Mrs. Lionel Marks--or Josephine Preston Peabody, to call her by the name
which she has made famous--is a poet whose tendency has always been
toward democracy. From _The Singing Leaves_, her first book of lyrics,
to _The Piper_ (the dramatic poem which received the Stratford-on-Avon
prize in 1910), and _The Wolf of Gubbio_, the poetic representation of
events in St. Francis's life in her latest published book, she has
chosen for her theme not fantastic and rare aspects of nature, nor the
new answers of her own emotions, but things that are common to all
normal mankind--such as love and religion. Also, without seeming to
preach, she is always expressing her love for Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity, and although she never dwells upon the overworked term, she
is as devoted an adherent of the brotherhood of man as was William
Morris.
Therefore I was eager to learn whether or not she held the
opinion--often expressed during the past months--that poetry is becoming
more democratic, less an art practised and appreciated by the chosen
few. Also I wanted to know if she saw signs of this democratization of
poetry in the development of free verse, or _vers libre_, as those who
write it prefer to say, in the apparently growing tendency of poets to
give up the use of rhyme and rhythm.
"Certainly, poetry is steadily growing more democratic," said Mrs.
Marks. "More people are writing poetry to-day than fifty years ago, and
the appreciation of poetry is more general. Most poets of genuine
calling are writing now with the world in mind as an audience, not
merely for the entertainment of a little literary cult.
"But I do not think that the _vers libre_ fad has any connection with
this tendency, or with the development of poetry at all. Indeed, I do
not think that the cult is growing; we hear more of it in the United
States than we did a year or two ago, but that is chiefly because London
and Paris have outworn its novelty, so the _vers libristes_ concentrate
their energies on Chicago and New York.
"I love some 'free verse.' Certainly, there may be times when a poet
finds he can express his idea or his emotion better without rhyme and
rhythm than with them. But verse that is ostentatiously free--free verse
that obviously has been made deliberately--that is a highly artificial
sort of writing, bears no more relation to literature than does an
acrostic. Neither the themes nor the methods of those who call
themselves _vers libristes_ are democratic; they are, in the worst sense
of the word, the sense which came into use at the time of the French
Revolution, aristocratic.
"The canon of the _vers libristes_ is essentially aristocratic. They
contend, absurdly enough, that all traditional forms of rhyme and rhythm
constitute a sort of bondage, and therefore they arbitrarily rule them
out. Not for them are the fetters that bound Shelley's spirit to the
earth! Also they arbitrarily rule out what they call, with their
fondness for labels, the 'sociological note,' 'didacticism,'
'meanings'--any ideas or emotions, in fact, that may be called communal
or democratic.
"My own canon is that all themes are fit for poetry and that all methods
must justify themselves. If I may be permitted to make a clumsy
wooden-toy apothegm I would say that poetry is rhythmic without and
within. If we turn Carlyle's sometimes cloudy prose inside out we find
that it has a silver lining of poetry.
"Neither can I understand why the _vers libristes_ believe that their
sort of writing is new. Leopardi wrote what would be called good
_imagisme_, although the _imagistes_ do not seem to be aware of the
fact, and the theory that rhyme is undesirable in poetry has appeared
sporadically time and again in the history of poetry. When Sir Philip
Sidney was alive there were pedants who argued against the use of rhyme,
and some of them confuted their own arguments by writing charming lyrics
in the traditional manner. By dint of reading the fine eye-cracking
print in the Globe Edition of Spenser I found that the author of the
_Faerie Queen_ at one time took seriously Gabriel Harvey's arguments
against rhyme and made an unbelievably frightful experiment in rhymeless
verse--as bad as the parodists of our band-wagon.
"The other day I asked some one in the Greek department of Harvard how
to read a fragment of Sappho's that I wanted to teach my children to
say. He said that no one nowadays could know how certain of Sappho's
poems really should be read, because the music for them had been lost,
and they were all true lyrics, meant to be sung and sung by Sappho to
music of her own making. So you see that poets who avowedly make verses
that can appeal only to the eye, successions of images, in which the
position of the words on the page is of great importance, believe that
they are the successors of poets whose work was meant not to be read,
but to be sung, whose verses fitted the regular measure of music.
"As I said before," said Mrs. Marks, smiling, "I have no objection to
free verse when it is a spontaneous expression. But I do object to free
verse when it is organized into a cult that denies other freedoms to
other poets! And I object to the bigotry of some of the people who are
trying to impose free verse upon an uninterested world.
"And also I object to the unfairness of some of the advocates of free
verse. When they compare free verse, and what I suppose I must call
chained verse, they take the greatest example of unrhymed poetry that
they can find--the King James version of the Book of Job, perhaps--and
say: 'This is better than "Yankee Doodle." Therefore, free verse is
better than traditional verse.'
"You see," said Mrs. Marks, "the commonest thing there is, I may say the
most democratic thing, is the rhythm of the heart-beat. A true poet
cannot ignore this. At the greatest times in his life, when he is filled
with joy or despair, or when he has a sense of portent, man is aware of
his heart, of its beat, of its recurrent tick, tick; he is aware of the
rhythm of life. When we are dying, perhaps the only sense that remains
with us is the sense of rhythm--the feeling that the grains of sand are
running, running, running out.
"The pulse-beat is a tremendous thing. It is the basis of all that men
have in common. All life is locked up in its regularly recurrent rhythm.
And it is that rhythm that appears in our love-songs, our war-songs, in
all the poetry of the human cycle from lullabies to funeral chants. In
the great moments of life men feel that they must be sharing, that they
must have something in common with other men, and so their emotions
crystallize into the ritual of rhythm, which is the most democratic
thing that there is.
"Primitive poetry, poetry that comes straight from the hearts of the
people, sometimes circulating for generations without being committed to
paper, is strongly traditional. The convention of regular rhyme and
rhythm is never absent. What could be more conventional and more
democratic than the old ballad, with its recurrent refrain in which the
audience joined? Centuries ago in the Scotch Highlands the
ballad-makers, like the men who wrote the 'Come-all-ye's' in our
great-grandfather's time, used regular rhyme and rhythm. And if these
poets were not democratic, then there never was such a thing as a
democratic poet."
"But is it not true," I asked, "that Whitman is considered the most
democratic poet of his day, and that his avoidance of rhyme and regular
rhythm is advanced as proof of his democracy?"
"Whitman," said Mrs. Marks, "was a democrat in principle, but not in
poetic practice. He loved humanity, but he still waits to reach his
widest audience because his verse lacks strongly stressed, communal
music. The only poems which he wrote that really reached the hearts of
the people quickly are those which are most nearly traditional in
form--_When Lilacs Last in Dooryards Bloomed_ and _Captain, My Captain!_
in which he used rhyme.
"You see, nothing else establishes such a bond with memory as rhyme.
"Did you ever think," said Mrs. Marks, suddenly, "that the truest
exuberance of life always expresses itself rhythmically? Children are
generous with the most intricate rhythms; they do not eat ice-cream in
the disorderly grown-up way; they eat it in a pattern, turning the
saucer around and around; they skit alternate flagstones or every third
step on the stairway. Because they are overflowing with life they
express themselves in rhythm. _Vers libre_ is too grown-up to be the
most vital poetry; one of the ways in which the poet must be like a
little child is in possessing an exuberance of life. His life must
overflow.
"The poets especially remember that Christ said, 'I am come that ye
might have life and that ye might have it more abundantly.'
"The rhythm of life," said Mrs. Marks, thoughtfully. "The rhythm of
life. Who is conscious of his heart-beats except at the great moments of
life, and who is unconscious of them then? The music of poetry is the
witness of that intense moment when there is discovered to man or woman,
when there reverberates through his brain and being, the tremendous
rhythm and refrain whereby we live."
Mrs. Marks has no patience with those who use the term "sociological" in
depreciation of all poetry that is not intensely subjective and
personal.
"There are some critics," she said, "who would condemn the Lord's Prayer
as 'sociological' because it begins 'Our Father' instead of 'My Father.'
"The true poet must be a true democrat; he must, if he can, share with
all the world the vision that lights him; he must be in sympathy with
the people. The war has made a great many European poets aware of this
fact. Think how the war changed Rupert Brooke, for instance? He had been
a most aristocratic poet, making poems, some of which could only repel
minds less in love with the fantastic. But he shared the great emotion
of his countrymen, and so he wrote out of his deeply wakened, sudden
simplicity those sonnets which they all can understand and must forever
cherish.
"The war will help make poetry. It has swept away the fads and cults
from Europe; they find a peaceful haven in the United States, but they
will not live as dogmas. In the democracy that is soon to come may all
'isms' founder and lose themselves! And may all true freedoms come into
their own, with the maker, his mind and his tools."
_THE HERESY OF SUPERMANISM_