The Literature of Ecstasy

the sixteenth century, and was used by Ariosto in his comedies, except that he employed a final additional unaccented syllable, making eleven syllables in each line. Surrey, who used it in his t

s, however, practically amounts to saying that blank verse is after all a great deal like prose; indeed, it may be arranged like modern free verse with great ease. Its plasticity and variety are due to the fact that its artificial requirements are less than those of most other metres. It was a fortunate day for English drama and poetry when Marlowe, Shakespeare and Milton, f

h is because blank verse, a more natural medium than the

c as used by Wordsworth. These poets, however, are merely less rhythmical than the alleged masters of blank verse. All blank verse is as near prose as any metrical medium that has been hitherto introduced. Bern

the poets of England in the nineteenth century used

n tried with success. I have no intention of using this means of showing that blank verse is really a more modulated prose.

ins with a capital letter. As a matter of fact, there is no particular virtue in having that pause, and the next line need not begin with a capital letter, and should

se, which is still freer and more natural than blank verse

ose, for blank verse is but a confined prose. It is not fair or right to make characters speak in this fettered prose. It is absurd to state that their speeches become poetry only because of this fettered prose. Every great passage in Shakespeare in blank verse would have continued to be poetr

e was, after all, right. "Blank verse, left merely to its numbers, has little operation either on ear or mind; it can hardly support itself without bold figures and striking images. A poe

ng the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Hebrews, among the Hindoos and the Anglo-Saxons. It is rhythmical prose, arranged so as to call attention to the rhythm. It is not a thi

it dates from Aelfric's Lives

inst it when they arrange free verse in prose form, and, vice versa, chop up prose sentences into brief lines beginning with a capital, and ask what is the difference between the two. It is admitted there is none. It matters not if the poet wishes to arrange his composition in free verse forms to call attention to the rhythm, or to print it as prose. It is immate

ust possess a cadence peculiar to itself. Free verse may have great poetic value even though it lacks a unique cadence. Free verse rose into pr

d arrange them in free verse. It is from the essay called "The Eternal Haunter" in the volume Exoti

t her

heart

r waxin

remainin

wither

n the frost

nly bright

om of her e

have l

all touch w

hem of he

It is still poetical, as it was in the original version as well. It really matters little if Hearn had writte

se and arranged it in prose, and tried unsuccessfully to show that the Pater passage did not become free verse, and that the Sandburg passage did not become good prose. His mistake was in trying to take a passage from Sandburg that had a patterned

hology which could have been printed as prose passages. They would have been just as good and poetical as they are in free v

n the long lines of irregular lengths like those of Whitman into which it fits better than it would into lines of brief, irregular length. But its poetry does not depend upon the rhythms which

g the past before our eyes a

t will rise the sple

mpires of which the very rui

across the world's waste spa

ed seas shall furrow the oc

we shall see the banner

g forward to victories that h

to prophecies of

reams of dreamers w

heir vision

have they b

and daught

sing to us the de

and the bea

htly refuses to recognize free verse as a distinct species of verse, holding it to have an affinity at least to prose.[117-A] He notes that the free verse advocates hav

nold and Walter Henley used it. Edward Carpenter had been writing it as a result of Whitman's influence, in Towards Democracy in 1883. In America Horace Traubel, long before the free verse vogue started, had been writing in his The Conservator free verse poems. No one paid attention to these even when some of them were collected in Optimos in 1910, except

ames Whitman as the leading influence on modern American poetry. Let us also be thankful that Wh

d Blake and in German by Goethe and Heine. As Bliss Perry also shows, The Lily and the Bee by Warren, the author of Ten Thousand a Year, was written in free verse, before Whitman. Tupper also used it. Free verse was adopted i

rts, are two chapters entitled "How Prose Can Resemble Verse," and "How Verse Can Resemble Prose." He wants prose not to be cast in metre or rhythm but simply to appear rhythmical and metrical; the metres and rhythms must be unobstrusively introduced. In this he follows Aristotle's Rhetoric which says prose should have rhythm but of not too marked a character. Dionysius especially shows Demosthenes's great care in the matte

ing one of Demosthenes's speeches. If Sidney said that he could not take up the ballad of Percy and Douglas without feeling his heart moved as by a trumpet, Dionysius says even more beautifully, "When I take up one of his speeches, I am entranced and am carried hither and

cognized that prose has often metrical feet that read like verse, thought it ugly and inelegant that an entire verse should appear in a prose composition. He says that he does not entertain "the idea that prose, which ought to have sweeping and fluen

ms made for the French form known as polyphonic verse. Prose

n wants adornment for his speech. Something of that mental state exists in us to-day. We bedeck and bedrape our poetry with trappings without which it is better off. Artificialities appear even in comparatively modern prose. The prose of M

ation, because all ornament was natural to him. In his essay on "Wherefore the Pythian Priestess now Ceases to Deliver Her

oets when they use the fetters of rhyme and metre, or are they with those fetters greater poets than they were in their novels. I have no intention of trying to answer these question

er they write in prose or verse. Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Scott, Emerson, Poe, James Thomson, B. V., Hardy, Meredith, Symons, Hugo, De Musset, Goethe and Heine, are examples of masters of the literature of ecstasy in both pr

hm and not be held in bondage to old verse forms. The day is disappearing when a man like Hegel could say that a production not in metre is not poetry. A sane attitude towards the free use of rhythms by poets has be

s Republic, or Milton's Areopagitica, but the prose of the great novelists. Surely the colloquial prose of Tchekov's Cherry Orchard has as good claim to be called poetry as The Essay on Man, Tess of the D'Urbervilles as The Ring and the Book, The Possessed as Phedre. Where are we to call a halt in the inevitable progress by which

TNO

e's The Kinds of Poetry, two excellent brochures

ee Mercure De France, March 15, 1921. Premie

in the preface to his John Morley and Other Essays, in Richard Aldington's "The A