Chapter 22
SECTION 22 OF LITERATURE IN THE MAKING BY SOME OF ITS MAKERS For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Betty B. Literature in the Making by SOME OF ITS MAKERS Let Poetry Be Free by Joyce Kilmer and Josephine Preston Peabody 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 and 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 practiced 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 today 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 Veres Librists 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 librists 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 librists 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 apotheem 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 librists 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 spencer i found that the author of the fairy 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 paradists of our bandwagon 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 our 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-yees 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 reach the hearts of the people
quickly are those which are most nearly traditional in form, When Lilacs Last Endoor Yards 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. Veres Libra 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. Marx thoughtfully, the rhythm of life. who is conscious of his heartbeats 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. End of section 22
