BLANK VERSE AND FREE VERSE AS FORMS OF PROSE
The unrhymed iambic pentameter known as blank verse is really a form of
free verse; it is a modified form of the unrhymed classical measure. It
made its appearance in Italy in the early part of the sixteenth century,
and was used by Ariosto in his comedies, except that he employed a final
additional unaccented syllable, making eleven syllables in each line.
Surrey, who used it in his translation of two books of the _Æneid_,
imported it from the Italians. It was called by the Italians _versi
sciolti_, "untied or free verse." It was, then, the old classical
measure with more freedom.
In his essay, _Blank Verse_, John Addington Symonds dwells especially on
the plasticity and variety of blank verse, which he says it has more
than any other national metre. It may be used for the commonplace and
the sublime, the tragic and the comic, etc. It does not have to consist
of five iambuses only, but other feet may be substituted almost at the
caprice of the poet. This, however, practically amounts to saying that
blank verse is after all a great deal like prose; indeed, it may be
arranged like modern free verse with great ease. Its plasticity and
variety are due to the fact that its artificial requirements are less
than those of most other metres. It was a fortunate day for English
drama and poetry when Marlowe, Shakespeare and Milton, following in the
footsteps of Surrey's translation of two books of the _Æneid_, and
Sackville's and Norton's play, _Gorboduc_, made blank verse fashionable.
The writers really brought poetry back into prose. For blank verse is
but a restricted prose, because there is as often as not no natural
pause at the end of the line, and because other feet may be substituted
for the iambus.
One of the reasons why English verse poetry excels French is because
blank verse, a more natural medium than the rhymed Alexandrines, became
the chief vehicle for poetry.
In fact, the blank verse of the later Elizabethan dramatists is really
prose, for it is less rhythmical than that of Shakespeare. Blank verse
was said to have degenerated with them. It is also said to be prosaic as
used by Wordsworth. These poets, however, are merely less rhythmical
than the alleged masters of blank verse. All blank verse is as near
prose as any metrical medium that has been hitherto introduced. Bernard
Shaw said he found it easier than prose. It appears very often in prose
without the writer being aware of it. Dickens had a tendency, as also
did Ruskin, to drop unconsciously into blank verse in his prose.
The great English blank verse poets and nearly all the poets of England
in the nineteenth century used this medium, and are really our supreme
prose poets.
The experiment of arranging blank verse in the form of prose and of
putting prose in the metre of blank verse has been often tried with
success. I have no intention of using this means of showing that blank
verse is really a more modulated prose. Any passage of blank verse can
naturally also be put into modern free verse, into the free rhythms of
Whitman, for example.
The lovers of blank verse imagine, however, that its beauty is partly
derived from the existence of a pause at the end of the fifth foot and
because the next line begins with a capital letter. As a matter of fact,
there is no particular virtue in having that pause, and the next line
need not begin with a capital letter, and should be continued as of the
same line. For the real pauses are, after all, not in these artificial
places but where our natural speech and punctuation marks dictate them.
The virtues of blank verse are the virtues of rhythmic prose, which is
still freer and more natural than blank verse, just as blank verse is
preferable to the heroic couplet.
Our English poets who write in blank verse would have done even better
to use prose, rhythmical or unrhythmical. To us moderns there is
something of a distortion in chopping up good prose into lines of five
feet, each beginning with a capital letter. The more beautiful and
natural medium is prose, for blank verse is but a confined prose. It is
not fair or right to make characters speak in this fettered prose. It is
absurd to state that their speeches become poetry only because of this
fettered prose. Every great passage in Shakespeare in blank verse would
have continued to be poetry in regular prose. We observe that the great
prose passages of Shakespeare are poetry even though not in blank verse.
English poetry should free itself from the bondage of blank verse, and
use prose. However, next to free verse blank verse is the best medium
that English poetry has yet found.
Blank verse was in disfavor in the eighteenth century and was regarded
as prose. We may smile at Samuel Johnson's remark upon it in his _Life
of Roscommon_, but on reflection we find that he was, after all, right.
"Blank verse, left merely to its numbers, has little operation either on
ear or mind; it can hardly support itself without bold figures and
striking images. A poem frigidly didactic, without rhyme, is so near
prose that the reader only scorns it for pretending to be verse." He
argues, either write prose or rhyme, but choose no intermediate measure.
The free verse of modern times, the revival of which is due to Walt
Whitman, is really the oldest form in which poetry was expressed. It
existed along with parallelism among the Egyptians, Babylonians, and
Hebrews, among the Hindoos and the Anglo-Saxons. It is rhythmical prose,
arranged so as to call attention to the rhythm. It is not a third medium
for expression, next to prose and the regular verse-forms. The lines do
not return upon themselves, that is, there is no repeat any more than in
rhythmical prose.
In its present form in English it dates from Aelfric's _Lives of the
Saints_, about 1000 A.D.
Free verse has come to stay, and numbers many able poets among its
devotees. It is more natural than rhymed or metrical verse, which,
however, it will not wholly displace. The manuscripts of many poets who
used conventional metres show that the original form of composition was
free verse. The detractors of free verse need not think they bring a
valid argument against it when they arrange free verse in prose form,
and, vice versa, chop up prose sentences into brief lines beginning with
a capital, and ask what is the difference between the two. It is
admitted there is none. It matters not if the poet wishes to arrange his
composition in free verse forms to call attention to the rhythm, or to
print it as prose. It is immaterial if you call _vers libre_ rhythmical
prose or a distinct verse form. The poetry is independent of any
ordering of the lines. Neither of the resulting products loses or gains
in poetical attributes by the objector's turning prose into free verse,
or free verse into prose. The question is, how much ecstasy or emotion,
what impassioned ideas there are in the work.
Free verse may or may not have a cadence all its own, but one feels that
those who advocate free verse need not try to prove that it does and
must possess a cadence peculiar to itself. Free verse may have great
poetic value even though it lacks a unique cadence. Free verse rose into
prominence lately because poets wanted to be freed from the bonds of
metre. They should not encumber themselves with the shackles of a new
prosody.
Let us illustrate our point: we shall take a few lines from a great
prose poem by Lafcadio Hearn and arrange them in free verse. It is from
the essay called "The Eternal Haunter" in the volume _Exotics and
Retrospectives_. The haunter is evidently ancestral memory or the spirit
of life in the past.
Ancient her beauty
As the heart of man,
Yet ever waxing fairer,
Forever remaining young.
Mortals wither in time
As leaves in the frost of autumn;
But time only brightens the glow
And the bloom of her endless youth.
All men have loved her
But none shall touch with his lips
Even the hem of her garment.
It is seen that this prose passage in the free verse transformance has
the cadences which were present before. It is still poetical, as it was
in the original version as well. It really matters little if Hearn had
written it as it now stands. It is a question of personal preference
with the poet, in what form he wishes to write.
Walter P. Eaton, in an article in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for October,
1919, considers the free verse form different from prose. He took a
passage from Pater's _Renaissance_ and arranged it in free verse form,
and then a passage from Sandburg's free verse and arranged it in prose,
and tried unsuccessfully to show that the Pater passage did not become
free verse, and that the Sandburg passage did not become good prose.
His mistake was in trying to take a passage from Sandburg that had a
patterned form, and in arranging the Pater passage into lines that were
too brief. But Professor Lowes has taken passages from Pater, Hewlett,
Fiona Macleod, Conrad and George Meredith and printed them as free
verse, and they truly read like free verse poems.
The votaries of free verse demand a special cadence, but there is hardly
any of it in Masters's poems in the _Spoon River Anthology_ which could
have been printed as prose passages. They would have been just as good
and poetical as they are in free verse, but Masters has the right to
make any arrangement he wanted. Ecstasy is more important than cadence,
and he has ecstasy.
The following passage from Roosevelt's essay on _History as Literature_
is poetry by virtue of its ecstasy and visualizing effect, though
printed in prose form. Roosevelt might have arranged it in the long
lines of irregular lengths like those of Whitman into which it fits
better than it would into lines of brief, irregular length. But its
poetry does not depend upon the rhythms which are in the original prose.
It is only one of the few cases where Roosevelt succeeds in being a
poet, for he was rather the orator who swayed by rhetoric many of the
worst of popular prejudices.
The true historian will bring the past before our eyes as if it
were the present . . .
Gorgeous in our sight will rise the splendor of dead cities,
And the might of the elder empires of which the very ruins crumbled
to dust ages ago;
Along ancient trade-routes, across the world's waste spaces, its
caravans shall move;
And the admirals of uncharted seas shall furrow the ocean with
their lonely prows,
Beyond the dim centuries we shall see the banners float above armed
hosts.
We shall see conquerors riding forward to victories that have
changed the course of time.
We shall listen to prophecies of forgotten seers.
Ours shall be the dreams of dreamers who dreamed greatly,
Who saw in their vision peaks so lofty
That never have they been reached
By the sons and daughters of men.
Dead poets shall sing to us the deeds of men of might
And the love and the beauty of women.
Dr. Andrews in his _Writing and Reading of Verse_ has also given us
illustrations of rhythmic prose that he has resolved into free verse.
Like Professor Patterson, he rightly refuses to recognize free verse as
a distinct species of verse, holding it to have an affinity at least to
prose.[117:A] He notes that the free verse advocates have not really
defined special laws of free verse. He also recommends the would-be
practitioners of free verse to study the prose rhythms of men like Pater
and De Quincey.
Professor Corson, the Browning scholar, wrote to Walt Whitman that be
believed that impassioned prose would be the medium in which the poetry
of the future would be written, and that he considered the _Leaves of
Grass_ one of the harbingers. The vogue of free verse, which is but
impassioned prose, shows that his prophecy is coming true. In England
Matthew Arnold and Walter Henley used it. Edward Carpenter had been
writing it as a result of Whitman's influence, 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 a few disciples. Richard Hovey, Ernest Crosby,
and Stephen Crane had also been writing free verse after Whitman before
the year 1900. About 1912 an impetus was given to free verse by the
poets of the new poetic era which set in and which Untermeyer calls the
_New Era in American Poetry_. Most of the contemporary free verse poets
began writing simultaneously.
Nearly all of our modern free verse poets are admittedly indebted to
Whitman; Louis Untermeyer names Whitman as the leading influence on
modern American poetry. Let us also be thankful that Whitman did not
write about the "technique of free verse," about "cadence," "strophe"
and "return."
Whitman is without a doubt the father of free verse in America and
England to-day. He did not claim to have originated it, since he found a
form of it in the prose poetry of the Bible and Ossian. It was also used
by Milton and Blake and in German by Goethe and Heine. As Bliss Perry
also shows, _The Lily and the 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 in France and Belgium as a result of
Whitman's influence. America owes nothing to French free verse which was
usually rhymed and corresponds to the Pindaric Ode founded by Cowley in
the middle of the seventeenth century.[119:A]
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was one of the few ancient critics who
brought the boundaries of prose and poetry close. His work _On Literary
Composition_ contains two chapters on the importance of rhythm, which he
considers an important element in prose as well as in verse, and he is
especially impressed by the rhythms of Thucydides, Plato and
Demosthenes. At the conclusion of this work, which has been translated
by W. Rhys Roberts, are two chapters entitled "How Prose Can Resemble
Verse," and "How Verse Can Resemble Prose." He wants prose not to be
cast in metre or rhythm but simply to appear rhythmical and metrical;
the metres and rhythms must be unobstrusively introduced. In this he
follows Aristotle's _Rhetoric_ which says prose should have rhythm but
of not too marked a character. Dionysius especially shows Demosthenes's
great care in the matter of rhythm, and instances as examples of
artistic finish among the Greeks the fact that Isocrates worked ten
years on his _Panegyrics_. After having shown how prose may resemble
verse he points out how verse resembles prose. When the clauses and
sense do not coincide with the metrical line but are carried over for
completion in another line, the result is prosaic. That is what makes
our English blank verse so much like prose.
Dionysius erred however in not emphasizing the importance of the
ecstatic element in making prose and verse resemble each other. He
over-valued the use of rhythm in prose, but he was after all swayed by
the ecstasy of the writer. He tells of the influence upon him of reading
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 thither, stirred
now by one emotion, now by another. I feel distrust, anxiety, fear,
disdain, hatred, pity, good-will, anger, jealousy. I am agitated by
every passion in turn that can sway the human heart, and am like those
who are being initiated into wild mystic rites."
However, regularity of feet or metre in prose carried on to a great
extent makes the prose artificial. The Romans occasionally indulged in
it, but they generally used rhythmical prose, as the reader of Cicero
and Livy will observe. Quintilian, who recognized that prose has often
metrical feet that read like verse, thought it ugly and inelegant that
an entire verse should appear in a prose composition. He says that he
does not entertain "the idea that prose, which ought to have sweeping
and fluent motion, should dawdle itself into dotage in measuring feet
and weighing syllables. For this would be the part of a wretched
creature, occupied on the infinitely little. Nor could one who exhausted
himself in this care, have time for better things."
Probably we need not better reply than this to the high claims made for
the French form known as polyphonic verse. Prose that is interspersed
with metrical patterns is not natural.
The truth of the matter is that all the metrical features that are
demanded of poetry belong to the ornamental requirements like metaphors,
myths, rhetorical flourishes and all other gewgaws. There are always
stages in civilization when man wants adornment for his speech.
Something of that mental state exists in us to-day. We bedeck and
bedrape our poetry with trappings without which it is better off.
Artificialities appear even in comparatively modern prose. The prose of
Milton is full of rhetoric and the great Burke had rhetorical
characteristics that we call Asiatic. We are familiar with the
euphuistic qualities of the Elizabethan prose, especially pervading John
Lyly's novel _Euphues_ and Sidney's _Arcadia_.
In an excellent essay Plutarch shows that he understood that verse was
largely natural to man in a certain stage of civilization, because all
ornament was natural to him. In his essay on "Wherefore the Pythian
Priestess now Ceases to Deliver Her Oracle in Verse," he gives the love
of ornament as the real reason for the growth of metre as a form of
literary expression.
Often the topic is broached whether men like Hardy and Meredith are
greater as poets than as novelists. The question is not put properly. It
should be, Do these writers cease being poets when they use the fetters
of rhyme and metre, or are they with those fetters greater poets than
they were in their novels. I have no intention of trying to answer these
questions, though it is usually agreed that these writers are greater in
their novels than in their verse, but the point is that they are poets
whether they use prose or verse as their medium.
Some authors get more ecstasy into their work when they write in prose
than in verse, as readers of the novels and verse poems of Dickens,
George Eliot and Thackeray are aware. Other authors are successful in
crystallizing their ecstasy whether they write in prose or verse.
Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Scott, Emerson, Poe, James
Thomson, B. V., Hardy, Meredith, Symons, Hugo, De Musset, Goethe and
Heine, are examples of masters of the literature of ecstasy in both
prose and verse. Other verse poets have not at all succeeded nor tried
to succeed in writing ecstasy in ordinary prose. The authors who have
given us ecstasy only in prose but have not tried to do so at all in
verse are too numerous to mention.
I believe that poetry will again return to the natural language of
prose. Critics are taking an entirely different stand toward rhythm,
admitting that the poets have the right to vary their measures, create
new rhythm and not be held in bondage to old verse forms. The day is
disappearing when a man like Hegel could say that a production not in
metre is not poetry. A sane attitude towards the free use of rhythms by
poets has been given us in a _New Study of English Poetry_ by Henry
Newbolt. Liberal critics are helping the poets break their shackles; the
following passage from a review of Newbolt's book, by J. Middleton Murry
is worth quoting:
Great Poets have always been those who believed that poetry
was by nature the worthiest vessel of the highest arguments of
which the soul of man is capable. Yet a poetic theory such as
this seems bound to include great prose, and not merely the
prose which can most easily be assimilated to the conditions
of poetry, such as Plato'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 the kinds of literary art merge into one? If
we insist that rhythm is essential to poetry, we are in danger
of confusing the accident with the essence, and of fastening
upon what will have to be in the last analysis a merely formal
difference. The difference in such must be substantial and
essential _aspects of Literature_.[122:A]
FOOTNOTES:
[117:A] Spingarn's _Creative Criticism_ and Erskine's _The Kinds of
Poetry_, two excellent brochures in æsthetic criticism, take a similar
view point.
[119:A] For a history of French free verse see _Mercure De France_,
March 15, 1921. Premiers Poètés Du Vers Libre by Édouard Dujardin.
[122:A] Passages of a similar import will be found by Professor George
M. Harper in the preface to his _John Morley and Other Essays_, in
Richard Aldington's "The Art of Poetry," _The Dial_, August, 1920, and
the preface to F. S. Flint's _Otherworld_.