne, carelessly,
inadvertently, or for some occult purpose, interjected one line of five
feet among his hexameters and the scansion usually followed is by
arrangement into a pentameter, thus:

  'Full-sailed | wide-winged | poised softly | forever |  asway,'

the first two feet being held to be spondees, and the third and fourth
amphibrachs. It has also been proposed to make the third foot a spondee or
an iambus, and the remaining feet anapaests, thus:

  'Full-sailed | wide-winged | poised soft- | ly forev- | er asway.'

"The confusion of these ideas is enough to mark them as unscientific and
worthless, to say nothing of the severe reflection they cast on the poet's
workmanship. We have not so known Mr. Swinburne, for, if there be anything
he has taught us about himself it is his strenuous and sometimes absurd
particularity about immaculate form. He would never overlook a line of
five feet in a poem of hexameters. But--as will, I think, appear later and
conclusively--the line is really of six feet, and is not iambic, trochaic,
anapaestic, the spurious spondaic that some writers have tried to
manufacture for English verse, or anything else recognized in Coleridge's
immortal stanza, or in text-books. It simply cannot be scanned by
classical rules; it cannot be weighed justly, and its full meaning
extracted, by any of the 'trip-time' or 'march-time' expedients of other
investigators. It is purely music; and when read by the method of music
appears perfectly designed and luminous with significance. Only a poet
that was at heart a composer could have made such a phrase, based
upon such intimate knowledge of music's rhythmical laws."
    C. E. RUSSELL, "Swinburne and Music" _North American Review_,
November, 1907.

6. Dr. Henry Osborn Taylor has kindly allowed me to quote this passage
from his _Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages_, pp. 246, 247:

"Classic metres expressed measured feelings. Hexameters had given voice to
many emotions beautifully, with unfailing modulation of calm or storm.
They had never revealed the infinite heart of God, or told the yearning of
the soul responding; nor were they ever to be the instrument of these
supreme disclosures in Christian times. Such unmeasured feelings could not
be held within the controlled harmonies of the hexameter nor within
sapphic or alcaic or Pindaric strophes. These antique forms of poetry
definitely expressed their contents, although sometimes suggesting further
unspoken feeling, which is so noticeable with Virgil. But characteristic
Christian poetry, like the Latin mediaeval hymn, was not to express its
meaning as definitely or contain its significance. Mediaeval hymns are
childlike, having often a narrow clearness in their literal sense; and
they may be childlike, too, in their expressed symbolism. Their
significance reaches far beyond their utterance; they suggest, they echo,
and they listen; around them rolls the voice of God, the infinitude of
His love and wrath, heaven's chorus and hell's agonies; _dies irae, dies
illa_--that line says little, but mountains of wrath press on it, from
which the soul shall not escape.

"Christian emotion quivers differently from any movement of the spirit in
classic measures. The new quiver, the new shudder, the utter terror, and
the utter love appear in mediaeval rhymed accentual poetry:

  Desidero te millies,
  Mê Jesu; quando venies?
  Me laetum quando facies,
  Ut vultu tuo saties?

  Quo dolore
  Quo moerore
  Deprimuntur miseri,
  Qui abyssis
  Pro commissis
  Submergentur inferi.

  Recordare, Jesu pie,
  Quod sum causa tuae viae;
  Ne me perdas ilia die.
       *       *       *       *       *
  Lacrymosa dies illa
  Qua resurget ex fa villa,
  Judicandus homo reus;
  Huic ergo parce, Deus!
    Pie Jesu, Domine,
    Dona eis requiem.

"Let any one feel the emotion of these verses and then turn to some piece
of classic poetry, a passage from Homer or Virgil, an elegiac couplet or a
strophe from Sappho or Pindar or Catullus, and he will realize the
difference, and the impossibility of setting the emotion of a mediaeval
hymn in a classic metre."

7. "_Friends_: I know how vain it is to gild a grief with words, and yet I
wish to take from every grave its fear. Here in this world, where life and
death are equal things, all should be brave enough to meet what all the
dead have met. The future has been filled with fear, stained and polluted
by the heartless past. From the wondrous tree of life the buds and
blossoms fall with ripened fruit, and in the common bed of earth, the
patriarchs and babes sleep side by side.

"Why should we fear that which will come to all that is?

"We cannot tell, we do not know, which is the greater blessing--life or
death. We do not know whether the grave is the end of this life, or the
door of another, or whether the night here is not somewhere else at dawn.
Neither can we tell which is the more fortunate--the child dying in its
mother's arms, before its lips have learned to form a word, or he who
journeys all the length of life's uneven road, painfully taking the last
slow steps with staff and crutch.

"Every cradle asks us, 'Whence?' and every coffin, 'Whither?' The poor
barbarian, weeping above his dead, can answer these questions as
intelligently as the robed priest of the most authentic creed. The tearful
ignorance of the one is just as consoling as the learned and unmeaning
words of the other. No man, standing where the horizon of a life has
touched a grave, has any right to prophesy a future filled with pain and
tears. It may be that death gives all there is of worth to life. If those
we press and strain against our hearts could never die, perhaps that love
would wither from the earth. Maybe this common fate treads from out the
paths between our hearts the weeds of selfishness and hate, and I had
rather live and love where death is king, than have eternal life where
love is not. Another life is naught, unless we know and love again the
ones who love us here.

"They who stand with aching hearts around this little grave need have no
fear. The larger and the nobler faith in all that is and is to be tells us
that death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest. We know that through
the common wants of life--the needs and duties of each hour--their griefs
will lessen day by day, until at last this grave will be to them a place
of rest and peace--almost of joy. There is for them this consolation. The
dead do not suffer. And if they live again, their lives will surely be as
good as ours. We have no fear. We are all children of the same mother, and
the same fate awaits us all.

"We, too, have our religion, and it is this: Help for the living, hope for
the dead."
    ROBERT G. INGERSOLL, "Address over a Little Boy's Grave."



CHAPTER VI

I have not attempted in this chapter to give elaborate illustrations of
the varieties of rhyme and stanza in English poetry. Full illustrations
will be found in Alden's _English Verse_. A clear statement of the
fundamental principles involved is given in W. H. Carruth's _Verse
Writing_.

Free verse is suggestively discussed by Lowes, _Convention and Revolt_,
chapters 6 and 7, and by Andrews, _Writing and Reading of Verse_, chapters
5 and 19. Miss Amy Lowell has written fully about it in the Prefaces to
_Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_ and _Can Grande's Castle_, in the final
chapter of _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_, in the Prefaces to
_Some Imagist Poets_, and in the _North American Review_ for January,
1917. Mr. Braithwaite's annual _Anthologies of American Verse_ give a full
bibliography of special articles upon this topic.

An interesting classroom test of the difference between prose rhythm and
verse rhythm with strongly marked metre and rhyme may be found in
comparing Emerson's original prose draft of his "Two Rivers," as found in
volume 9 of his Journal, with three of the stanzas of the finished poem:

"Thy voice is sweet, Musketaquid, and repeats the music of the ram, but
sweeter is the silent stream which flows even through thee, as thou
through the land.

"Thou art shut in thy banks, but the stream I love flows in thy water, and
flows through rocks and through the air and through rays of light as well,
and through darkness, and through men and women.

"I hear and see the inundation and the eternal spending of the stream in
winter and in summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy
are they who can hear it."

  "Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
    Repeats the music of the rain;
  But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
    Through thee, as thou through Concord plain.

  "Thou in thy narrow banks are pent;
    The stream I love unbounded goes
  Through flood and sea and firmament;
    Through light, through life, it forward flows.

  "I see the inundation sweet,
    I hear the spending of the stream
  Through years, through men, through nature fleet,
    Through love and thought, through power and dream."

I also suggest for classroom discussion the following brief passages from
recent verse, printed without the authors' names:

1. "The milkman never argues; he works alone and no one speaks to him;
the city is asleep when he is on his job; he puts a bottle on six hundred
porches and calls it a day's work; he climbs two hundred wooden stairways;
two horses are company for him; he never argues."

2. "Sometimes I have nervous moments--
   there is a girl who looks at me strangely
   as much as to say,
   You are a young man,
   and I am a young woman,
   and what are you going to do about it?
   And I look at her as much as to say,
   I am going to keep the teacher's desk
     between us, my dear,
   as long as I can."

3. "I hold her hands and press her to my breast.

"I try to fill my arms with her loveliness, to plunder her sweet smile
with kisses, to drink her dark glances with my eyes.

"Ah, but where is it? Who can strain the blue from the sky?

"I try to grasp the beauty; it eludes me, leaving only the body in my
hands.

"Baffled and weary, I came back. How can the body touch the flower which
only the spirit may touch?"

4. "Child, I smelt the flowers,
   The golden flowers ... hiding in crowds like fairies at my feet,
   And as I smelt them the endless smile of the infinite broke over me,
     and I knew that they and you and I were one.
   They and you and I, the cowherds and the cows, the jewels and the
     potter's wheel, the mothers and the light in baby's eyes.
   For the sempstress when she takes one stitch may make nine unnecessary;
   And the smooth and shining stone that rolls and rolls like the great
     river may gain no moss,
   And it is extraordinary what a lot you can do with a platitude when you
     dress it up in Blank Prose.
   Child, I smelt the flowers."



CHAPTER VII

Recent criticism has been rich in its discussions of the lyric. John
Drinkwater's little volume on _The Lyric_ is suggestive. See also C. E.
Whitmore's article in the _Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass._, December, 1918. Rhys's
_Lyric Poetry_, Schelling's _English Lyric_, Reed's _English Lyrical
Poetry_ cover the whole field of the historical English lyric. A few books
on special periods are indicated in the "Notes" to chapter ix.

An appreciation of the lyric mood can be helped greatly by adequate oral
reading in the classroom. For teachers who need suggestions as to oral
interpretation, Professor Walter Barnes's edition of Palgrave's _Golden
Treasury_ (Row, Petersen & Co., Chicago) is to be commended.

The student's ability to analyse a lyric poem should be tested by frequent
written exercises. The method of criticism may be worked out by the
individual teacher, but I have found it useful to ask students to test a
poem by some or all of the following questions:

(a) What kind of experience, thought or emotion furnishes the basis for
this lyric? What kind or degree of sensitiveness to the facts of nature?
What sort of inner mood or passion? Is the "motive" of this lyric purely
personal? If not, what other relationships or associations are involved?

(b) What sort of imaginative transformation of the material furnished by
the senses? What kind of imagery? Is it true poetry or only verse?

(c) What degree of technical mastery of lyric structure? Subordination of
material to unity of "tone"? What devices of rhythm or sound to heighten
the intended effect? Noticeable words or phrases? Does the author's power
of artistic expression keep pace with his feeling and imagination?


CHAPTER VIII

For a discussion of narrative verse in general, see Gummere's _Poetics_
and _Oldest English Epic_, Hart's _Epic and Ballad_, Council's _Study of
Poetry_, and Matthew Arnold's essay "On Translating Homer."

For the further study of ballads, note G. L. Kittredge's one volume
edition of Child's _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_, Gummere's
_Popular Ballad_, G. H. Stempel's _Book of Ballads_, J. A. Lomax's _Cowboy
Songs and other Frontier Ballads_, and Hart's summary of Child's views in
_Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass._, vol. 21, 1906. The _Oxford Book of English Verse_,
Nos. 367-389, gives excellent specimens.

All handbooks on _Poetics_ discuss the Ode. Gosse's _English Odes_ and
William Sharp's _Great Odes_ are good collections.

For the sonnet, note Corson's chapter in his _Primer of English Verse_,
and the Introduction to Miss Lockwood's collection. There are other
well-known collections by Leigh Hunt, Hall Caine and William Sharp.
Special articles on the sonnet are noted in Poole's _Index_.

The dramatic monologue is well discussed by Claude Howard, _The Dramatic
Monologue_, and by S. S. Curry, _The Dramatic Monologue in Tennyson and
Browning_.


CHAPTER IX

The various periods of English lyric poetry are covered, as has been
already noted, by the general treatises of Rhys, Reed and Schelling. Old
English lyrics are well translated by Cook and Tinker, and by Pancoast and
Spaeth. W. P. Ker's _English Literature; Mediaeval_ is excellent, as is C.
S. Baldwin's _English Mediaeval Literature_. John Erskine's _Elizabethan
Lyric_ is a valuable study. Schelling's introduction to his Selections
from the Elizabethan Lyric should also be noted, as well as his similar
book on the Seventeenth-Century Lyric. Bernbaum's _English Poets of the
Eighteenth Century_ is a careful selection, with a scholarly introduction.
Studies of the English poetry of the Romantic period are very numerous:
Oliver Elton's _Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830_, is one of the
best. Courthope's _History of English Poetry_ and Saintsbury's _History of
Criticism_ are full of material bearing upon the questions discussed in
this chapter.

Professor Legouis's account of the change in atmosphere as one passes from
Old English to Old French poetry is so delightful that I refrain from
spoiling it by a translation:

"En quittant _Beowulf_ ou la _Bataille de Maldon_ pour le _Roland_, on a
l'impression de sortir d'un lieu sombre pour entrer dans la lumière. Cette
impression vous vient de tous les côtés à la fois, des lieux décrits, des
sujets, de la manière de raconter, de l'esprit qui anime, de
l'intelligence qui ordonne, mais, d'une façon encore plus immédiate et
plus diffuse, de la différence des deux langues. On reconnaît sans doute
généralement à nos vieux écrivains ce mérite d'être clairs, mais on est
trop habitué à ne voir dans ce don que ce qui découle des tendances
analytiques et des aptitudes logiques de leurs esprit. Aussi plusieurs
critiques, quelques-uns français, ont-ils fait de cet attribut une manière
de prétexte pour leur assigner en partage la prose et pour leur retirer
la faculté poétique. Il n'en est pas ainsi. Cette clarté n'est pas
purement abstraite. Elle est une véritable lumière qui rayonne même des
voyelles et dans laquelle les meilleurs vers des trouvères--les seuls qui
comptent--sont baignés. Comment dire l'éblouissement des yeux longtemps
retenus dans la pénombre du _Codex Exoniensis_ et devant qui passent
soudain avec leurs brillantes syllables 'Halte-Clerc,' l'épée d'Olivier,
'Joyeuse' celle de Charlemagne, 'Monjoie' l'étendard des Francs? Avant
toute description on est saisi comme par un brusque lever de soleil. Il
est tels vers de nos vieilles romances d'où la lumière ruisselle sans
même qu'on ait besoin de prendre garde à leur sens:

  "'Bele Erembors a la fenestre au jor
  Sor ses genolz tient paile de color,'
[Footnote: "Fair Erembor at her window in daylight
    Holds a coloured silk stuff on her knees."]

ou bien

  "'Bele Yolanz en chambre coie
  Sor ses genolz pailes desploie
  Coust un fil d'or, l'autre de soie...."
[Footnote: "Fair Yoland in her quiet bower
    Unfolds silk stuffs on her knees
    Sewing now a thread of gold, now one of silk."]

C'est plus que de la lumière qui s'échappe de ces mots,
c'est de la couleur et de la plus riche."
[Footnote: Emile Legouis, _Défense de la Poésie Française_, p. 44.]


CHAPTER X

While this chapter does not attempt to comment upon the work of living
American authors, except as illustrating certain general tendencies of the
lyric, I think that teachers of poetry should avail themselves of the
present interest in contemporary verse. Students of a carefully chosen
volume of selections, like the _Oxford Book_, should be competent to pass
some judgment upon strictly contemporary poetry, and I have found them
keenly interested in criticizing the work that is appearing, month by
month, in the magazines. The temperament and taste of the individual
teacher must determine the relative amount of attention that can be given
to our generation, as compared with the many generations of the past.



APPENDIX

Believing as I do that a study of the complete work of some modern poet
should accompany, if possible, every course in the general theory of
poetry, I venture to print here an outline of topical work upon the poetry
of Tennyson. Tennyson's variety of poetic achievement is so great, and his
technical resources are so remarkable, that he rewards the closest study,
even on the part of those young Americans who cannot forget that he was a
"Victorian":


TOPICAL WORK UPON TENNYSON


I

THE METHOD OF CRITICISM

[The scheme here suggested for the study of poetry is based upon the
methods followed in this book. The student is advised to select some one
poem, and to analyse its content and form as carefully as possible, in
accordance with the outline printed below. The thought and feeling of the
poem should be thoroughly comprehended as a whole before the work of
analysis is begun; and after the analysis is completed, the student should
endeavor again to regard the poem synthetically, i. e., in its total
appeal to the aesthetic judgment, rather than mechanically and part by
part.]


FORM / CONTENT

A "IMPRESSION"

_Of Nature._ What sort of observation of natural phenomena is revealed
in this poem? Impressions of movement, form, color, sound, hours of the
day or night, seasons of the year; knowledge of scientific facts, etc.?

_Of Man._ What evidence of the poet's direct knowledge of men? Of
knowledge of man gained through acquaintance with Biblical, classical,
foreign or English literature? Self-knowledge?

_Of God._ Perception of spiritual laws? Religious attitude? Is this
poem consistent with his other poems?

B "TRANSFORMING IMAGINATION"

Does the "raw material" presented by "sense impressions" undergo a
real "change in kind" as it passes through the mind of the poet?

Do you feel in this poem the presence of a creative personality?

What evidence of poetic instinct in the selection of characteristic
traits? In power of representation through images? In idealization?

C "EXPRESSION"

What is to be said of the range and character of the poet's vocabulary?
Employment of figurative language? Selection of metre? Use of rhymes?
Modification of rhythm and sound to suggest the idea conveyed? Imitative
effects?

In general, is there harmony between form and content, or is there
evidence of the artist's caring for one rather than the other?


II

TENNYSON'S LYRIC POETRY

[Write a criticism of the distinctively lyrical work of Tennyson, based
upon an investigation at first hand of the topics suggested below. Do not
deal with any poems in which the narrative or dramatic element seems to
you the predominant one, as those forms of expression will be made the
subject of subsequent papers.]

A. "IMPRESSION" (i. e., experience, thought, emotion).

_General Characteristics._

Does the freshness of the lyric mood seem in Tennyson's case dependent
upon any philosophical position? Upon sensitiveness to successive
experiences?

Is his lyric egoism a noble one? How far does he identify himself with his
race? With humanity?

Is his lyric passion always genuine? If not, give examples of lyrics that
are deficient in sincerity. Is the lyric passion sustained as the poet
grows old?

_Of Nature._

What part does the observation of natural phenomena--such as form, color,
sound, hours of the day or night, seasons, the sky, the sea--play in these
poems? To what extent is the lyrical emotion called forth by the details
of nature? By her composite effects? Give instances of the poetic use of
scientific facts.

_Of Man._

What human relationships furnish the themes for his lyrics? In the love-
lyrics, what different relationships of men and women? To what extent does
he find a lyric motive in friendship? In patriotism? How much of his lyric
poetry seems to spring from direct contact with men? From introspection?
From contact with men through the medium of books? How clearly do his
lyrics reflect the social problems of his own time? In his later lyrics
are there traces of deeper or shallower interest in men and women? Of
greater or less faith in the progress of society?

_Of God._

Mention lyrics whose themes are based in such conceptions as freedom,
duty, moral responsibility. Does Tennyson's lyric poetry reveal a sense of
spiritual law? Is the poet's own attitude clearly evident?

B. "TRANSFORMING IMAGINATION."

What evidence of poetic instinct in the selection of characteristic
traits? In power of representation through images? Distinguish between
lyrics that owe their poetic quality to the Imagination, and those created
by the Fancy. (Note Alden's discussion of this point; "Introduction to
Poetry," pp. 102-112.) How far is Tennyson's personality indicated by
these instinctive processes through which his poetical material is
transformed?

C. "EXPRESSION."

What may be said in general of his handling of the lyric form: as to
unity, brevity, simplicity of structure? Occasional use of presentative
rather than representative language? Choice of metres? Use of rhymes?
Modification of rhythm and sound to suit the idea conveyed? Evidence of
the artist's caring for either form or content to the neglect of the
other? Note whatever differences may be traced, in all these respects,
between Tennyson's earlier and later lyrics.


III

TENNYSON'S NARRATIVE POETRY

[Write a criticism of the distinctively narrative work of Tennyson, based
upon the questions suggested below.]

A. "IMPRESSION" (i. e., experience, thought, emotion).

_General Characteristics._

After classifying Tennyson's narrative poetry, how many of his themes seem
to you to be of his own invention? Name those based, ostensibly at least,
upon the poet's own experience. To what extent do you find his narrative
work purely objective, i. e., without admixture of reflective or didactic
elements? What themes are of mythical or legendary origin? Of those having
a historical basis, how many are drawn from English sources? Does his use
of narrative material ever show a deficiency of emotion; i. e., could the
story have been better told in prose? Has he the story-telling gift?

_Of Nature._

How far does the description of natural phenomena, as outlined in Topic
II, A, enter into Tennyson's narrative poetry? Does it always have a
subordinate place, as a part of the setting of the story? Does it overlay
the story with too ornate detail? Does it ever retard the movement unduly?

_Of Man._ (Note that some of the points mentioned under _General
Characteristics_ apply here.)

What can you say of Tennyson's power of observing character? Of conceiving
characters in complication and collision with one another or with
circumstances? Give illustrations of the range of human relationships
touched upon in these poems. Do the later narratives show an increased
proportion of tragic situations? Does Tennyson's narrative poetry throw
any light upon his attitude towards contemporary English society?

_Of God._ (See Topic II, A.)

B. "TRANSFORMING IMAGINATION."

Adjust the questions already suggested under Topic II, B, to narrative
poetry. Note especially the revelation of Tennyson's personality through
the instinctive processes by which his narrative material is transformed.

C. "EXPRESSION."

What may be said in general of his handling of the narrative form, i. e.,
his management of the setting, the characters and the plot in relation to
one another? Have his longer poems, like the "Idylls," and "The Princess,"
the unity, breadth, and sustained elevation of style that are usually
associated with epic poetry? What can you say of Tennyson's mastery of
distinctly narrative metres? Of his technical skill in suiting rhythm and
sound to the requirements of his story?


IV

TENNYSON'S DRAMAS

[Reference books for the study of the technique of the drama are easily
available. As preparatory work it will be well to make a careful study of
Tennyson's dramatic monologues, both in the earlier and later periods.
These throw a good deal of light upon his skill in making characters
delineate themselves, and they reveal incidentally some of his methods of
dramatic narrative. For this paper, however, please confine your criticism
to "Queen Mary," "Harold," "Becket," "The Cup," "The Falcon," "The Promise
of May," and "The Foresters." In studying "Becket," compare Irving's stage
version of the play (Macmillan).]

A. Classify the themes of Tennyson's dramas. Do you think that these
themes offer promising dramatic material? Do you regard Tennyson's
previous literary experience as a help or a hindrance to success in the
drama?

_Nature._ Apply what is suggested under this head in Topics I, II, and
III, to drama.

_Man._ Apply to the dramas what is suggested under this head in Topics II
and III, especially as regards the observation of character, the
conception of characters in collision, and the sense of the variety of
human relationships. Do these plays give evidence of a genuine comic
sense? What tragic forces seem to have made the most impression upon
Tennyson? Give illustrations, from the plays, of the conflict of the
individual with institutions.

_God._ Comment upon Tennyson's doctrine of necessity and retribution. Does
his allotment of poetic justice show a sympathy with the moral order of
the world? Are these plays in harmony with Tennyson's theology, as
indicated elsewhere in his work? Do they contain any clear exposition of
the problems of the religious life?

B. Compare Topic II, B. In the historical dramas, can you trace the
influence of the poet's own personality in giving color to historical
personages? Compare Tennyson's delineation of any of these personages with
that of other poets, novelists, or historians. Do you think he has the
power of creating a character, in the same sense as Shakespeare had it?
How much of his dramatic work do you consider purely objective, i. e.,
untinged by what was called the lyric egoism?

C. What may be said in general of Tennyson's handling of the dramatic
form? Has he "the dramatic sense"? Of his management of the web of
circumstance in which the characters are involved and brought into
conflict? Comment upon his technical skill as displayed in the different
"parts" and "moments" of his dramas. Does his exhibition of action fulfill
dramatic requirements? Is his vocabulary suited to stage purposes? Give
instances of his purely lyric and narrative gifts as incidentally
illustrated in his dramas. Instance passages that cannot in your opinion
be successfully acted. In your reading of these plays, or observation of
any of them that you have seen acted, are you conscious of the absence of
any quality or qualities that would heighten the pleasure they yield you?
Taken as a whole, is the form of the various plays artistically in
harmony with the themes employed?



BIBLIOGRAPHY

This list includes the more important books and articles in English which
have been discussed or referred to in the text. There is an excellent
bibliography in Alden's _Introduction to Poetry_, and Patterson's _Rhythm
in Prose_ contains a full list of the more technical articles dealing with
rhythms in prose and verse.


ALDEN, RAYMOND M.
  _English Verse_. New York, 1903.
  _An Introduction to Poetry_. New York, 1909.
  "The Mental Side of Metrical Form," in _Mod. Lang. Review_, July, 1914.

ALEXANDER, HARTLEY B.
  _Poetry and the Individual_. New York, 1906.

ANDREWS, C. E.
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ARISTOTLE.
  _Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_, edited by S. H. Butcher. New York,
1902.
  _On the Art of Poetry_, edited by Lane Cooper. Boston, 1913.

BABBITT, IRVING.
  _The New Laokoon_. Boston and New York, 1910.

BERNBAUM, ERNEST, _editor_.
  _English Poets of the 18th Century_. New York, 1918.

BOSANQUET, BERNARD.
  _A History of Aesthetic_. New York, 1892.
  _Three Lectures on Aesthetic_. London, 1915.

BRADLEY, A. C.
  _Oxford Lectures on Poetry_. London, 1909.

BRAITHWAITE, WILLIAM S., _editor_.
  _The Book of Elizabethan Verse_. Boston, 1907.
  _Anthology of Magazine Verse 1913-19_. New York, 1915.

BRIDGES, ROBERT.
  _Ibant Obscurae_. New York, 1917.

BUTCHER, S. H.
  (See Aristotle.)

CHILD, F. G.
  _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_, 5 vols., 1882-1898.

CLARK, A. C.
  _Prose Rhythm in English_. Oxford, 1913.

COLERIDGE, S. T.
  _Biographia Literaria_. Everyman edition.

CONNELL, F. M.
  _A Text-Book for the Study of Poetry_. Boston, 1913.

COOK, ALBERT S., _editor_.
  _The Art of Poetry_. Boston, 1892.

COOK, A. S., _and_ TINKER, C. B.
  _Select Translations from Old English Poetry_. Boston, 1902.

CORSON, HIRAM.
  _A Primer of English Verse_. Boston, 1892.

COURTHOPE, WILLIAM J.
  _A History of English Poetry_. London, 1895.
  _Life in Poetry: Law in Taste_. London, 1901.

COWL, R. P.
  _The Theory of Poetry in England_. London, 1914.

CROCE, B.
  _Aesthetics_. London, 1909.

CROLL, MORRIS W.
  "The Cadence of English Oratorical Prose," in _Studies in Philology_,
    January, 1919.
  See also Croll and Clemons, Preface to _Lyly's Euphues_. New York, 1916.

DRINKWATER, JOHN.
  _The Lyric_. New York (n.d.).

EASTMAN, MAX.
  _Enjoyment of Poetry_. New York, 1913.

ELTON, OLIVER W.
  "English Prose Numbers," in _Essays and Studies_, by members of the
  English Association, 4th Series. Oxford, 1913.

ERSKINE, JOHN.
  _The Elizabethan Lyric_. New York, 1916.

FAIRCHILD, ARTHUR H. R.
  _The Making of Poetry_. New York, 1912.

GARDINER, J. H.
  _The Bible as English Literature_. New York, 1906.

GATES, LEWIS E.
  _Studies and Appreciations_. New York, 1900.

GAYLEY, C. M., _and_ SCOTT, F. N.
  _Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism_. Boston, 1899.

GORDON, K.
  _Aesthetics_. New York, 1909.

GOSSE, EDMUND W.
  _English Odes_. London, 1881.

GUMMERE, FRANCIS B.
  _A Handbook of Poetics_. Boston, 1885.
  _The Beginnings of Poetry_. New York, 1901.
  _The Popular Ballad_. Boston and New York, 1907.
  _Democracy and Poetry_. Boston and New York, 1911.

HART, WALTER M.
  _Epic and Ballad_. Harvard Studies, etc., vol. 11, 1907.
  See his summary of Child's views in _Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass._, 21, 1906.

HAYES, ALFRED.
  "Relation of Music to Poetry," in _Atlantic_, January, 1914.

HEARN, LAFCADIO.
  _Kwaidan_. Boston and New York, 1904.

HOLMES, EDMOND.
  _What is Poetry?_ New York, 1900.

HUNT, LEIGH.
  _What is Poetry?_ edited by Albert S. Cook. Boston, 1893.

JAMES, WILLIAM.
  _Psychology._ New York, 1909.

KITTREDGE, G. L., _editor_.
  _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_. Boston, 1904.

LA FARGE, JOHN.
  _Considerations on Painting_. New York, 1895.

LANIER, SIDNEY.
  _Science of English Verse_. New York, 1880.
  _Poem Outlines_. New York, 1908.

LEGOUIS, ÉMILE.
  _Défense de la Poésie Française_. London, 1912.

LEWIS, CHARLTON M.
  _The Foreign Sources of Modern English Versification_, Halle, 1898.
  _The Principles of English Verse_. New York, 1906.

LIDDELL, M. H.
  _Introduction to Scientific Study of English Poetry_. New York, 1912.

LOCKWOOD, LAURA E., _editor_.
  _English Sonnets_. Boston and New York, 1916.

LOMAX, JOHN A.
  _Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads_. New York, 1916.

LOWELL, AMY.
  _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_. New York, 1917.
  _Men, Women and Ghosts_. New York, 1916.
  _Can Grande's Castle_. New York, 1918.

LOWES, JOHN L.
  _Convention and Revolt in Poetry_. Boston and New York, 1919.

LYLY, JOHN.
  _Euphues_, edited by Croll, M. W., and Clemons, H. New York, 1916.

MACKAIL, J. W.
  _The Springs of Helicon_. New York, 1909.

MARSHALL, HENRY R.
  _Aesthetic Principles_. New York, 1895.

MAYOR, J. B.
  _Chapters on English Metre_. London, 1886.

MILL, J. S.
  "Thoughts on Poetry," in _Dissertations_, vol. 1.

MOORE, J. ROBERT.
  "The Songs in the English Drama" (Harvard Dissertation, unpublished).

MORSE, LEWIS K., _editor_.
  _Melodies of English Verse_. Boston and New York, 1910.

NEILSON, WILLIAM A.
  _Essentials of Poetry_. Boston and New York, 1912.

NEWBOLT, SIR HENRY.
  _A New Study of English Poetry_. New York, 1919.

OMOND, T. S.
  _A Study of Metre_. London, 1903.

PALGRAVE, FRANCIS T.
  _The Golden Treasury_. London, 1882.

PANCOAST, H. S. and SPAETH, J. D.
  _Early English Poems_. New York, 1911.

PATTERSON, WILLIAM M.
  _The Rhythm of Prose_. New York, 1916.

PATTISON, MARK, _editor._
  _Milton's Sonnets_. New York, 1883.

PHELPS, WILLIAM L.
  _The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement_. Boston, 1893.

POUND, LOUISE.
  "The Ballad and the Dance," _Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass_., September, 1919.

QUILLER-COUCH, A. T., _editor_.
  _The Oxford Book of English Verse_. Oxford, 1907.

RALEIGH, WALTER.
  _Wordsworth_. London, 1903.

RAYMOND, GEORGE L.
  _Poetry as a Representative Art_. New York, 1886.
  _The Genesis of Art-Form_. New York, 1893.
  _Rhythm and Harmony in Poetry and Music_. New York, 1895.

REED, EDWARD B.
  _English Lyrical Poetry_. New Haven, 1912.

RHYS, ERNEST.
  _Lyric Poetry_. New York, 1913.

RHYS, ERNEST, _editor_.
  _The New Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics_. New York (n.d.).

RIBOT, T.
  _Essay on the Creative Imagination_. Chicago, 1906.

RUSSELL, C. E.
  "Swinburne and Music," in _North American Review_, November, 1907.

SAINTSBURY, GEORGE.
  _History of English Prosody_. London, 1906-10.
  _History of English Prose Rhythm_. London, 1912.

SANTAYANA, GEORGE.
  _The Sense of Beauty_. New York, 1896.
  _Interpretation of Poetry and Religion_. New York, 1900.

SCHEMING, F. E., _editor_.
  _A Book of Elizabethan Lyrics_. Boston, 1895.
  _Seventeenth Century Lyrics_. Boston, 1899.

SCHELLING, F. E.
  _The English Lyric_. Boston and New York, 1913.

SHACKFORD, MARTHA H.
  _A First Book of Poetics_. Boston, 1906.

SHELLEY, PERCY B.
  _A Defense of Poetry_, edited by Albert S. Cook. Boston, 1891.

SHERMAN, L. A.
  _Analytics of Literature_. Boston, 1893.

SHERMAN, STUART P.
  _Contemporary Literature_. New York, 1917.

SIDNEY, SIR PHILIP.
  _The Defense of Poesy_, edited by Albert S. Cook. Boston, 1890.

SNELL, ADA F.
  "Syllabic Quantity in English Verse," in _Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass_.,
September, 1918.

SPINGARN, J. E.
  _Creative Criticism_. New York, 1917.

STEDMAN, EDMUND C.
  _The Nature and Elements of Poetry_. Boston and New York, 1892.

STEMPEL, G. H.
  _A Book of Ballads_. New York, 1917.

STEWART, J. A.
  _The Myths of Plato_. London, 1905.

SYMONS, ARTHUR.
  _The Seven Arts_. London, 1906.

TAYLOR, HENRY O.
  _The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages_. New York, 1901.

TOLMAN, A. H.
  _Hamlet and Other Essays_. Boston, 1904.

TOLSTOY, L.
  _What is Art_? New York (n.d.).

UNTERMEYER, LOUIS.
  _The New Era in American Poetry_. New York, 1919.

WATTS-DUNTON, THEODORE.
  _Poetry and the Renascence of Wonder_. New York, (n.d.).

WELLS, CAROLYN.
  _A Parody Anthology_. New York, 1904.

WHITMORE, C. E.
  Article on the Lyric in _Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass_., December, 1918.

WHITNEY, W. D.
  _Language and the Study of Language_. New York, 1867.

WILKINSON, MARGUERITE.
  _The New Voices_., New York, 1919.



INDEX

Abercrombie, Lascelles
Accent
Adams, F. P., free verse parody by
Aesthetics, and poetry
Alden, R. M.
  _Introduction to Poetry_
Aldington, Richard
Alexander, Hartley B.
  _Poetry and the Individual_
Alliteration
Andrews, C. E.
  _Writing and Reading of Verse_
Angellier, Auguste
Anglo-Saxon lyrical verse
Aristotle
  _Poetics_
  definition of Tragedy
Arnold, Matthew
  "The Strayed Reveller"
Artistic imagination
Artistic production
  the impulse to
Asbury, Samuel
Assonance

Babbitt, Irving
  _New Laokoon_
Ballad, the
Baumgarten, A. G.
Beauty
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell
Blake, William
Blunt, Wilfrid
  sonnet on Gibraltar
Boethius
  _De Consolatione Philosophiae_
Bosanquet, Bernard
  _History of AEsthetic_
Bradley, A. C.
Bridges, Robert
Brooke, Stopford
Brownell, Baker
Browning, Robert
  _The Ring and the Book_
Bryant, F. E.
Burns, Robert
Butcher, S. H.
  _Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_
Bynner, Witter
Byron
  "ottava rima"

Calverley, C. S.
  parody of Browning
Campion, Thomas
Carlyle, Thomas
Chase, W. M.
Chaucer, Geoffrey
Chaucerian stanza, the
Child, F. J.
  _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_
Chinese lyrics
Chopin, Frédéric
Church music
Clark, A. C.
  _Prose Rhythm in English_
Cleghorn, Sarah N.
  "Come, Captain Age"
Colcord, Lincoln
Coleridge, S. T.
  _Biographia Literaria_
  _Kubla Khan_
  _Christabel_
Colvin, Sidney, "The Fine Arts,"
Content and form
Coquelin, E. H. A.
Corson, Hiram
_Counsel upon the Reading of Books_
Courthope, W. J., _History of English Poetry_
Cowley, Abraham, Pindaric ode in English
Cranmer-Byng, L., _The Lute of Jade_
Creative imagination
Croce, B.
Croll, Morris W.

Dances and poetry
Daniel, Samuel
Debussy, Claude
Dickens, Charles
Dickinson, Emily
Dolmetsch, Arnold
Drama
  lyrical element in
  dramatic monologue
Drinkwater, John
Dryden, John
Duran, Carolus

Ear, the, appeal to
Eastman, Max, _Enjoyment of Poetry_
Elizabethan lyric, the
Elton, Oliver W.
Emerson, R. W.
Enjoyment of Verse
Erskine, John
Euphuism
"Eye-minded" or "ear-minded,"

Fairchild, A. H. R., _Making of Poetry_
Feeling, and imagination
  conveyed by words
Feet, in verse
Feminine rhymes
Figures of speech
Fine arts
  "form" and "signficance" in
  the man in
Firkins, O. W.
FitzGerald, Edward
Fletcher, John Gould
Form, in the arts
Fort, Paul
Free verse
  four types of
French song in England
Fromentin, E.
Frost, Robert
Futurist poets

Gardiner, J. H.
Gates, Lewis E.
Genius and inspiration
Giovanitti, Arturo
Gluck, C. W., opera
Goethe
Goodell, T. D.
Gosse, Edmund, definition of the ode
Graphic arts and the lyric
Gray, Thomas
Greek poetry
Gummere, F. B., _Handbook of Poetics_

Hamilton, Sir W. R., quaternions
Hamlet
Hardy, Thomas
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
  _Wonder-Book_
  _Scarlet Letter_
Hearn, Lafcadio
Hebrew lyric, the
Hebrew poetry
Henley, W. E.
Herford, C. H.
Hexameters
  English
Holmes, Edmond, _What is Poetry?_
Holmes, Justice Oliver Wendell
Horace
Horatian ode, English
Hudson, W. H.
Hugo, Victor

Images, verbal
  selection and control of
  visual
  auditory
  tactile
  motor
Imagination, or imaginations
  the poet's
  and feeling
  creative and artistic
  poetic
  lyric
Imagist poets
Imagist verse
_In Memoriam_ stanza, the
Individualism in poetry
Ingersoll, Robert G.
Inspiration

James, Henry
James, William
  an illustration from
Japanese lyrics
Japanese prints
Johnson, Samuel
Jonson, Ben

Keats, John
Kipling, Rudyard

La Farge, John, _Considerations on Painting_
Lamb, Charles
Landor, Walter Savage
Lang, Andrew
Lanier, Sidney, musical theory of verse
  _Poem Outlines_
Latin poets
Lee-Hamilton, Eugene
Legouis, Emile, _Défense de la Poésie Française
Leighton, Sir Frederick
Lessing, _Laokoon_
Lewis, C. M.
Lindsay, Vachel
  "The Congo,"
"Literary" language
Locke, John
Lockwood, Laura E.
Lopere, Frederic A.
Lowell, Amy
Lowes, J. L.
Lyric, the field of
  classification
  definitions
  general characteristics
  objects of the lyric vision
  imagination
  expression
  relationships and types of
  lyrical element in drama
  and narrative
  and graphic arts
  Japanese and Chinese
  decay and survival
  Hebrew
  Greek and Roman
  of Western Europe
  the Elizabethan
  the Romantic
  present status of
  objections to
Macaulay, T. B.
Marinetti, F. T.
Marquis, Don
Masculine rhymes
Masefield, John
Masters, Edgar Lee
Matthews, Brander
Meredith, George
Metre, and rhythm
_Midsummer Night's Dream_
Mill, John Stuart
Millet, J. F.
Milton, John
Monroe, Harriet
Moody, William Vaughn
Moore, J. Robert
Morris, William
Moving picture
Murray, Gilbert
Music and poetry

Narrative poetry
Neilson, W. A.
Newbolt, Sir Henry
Nonsense-verse

Ode, the
Omond, T. S.
Orpheus and Eurydice, myth of

Page, Walter H.
Palgrave, F. T.
"Parallelogram of Forces, The"
Pattern-instinct, the
Patterson, W. M., _Rhythm of Prose_
Pattison, Mark
Peacock, Thomas Love
Persian carpet theory of painting
Pindaric ode, English
Plato
Play-instinct, the
Poe, Edgar Allan
"Poet, the"
  and other men
  his imagination
  his words
Poetry
  some potencies of
  nature of
  and aesthetics
  an art
  the province of
  imagist
  Hebrew
  Greek
  and music
  three main types
  and dances
  of alien races
  _See also_ Lyric.
Polyphonic prose
Pope, Alexander
Pound, Louise
Prosody and enjoyment
Puttenham, George, _Arte of English Poesie_

Quantity

Racial differences
Raleigh, Prof. Walter
Raymond, G. L.
Real effects
Reed, E. B., _English Lyrical Poetry_
Renan, Ernest
Rhyme, as a form of rhythm
Rhys, Ernest
Rhythm, and metre
  nature of
  measurement of
  of prose
  rhyme and
Ribot, Th., _Essay on the Creative Imagination_
Ripley, W. Z.
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
Romantic lyric, the
Royce, Josiah
Ruskin, John
Russell, C. E., "Swinburne and Music,"

Saintsbury, George, _History of English Prose Rhythm_
Santayana, George
Schelling, F. E.
Scherer, Edmond
Scott, Sir Walter
Sea, a quiet, in the arts
Shackford, M. H.
Shakspere, William
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Sherman, Stuart P.
Sidney, Sir Philip
Significance, in the arts
Size of poetic thoughts
Smith, L. W.
Snell, Ada F.
Sonnet, the
  Petrarchan
  Shaksperean
South, Robert
Space-arts
Spaced prose
Spectra hoax, the
Spencer, Herbert
Spenser, Edmund, the "poet's poet"
Spenserian stanza, the
Stanza
Stanzaic law
Stedman, E. C.
Stevenson, R. L.
Stewart, J. A., _The Myths of Plato_
Story, W. W.
Stress, in verse
"Stressers,"
Subjectivity and the lyric
Swinburne, A. S.
Syllabic principle of versification

Taine, H. A.
Tasso
Taylor, Henry Osborn
Teasdale, Sara
Technique
Tennyson, Alfred
Thinking without words
Thompson, Francis
Thoreau, H. D.
Time-arts
"Timers"
Tolman, A. H.
Tolstoy
Tone-color
Tone-feeling
Tynan, Katharine, "Planting Bulbs"

Verbal images
Voice-waves, photographs of

Walton, Isaac
Watts, G. F.
Watts-Dunton, Theodore
Wells, Carolyn
Whistler, James
Whitefield, George
Whitman, Walt
Whitmore, C. E.
Whitney, W. D.
Whittling
Wilkinson, Florence, _New Voices_
Words, the poet's
  how they convey feeling
  as current coin
  an imperfect medium
  unpoetic
  embodiment of poetic feeling
  sound-values and meaning-values
Wordsworth, William
Wyatt, Edith





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