LIBRARY
OF
SAN DIEGO
presented to the
UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
SAN DIEGO
by
Mrs . Jarvis Barlow
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.
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO SAN FRANCISCO
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1930, BY BLISS PERRY
ALL RIGHTS HESKKVED
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSBTTS
PRINTED IN THE U . S . A
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, trans-
forming 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
CONTENTS
PART!
POETRY IN GENERAL
I. A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND 8
II. THE PROVINCE OP POETRY 88
III. THE POET'S IMAGINATION 61
IV. THE POET'S WORDS 98
V. RHYTHM AND METRE 143
VI. RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSB 182
PARTH
THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
VII. THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY 227
VIII. RELATIONSHIPS AND TYPES OF THE
LYRIC f 259
IX. RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL 299
X. THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC 329
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 851
APPENDIX 375
BIBLIOGRAPHY 383
INDEX 391
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.
4 POETRY IN GENERAL
"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, in-
stead of looking out of the window and quot-
ing Katharine Tynan? And then it flashes
over me, in lieu of answer, that I have just
discovered one way of beginning the chapter,
A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND 5
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 in-
stance, to seize upon a physical image like
that of a woman planting bulbs, and trans-
mute it into a symbol of the resurrection of
the dead; its capacity for turning fact into
truth and brown earth into beauty; for re-
moulding the broken syllables of human
speech into sheer music; for lifting the mind,
bowed down by wearying thought and haunt-
ing fear, into a brooding ecstasy wherein
weeping is changed into laughter and au-
tumnal 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," de-
clared 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
6 POETRY IN GENERAL
of the finest spirits in every race that has
attained to civilization have devoted them-
selves 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 ex-
plain some of the secrets of poetry ; the psycho-
logical laboratory, the history of criticism,
the investigation of linguistics, the modern
developments in music and the other arts,
have all contributed something to our in-
telligent 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
A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND 7
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 in-
terpretation 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 ques-
tions has to do with the relations of the study
of poetry to the general field of ^Esthetics.
1. The Study of Poetry and the Study of
^Esthetics
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
8 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 pT nf>tiffn
through words rhythmically arranged. But as
soon as they began to inquire into the par-
ticular kind of emotion which is utilized in
poetry and the various rhythmical arrange-
ments employed by poets, they found them-
selves 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 /Esthetics. This word, derived from
the Greek aisthanomai (to perceive), has been
defined as "anything having to do with per-
ception 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 Beauti-
ful" and "The Philosophy of Beauty"; that
A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND 9
is, both the analysis and classification of beau-
tiful things as well as speculation as to the
origin and nature of Beauty itself. But it
should be borne in mind that aesthetic in-
quiry 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 con-
temporary 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 dif-
ference, as far as the objects themselves are
concerned? Andjwhat is it which the prefer-
able 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 beau-
tiful 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
10 POETRY IN GENERAL
think that he had ever looked at river or sky
or had his pulses quickened by a tune. Never-
theless, no one can turn the pages of a formal
History of ^Esthetics 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 con-
tributions of the Greeks to aesthetic theory,
as they are stated by Bosanquet: l (l)jthe_
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
1 Bosanquet, History of ^Esthetic, chap. 8.
A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND 11
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 crea-
tion 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 individ-
ually "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 over-
much 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
12 POETRY IN GENERAL
will surely lead him into a deeper curiosity as
to the nature and manifestations of aesthetic
feeling in general.
#. 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 be-
tween 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. Thou-
sands 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
A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND 13
enough: it is the direct inspiration of the
divinity, the "god" takes possession of
^thejDgeJt, 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 contem-
porary 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-excite-
ment, 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 pro-
cessional and pageant, are all expressions of
communal feeling, and it is this communal
feeling "the sense of joy in widest com-
monalty spread " which has inspired, in
Greece and Italy, some of the greatest ar-
tistic 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 thejn^yid^aJLailistjonly. We see
14 POETRY IN GENERAL
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. 7 What
he produces in his loneliness the wond 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 "trans-
mission of emotion," this "infectious" qual-
ity 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
A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND 15
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 dra-
matic 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 V7\]iinhlft firrrirr in insist-
ing 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
16 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 subse-
quent theorists have pointed out the analogy
between the play of young animals, the free
expression of their surplus energy, their or-
ganic 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 appear-
ances 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 im-
pressionist painter or the imagist poet illus-
trates this conception. The conventions of
the stage are likewise a case in point. Stage
settings, conversations, actions, are all af-
A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND 17
fected by the "optique du theatre," 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 char-
acterize great art: it is perceived in the
austerity and reserve of the Psyche of Naples
and the Venus of Melos:
18 POETRY IN GENERAL
"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 pleasur-
able 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 pleas-
ures 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 in-
creased, 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 re-
A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND 19
main 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
thejnere whittling of a stick to exercise sur-
plus energy, it is ordered play or labor. It
follows a method. It betrays premeditation.
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 re-
membered from other patterns. He gets
pleasure from the sheer muscular activity,
POETRY IN GENERAL
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 mir-
acle: he has thrown the raw material of feel-
ing into form and that form itself yields
pleasure. His "bit of fiat" has taken a piece
of wood and transformed it: made it expres-
sive of something. All the "arts of design"
among primitive races show this pattern-
instinct.
But the impulse toward an ordered ex-
pression of feeling is equally apparent in the
rudimentary stages of music and poetry. The
stinking ofhands 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 cheer-
ing and of song, the quickened feet of negro
stevedores as some one starts a tune, the
children's delight in joining hands and mov-
ing in a circle, all serve to illustrate the law
L^ y t
O r V^Lt^c L <Sx"
r /^ ^ j
A GLANCE AT TEE BACKGROUND 1
-^Cx, i
that as feeling gains in intensity it tends to- -/
ward ordered expression. Poetry, said Cole-
ridge, in one of his marvelous moments of
insight, is the result of "a more than, usual, ^-f-
state of emotion" combined "with more than f,
usual order."
What has been said about play and shar-
able pleasure and the beginning of design has
been well summarized by Sidney Colvin: 1
"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 re-
sults 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 re-
straint 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
dear that any specific work of art may be
regarded, at least theoretically, from two
1 Article on "The Fine Arts" in Encyclopadia Briiannica.
22 POETRY IN GENERAL
points of view. We may look at its "outside"
OF 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 dis-
tinction 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 look-
ing 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 dis-
section 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 com-
plex of sensation. Music is a perfect example
of "embodied feeling," as students of aesthet-
ics term it, and the body is here inseparable
from the feeling. But in poetry, which is like-
wise embodied feeling, it is somewhat easier
A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND 23
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, 1 or the poet may not have been a
sufficiently skilful workman to achieve suc-
cess in the form or "pattern" which he has
rightly chosen.
Even in poetry, then, the distinction be-
tween 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 Eng-
lish painter G. F. Watts often expressed him-
self in the same fashion: "I paint first of all
because I have something to say: . . . My
1 Certainly not, for instance, in Wordsworth's " Reverie of
Poor Susan."
24 POETRY IN GENERAL
intention has not been so much to paint pic-
tures that will charm the eye as to suggest
great thoughts that will appeal to the imagi-
nation 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 tex-
ture, 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 im-
portant 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 some-
times been called, such as a rectangle, a
square, a cube, carries a certain element
of association which gives it a degree of sig-
A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND 25
nificance. There is no absolutely bare or
blank pattern. "Four-square" means some-
thing to the mind, because it is intimately
connected with our experience. 1 It cannot be
a mere question of balance, parallelism and
abstract "unity in variety." \The acanthus
design in architectural ornament, the Sara-
cenic 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 expres-
sive 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 deco-
rative 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
1 See Bosanquet, Three Lectures on ^Esthetic, pp. 19, 29, 39,
and Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, p. 83.
26 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 mean-
ing, 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
A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND 27
debated ever since the time of Winckelmann
and Lessing. The controversy over the work
of such artists as Wagner, Browning, Whit-
man, 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?" *
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! But3osan-
quet's carefully framed definition of the beau-
tiful, in his History of /Esthetic, endeavors,
like Browning, to adjust the different claims
of form and significance: "The beautiful is
that which has characteristic or individual
1 "Fra Lappo Lippi."
28 POETRY IN GENERAL
expressiveness for sense-perception or imagi-
nation, 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. Lit is
this: there is nothing in any work of art ex-
cept 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
A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND 29
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 opportu-
nities which one medium or another affords to
the artist. But though human curiosity never
wearies of examining the inexhaustible possi-
bilities 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 be-
comes transformed as it passes through his
"shop," in some such way as iron is trans-
formed into steel in a blast furnace. An appa-
ratus called a "transformer" alters the wave-
30 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 ex-
presses 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 sub-
sequent 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 sen-
sations," said Caroms 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 sub-
stances that you must render wood, metal,
textures, for instance. When you fail to re-
produce 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
A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND 31
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 Paint-
ing, a little book which is full of suggestive-
ness 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 as-
pirations, former habits, images that we have
cared for, and through which we indicate to
others our training, our race, the entire edu-
cated part of our nature."
One of La Farge's concrete examples must
be quoted at length: l
"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 ab-
solutely different in the texture of their minds and
in the result that they wished to obtain, so far as
1 Considerations on Painting, pp. 71-73. Macmillan.
32 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 be-
fore 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 invol-
untarily looked upon what was most interesting
to him in the whole sight; and though the whole
A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND S3
sight was what he meant to represent, he had un-
consciously 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 pic-
ture 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 na-
ture seen through a temperament," G. L.
Raymond's "Art is nature made human,"
and Croce's "Art is the expression of im-
pressions." These painters and critics agree,
evidently, that the mind of the artist is an
34 POETRY IN GENERAL
organism which acts as a "transformer." It
receives the reports of the senses, but alters
these reports in transmission and it is pre-
cisely in this alteration that the most per-
sonal 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 hand-
books of psychology to illustrate the proc-
ess of sensory stimulus of a nerve-centre and
the succeeding motor reaction. The diagram
is usually drawn after this fashion:
.Nerve-centre
The process is thus described by William
James: 1
"The afferent nerves, when excited by some
physical irritant, be this as gross hi 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."
1 Psychology, Briefer Course, American Science Series, p. 91.
Henry Kelt. J
A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND 85
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. 1 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 Me-
moriam" 2
In the next chapter we must examine this
1 See the extremely interesting statement by Sara Teasdale,
quoted in Miss Wilkinson's New Voices, p. 199. Macmillan,
1919.
2 Counsel upon the Reading of Books, p. 219. Houghton
MiOliu Company.
36 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 "expres-
sion" 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 modifica-
tion, 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 imagi-
nation 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
A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND 37
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 in-
tricately fascinating than in poetry.
CHAPTER H
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 sur-
veyor's line accurately around the borders
of this field, determining what belongs to it
rather than to the neighboring arts, is always
THE PROVINCE OF POETRY 39
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, be-
tween 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 expres-
sion, according to th$ nature of the material
which they employ. That is to say, the "time-
arts" like poetry^fed music deal prima-
40 POETRY IN GENERAL
rily 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 "paint-
ing" group, and others that belong as natu-
rally 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, 1 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
1 F. E. Bryant, The Limits of Descriptive Writing, etc. Ann
Arbor, 1906.
THE PROVINCE OF POETRY 41
Orfeo," it still keeps, among all the strange
transformations which it has undergone, "the
freshness of the early world." Let us con-
dense the story from King Alfred's Anglo-
Saxon version of Boethius's De Consolatione
Philosophies: "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 marvel-
ously 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 nar-
ratable by means of a "time-art" like poetry.
The myth itself is one of fascinating human
interest, and if a prose writer like Hawthorne
42 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 adjec-
tive, that the myth contained sentiment,
imagination, passion, dramatic climax, pa-
thos the qualities which we commonly
associate with poetry and that Hawthorne,
although a prose writer, had such an ex-
quisite 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 real-
ize the full value of Lessing's distinction, we
must turn to one of the countless verse ren-
derings of the myth. Here we have a suc-
cession 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
THE PROVINCE OF POETRY 43
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 can-
not, 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 "oper-
atic" devices as such furnishes in its suc-
cessions 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 por-
tions of the story, such as those relating to
the wondrous harping, can obviously be in-
terpreted better through music x than through
the medium of any other art.^3
What can Lessing's "space-arts," sculpture
and painting, do with the material furnished
44 POETRY IN GENERAL
by the Orpheus myth? Itjs clear that they
cannot tell the whole story, since they are
dealing with "bodies that coexist" rather
than with successive actions. They must se-
lect some one instant of action only, and pref-
erably 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 mo-
ment 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 per-
sons 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 per-
THE PROVINCE OF POETRY 45
sonages and the background in two dimen-
sions. He can separate his figures more com-
pletely than the sculptor, can make their
instant of action more "dramatic," can
portray certain objects, such as the diapha-
nous 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 "atmos-
phere" of the whole, in a fashion unap-
proachable 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 prov-
inces 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 conven-
46 POETRY IN GENERAL
iently be called "Orpheus and Eurydice."
Each has had his own conception of the theme,
each his own professional technique in han-
dling 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 con-
ditioned 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 ren-
dered 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 PROVINCE OF POETRY 47
the quiet sea, and whatever he may find
belongs to him. We declaim against the con-
fusion 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 success-
ful, 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
48 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 under-
stood, is that portion of human feeling which
expresses itself through rhythmical and pref-
erably 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, au-
ditory, 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, trans-
formation. l 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. Jype 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
1 "The finest poetry was first experience; but the thought
has suffered a transformation since it was &n experience."
Emerson, Shakespeare: The Poet.
THE PROVINCE OF POETRY 49
artists is to be traced not so much in the pe-
culiar 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 imagi-
nation, and in the strongly rhythmical or
metrical character of the final expression.
Let carbon represent the first of the stages,
i 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 cut-
ting, polishing and setting of the diamond, by
the arrangement of the transformed and now
purely verbal images into effective rhythmi-
cal 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
y
50 POETRY IN GENERAL
sense-impressions of every kind, his expe-
rience, 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 what-
ever the poet has seen and felt, modified by
his imagination. The result is a poem: "em-
bodied 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 be-
tween the poet's brain and ours. His brain
beats into rhythm; that is the simple but
enormous difference in function, and hence it
THE PROVINCE OF POETRY 51
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.
8. An Illustration from William James
No one can be more conscious than the
present writer of the impossibility of describ-
ing 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 neverthe-
less 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
\J
52 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 com-
plicated 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." 1
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 ani-
mal 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.
"Thus, a tired wayfarer on a hot day throws
1 Psychology, Briefer Course, pp. 97, 98. Henry Holt.
THE PROVINCE OF POETRY
53
himself on the damp earth beneath a maple-tree.
The sensations of delicious rest and coolness pour-
ing 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 sug-
gestiveness to the student of poetry. For it is
along this loop-line of "memories anoT ideas
of the distant" that poetry wins its general-
izing 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 co-
herence and general human significance. It is
possible, certainly, as the experiments of con-
54 POETRY IN GENERAL
temporary "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 im-
pressions and representation of those impres-
sions 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 liter-
ature, whether poetry or prose." 1 To quote
another critic: "A rock, a star, a lyre, a
cataract, do not, except incidentally and in-
directly, owe their command of our sym-
pathies to the bare power of evoking re-
actions 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 expe-
rience, in the number and vigor of the occa-
sions in which they have crossed and re-
crossed the palpitating thoroughfares of life.
. . . Sense-impressions are poetically valuable
1 Lewis Worthington Smith, "The New Naivete," Atlantic,
April, 1916.
THE PROVINCE OF POETRY 55
only in the measure of their power to procreate
or re-create experience." l
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 redis-
covering the formula of "Back to Nature." 2
Like "free verse," it has widened the field of
expression, although its advocates have some-
times forgotten that thousands of "imagist"
poems lie embedded in the verse of Browning
and even in the prose of George Meredith. 3
We shall discuss some of its tenets later, but it
should be noted at this point that the radi-
cal deficiency of imagist verse, as such, isTn its
lack of general ideas. Much of it might have
been written by an infinitely sensitive decapi-
tated 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
1 O. W. Firkins, "The New Movement in Poetry," Nation,
October 14, 1915.
1 See the discussion of imagist verse in chap. m.
1 J. L. Lowes, "An Unacknowledged Imagist," Nation,
February 24, 1916.
56 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 Words-
worth, 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 hu-
man 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 PROVINCE OF POETRY 57
the human mind. He reads the divine justice
in the tragic fall of Kings. He penetrates be-
neath the external forms of Nature and per-
ceives 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 wonder-
ful 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 gen-
eralization 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 uni-
58 POETRY IN GENERAL
verse; 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 dwell-
ing is the light of setting suns."
But this perception of relations, character-
istic as it is of the poetic temper, is also an
attribute of the philosopher. The intellect
of a Newton, too, leaps from the specific in-
stance 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 corre-
spondingly quick to feel dissonances, imper-
fections, slights. Like Lamb, they are "rather
squeamish about their women and children."
Like Keats, they are "snuffed out by an
THE PROVINCE OF POETRY 69
article." Keener pleasures, keener pains, this
is the law of their life; but it is applicable to
all persons of the so-called artistic tempera-
ment. It is one of the penalties of a fine organ-
ism. It does not of itself describe a poet. 1
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 him-
self a true creator. Criticism no longer at-
tempts 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 lov-
ingly for many a century, observing their
various endowments, their manifest en-
deavors, their victories and defeats, observ-
ing likewise the nature of language, that
strange medium (so much stranger than any
clay or bronze!) through which poets are
1 I have here utilized a few paragraphs from my chapter on
"Poetry" in Counsel upon the Reading of Books, Hough ton
Miffliu Company.
60 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 hill-
top, were used as markers to indicate the
outlines of a continent. Criticisnv likewise,
needs its poor sticks and stones of common-
place, 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 IH
THE POET'S IMAGINATION
"The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by pro-
ducing 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 conven-
ience 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 feel-
ing. A small girl, the other day, spoke of a
telegraph wire as "that message-vine." Her
father and mother smiled at this naive re-
naming 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
62 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 imagina-
tion. 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 psy-
chology 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 pe-
culiar significance to students of poetry, is
this: in the stream of objects immediately
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 63
present to consciousness there are no images
of feeling itself. 1
"""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 jeal-
ousy, 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 every-
thing 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 f eeling is to call up the
images that are naturally connected with that
feeling." 2
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 assert-
ing, as our grandfathers did, that the imagi-
1 This point has been elaborated with great care in Professor
A. H. R. Fairchild's Making of Poetry. Putnam's, 1912.
* Fairchild, pp. 24, 25.
64 POETRY IN GENERAL
nation is a "faculty" of the mind, like "judg-
ment," 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 "imagi-
nations" 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 in-
tegration 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 com-
pared with the power displayed by a Shake-
speare, a Homer, a Dante." We are inclined
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 65
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 him-
self 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. 1 This famous psy-
chologist, 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 imagina-
tion. Then he passes to the unconscious fac-
tor, 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
1 Th. Ribot, Essai tur V Imagination crSatrice. Paris, 1900.
English translation by Open Court Co., Chicago, 1906.
66 POETRY IN GENERAL
conscious elaboration. 1 Ribot points out that
certain organic changes, as in blood circula-
tion 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 ani-
mal'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 appli-
cation; or else (B) the unconscious prepara-
tion, followed by the "idea" or "inspiration,"
and then by the "development" or con-
struction. Whether a man is inventing a
safety-pin or a sonnet, the series of imagina-
tive processes seems to be much the same.
There is of course a typical difference between
the "plastic" imagination, dealing with clear
1 See the quotation from Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the
mathematician, in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this
chapter.
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 67
images, objective relations, and seen at its
best in the arts of form like sculpture and
architecture, and that "diffluent" imagina-
tion 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, flower-
ing and completion," and the same funda-
mental motor impulse as the driving power.
Holding in mind these general characteris-
tics of the creative imagination, as traced by
Bibot, 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 formu-
lation of its functions. But it may be helpful
to quote a paragraph from Hartley B. Alex-
ander's brilliant and subtle book, Poetry and
the Individual : l
"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
1 Putnam's, 1906.
68 POETRY IN GENERAL
our growing life, we term imagination. It is dis-
tinguished 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 under-
standing 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 imagi-
nation 'is the Pharaoh in command. It is dis-
tinguished 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 imagi-
nation 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 train-
ing of the individual reader, but its quicken-
ing power will be recognized even by those
who are incapable of grasping all the intellec-
tual distinctions involved.
3. Poetic Imagination in Particular
We are now ready, after this consideration
of the creative and artistic imagination, to
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 69
look more closely at some of the qualities
of the poetic imagination in particular. JThe
specific formal features of that imagination
lie, as we have seen, in its use of verbal im-
agery, 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 hi 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 Il-
lustrations" for this chapter, a quotation
from Mr. Lascelles-Abercrombie, in which he
refers to the "region where the outward radi-
ations of man's nature combine with the ir-
radiations of the world." That is to say, the
inward-sweeping stream of consciousness is
instantly met by an outward-moving activity
70 POETRY IN GENERAL
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, ap-
propriates them as a part of its own nature.
Professor Fairchild, who calls this self-pro-
jecting process by the somewhat ambiguous
name of "personalizing," rightly insists, I be-
lieve, that poets make a more distinctive use
of this activity than other men. He quotes
some of the classic confidences of poets them-
selves: 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
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 71
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 Words-
worth. 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 imagina-
tion, by means of which the child or the primi-
tive 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 temper-
ament, allied with the preceding, likewise
seems to belong in the region where words are
72 POETRY IN GENERAL
not as yet emerging above the threshold of
consciousness. I mean the strange feeling, wit-
nessed to by many poets, of the fluidity, fusi-
bility, 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 solu-
tion," the "flowing of all things" of the
Greeks, the "river within the river" of Emer-
son. 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 in-
definite." x "Shakespeare, too," says Car-
lyle, 2 "does not look at a thing, but into it,
through it; so that he constructively compre-
hends it, can take it asunder and put it to-
gether 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,
1 Preface to 1815 edition of his Poems.
J Essay on "Goethe's Works."
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 73
as for Shakespeare, the world lies all translu-
cent, all fusible we might call it, encircled with
Wonder; the Natural in reality the Supernatu-
ral, 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 crea-
tions representing and ennobling its effects."
Coleridge's formula is briefer still; the imag-
ination "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in
order to re-create." 1
Such passages help us to understand the
mystical moments which many poets have re-
corded, 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
1 Biographia Literaria.
74 POETRY IN GENERAL
type of mysticism. But the sense of the in-
finite 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 evolu-
tionary version of St. John's "It doth not yet
appear what we shall be." "The primary
imagination," asserted Coleridge, "is a repe-
tition in the finite mind of the eternal act of
creation in the infinite / am." l Here, evi-
dently, unless the "God-intoxicated" Cole-
ridge is talking nonsense, we are in the pres-
ence 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-presen-
1 Biographia Literaria, chap. 13.
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 75
tation 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 suffi-
ciently conscious of what is going on within
their workshop to tell us something about it.
Professor Fairchild has made an interesting
collection J of testimony relating to the tu-
multuous 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
1 The Making of Poetry, pp. 78, 79.
76 POETRY IN GENERAL
which Shelley strives to portray the spirit of
t1ie~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: *
" 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
1 Dublin Review, July, 1908.
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 77
ether. He chases the rolling world. He gets be-
tween the feet of the horses of the sun. He stands
in the lap of patient Nature, and twines her loos-
ened 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 con-
trolled. 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 com-
bination 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:
78 POETRY IN GENERAL
"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 appro-
priate the name of Imagination." "Synthetic
and magical power," indeed, with a Coleridge
as Master of the Mysteries! But the per-
plexed 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 : 1
" The poet concentrates his thought on some con-
crete 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 in-
citement of these feelings, and in accordance with
laws of association that may at least in part be
described, these images grow bright and clear,
1 Lewis E. Gates, Studies and Appreciations, p. 215. Mao-
millan, 1900.
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 79
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 con-
scious purpose and so growing intellectually sig-
nificant, 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 un-
diiniiiisliing 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." 1
For sometimes, assuredly, the synthesis of
images seems to take place without the voli-
tion of the poet. The hypnotic trance, the
1 " Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted accord-
ing to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, ' I will
compose poetry.' ... It is not subject to the control of the ac-
tive powers of the mind. ... Its birth and recurrence have no
necessary connection with the consciousness or will." Shelley,
A Defense of Poetry.
80 POETRY IN GENERAL
narcotic dream or revery, and even our experi-
ence 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 syn-
thesizes, 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 "con-
scious purpose" whatever, and no "meaning"
in the ordinary interpretation of that word.
Nevertheless it is perfect integration of im-
agery, 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 happi-
ness " of being insane. " Dream not, Coleridge,
of having tasted all the grandeur and wild-
ness of fancy till you have gone mad! All
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 81
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 " 1
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 combina-
tion of imagery. Wordsworth's naive explana-
tion of the task performed by the imagination
in his "Cuckoo" and "Leech-Gatherer" 2
occupies a middle ground. We are at least
certain of his entire honesty and inciden-
tally 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
1 The Philosophy of Composition.
* Preface to poems of 1815-1845.
82 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 abstract-
ing, and the modifying powers of the Imagination,
immediately and mediately acting, are all brought
into conjunction. The stone is endowed with some-
thing 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 correct-
ness in every detail. It is evident that we
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 83
have to deal with an infinite variety of normal
and abnormal minds. Some of these defy
classification; others fall into easily recog-
nized 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!" 1
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 re-
corded experience of individual men, and
1 Midsummer Night's Dream, v, i, 7-22.
84 POETRY IN GENERAL
from these make our comparisons and gener-
alizations. It may even happen that some
readers will get a clearer conception of the se-
lection and synthesis of images if they turn
for the moment away from poetry and en-
deavor to realize something of the same proc-
esses as they take place in imaginative prose.
In Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, for example,
the dominant image, which becomes the sym-
bol 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 ro-
mance are mastered by it, subordinated to it;
it becomes the dominant note in the composi-
tion. 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.
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 85
Apply this familiar law of complexity to
a poet's conscious or unconscious choice of
images. In the essay which we have already
quoted 1 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 individ-
uality of the artist. This so-called 'acquired con-
stitution 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 sensa-
tions and perceptions that he captures and auto-
matically stores up. It guides him in his judg-
ments 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 Me, 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 conscious-
ness, 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."
1 Studies and Appreciations, p. 216.
86 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 cpntemporary
"imagists." As we have already noted, in
Chapter II, they stress the individual reac-
tion 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 hor-
ror of the cliche 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 Alding-
ton sums up his article on "The Imagists" *
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. Indi-
viduality of rhythm; vers libre. 4. The exact
word. The Imagists would like to possess 'Ie mot
1 "Greenwich Village," July 15, 1915.
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 87
qui fait image, 1'adjectif inattendu et precis qui
dessine de pied en cap et donne la senteur de la
chose qu'il est charge 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.
88 POETRY IN GENERAL
Mr. Lowes, as we have already remarked,
has printed dozens of passages from Mere-
dith's novels in the typographical arrange-
ment of free verse so as to emphasize their
"imagist" character. One of the most effec-
tive 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 con-
sidered prose or verse. Examine simply for
their vivid picture-making quality the collec-
tions 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 se-
ries of poems entitled "Towns in Colour."
Then read the author's preface, in which her
artistic purpose in writing " Towns in Col-
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 89
our " is set forth: "In these poems, I have en-
deavoured 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 de-
scribed. It is an enchanting thing to wander
through a city looking f or its unrelated beauty,
the beauty by which it captivates the sensu-
ous sense of seeing.'* 1
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.
1 Italics mine.
90 POETRY IN GENERAL
"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 BrownelFs
" 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, whatelse?" Unless we adopt
the Japanese theory of "stop poems," where
the implied continuation of the mood^ the
suggested application of the symbol or alle-
gory, 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
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 91
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 produc-
tion 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 nas-
citur nonfit." We cannot avoid the difficulties
of the question by attributing the poet's im-
agination 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 capa-
ble of producing ideal syntheses. Nor does
the old word "inspiration" help much either.
Whatever we mean by inspiration a some-
92 POETRY IN GENERAL
thing not ourselves, supernatural or sub-lim-
inal 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 re-
mark is surely sound: "One's writing is good
only where the intelligence and the imagina-
tion are in equilibrium. As soon as one of
them over-balances the other, it's all up." l
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 imagi-
nation is something different from the mere
memory-image; that by a process of selection
and combination and re-presentation of
1 Compare W. A. Neilson's chapter on "The Balance of
Qualities " in Essentials of Poetry. Hough ton Mifflin Company,
1912.
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 93
images something really new comes into be-
ing, and that we are therefore justified in us-
ing the term constructive, or creative imagina-
tion. This imagination embodies, as we say,
or "bodies forth," as Duke Theseus said, "the
forms of things unknown." It ultimately be-
comes 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, 1 that "the cen-
tral 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
Making of Poetry, p. 34.
94 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 atten-
tion 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 con-
vey the "sense" of things rather than the
knowledge of things. Disregard for the mo-
ment the precise words employed in the fol-
lowing 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."
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 95
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
96 POETRY IN GENERAL
limitless enjoyments. If he wishes to analyse
more closely the nature of the pleasure which
poetry affords, he may select any lines he hap-
pens 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 "nod-
ding") re-presented to us, and emphasized by
conferring, modifying or abstracting whatever
elements the poet wishes to stress or to sup-
press. 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,"
THE POET'S IMAGINATION 97
or Emerson's picture of the slow New Eng-
land 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 imagina-
tion" in that dim region through which the
poet feels his way before he comes to the con-
scious choice of expressive words and to the
ordering of those words into beautiful rhyth-
mical 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 lan-
guage 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 distin-
guished 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
THE POET'S WORDS 99
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 mod-
ern 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 sen-
sitive 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 emo-
tions, 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 transmis-
100 POETRY IN GENERAL
sion through oral repetition alone, it is ob-
vious 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 con-
fuse 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 trans-
lated into terms of tone although it is true
that the trained reader of music can easily
translate to his inner ear without any audi-
ble rendering of the indicated sounds.
This distinction is essential to the under-
standing 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 read-
ers who, like the skilled readers of printed
music, can instantly hear the indicated
THE POET'S WORDS 101
sounds without any actual rendition of them
into physical tone. Many professed lovers of
poetry have no real ear for it. They are hope-
lessly "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 typog-
raphy, 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
102 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 de-
scribed as "concrete" or "sensuous" in dis-
tinction 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 cov-
ered 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
THE POET'S WORDS 103
page. Brander Matthews has recorded a curi-
ous 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 tak-
ing 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 sum-
moned 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 pre-
vious 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
104 POETRY IN GENERAL
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." 1
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 rac-
quets, 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 particu-
lar 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 fin-
gers, playing his favorite strokes with it, win-
ning 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 rid-
1 Brander Matthews, These Many Years. Scribner's, New
York, 1917.
THE POET'S WORDS 105
ing-whip or paddle mean little to him emo-
tionally, except that they may stir his imagi-
native 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 indi-
vidual 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 par-
ticular thing, while another object leaves
them cold.
Now suppose that our half-dozen young
men are sitting in the dark, talking evok-
ing 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 pic-
turesque word chosen by the best talker of
the company has the same meaning for them
all. They all understand the word, approxi-
mately, but each feels it in a way unexperi-
enced by his friend. The freightage of signifi-
106 POETRY IN GENERAL
cance carried by each concrete, sensuous,
picture-making word is bound to vary ac-
cording to the entire physical and mental his-
tory of the man who hears it. Even the com-
monest 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 sug-
gest 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 overheard. Eloquence supposes an
THE POET'S WORDS 107
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 embody-
ing 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." 1 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 vo-
cabulary made by Professor C. H. Herford 2
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 com-
plex motors-stimulus of intricate, abrupt and
plastic form. . . . He delighted in the angular,
1 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 Asso-
ciation, 19, 2.
2 Robert Browning, Modern English Writers, pp. 244-66.
Blackwood & Sons, 1905.
108 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 sur-
prises, 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 his-
tory. Hebrew poetry, as is well known, is
always expressing emotion in terms of bodily
sensation.
"Anger," says Renan, 1 "is expressed in Hebrew
in a throng of ways, each picturesque, and each
borrowed from physiological facts. Now the meta-
phor is taken from the rapid and animated breath-
ing 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,
1 Quoted by J. H. Gardiner, The Bible as Literature, p. 114.
THE POET'S WORDS 109
impatience short breathing, desire is thirst or pale-
ness. Pardon is expressed by a throng of meta-
phors 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 stand-
ing: 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 l 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."
1 "What English Poetry may Learn from Greek," Atlantic
Monthly, November, 1912.
110 POETRY IN GENERAL
Nor should it be forgotten that Milton,
while praising "a graceful and ornate rhet-
oric," declares that poetry, compared with
this, is "more simple, sensuous and passion-
ate." * These words "sensuous" and "pas-
sionate," dulled as they have become by repe-
tition, should be interpreted in their full lit-
eral 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-rnind 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 experi-
ence, merely our own nicknames for things,
they would not pass the walls of the Garden
inhabited by each man's imagination. "Ex-
pression" would be possible, but "communi-
1 Tract on Education.
THE POET'S WORDS 111
cation" would be impossible, and indeed
there would be no recognizable terms of ex-
pression 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 ex-
pression is individual, and that in highly de-
veloped 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 func-
tion. A word is a social instrument. "It be-
longs," says Professor Whitney, 1 "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 indi-
viduals, is wrought out by the community.
... A solitary man would never frame a lan-
guage. Let a child grow up in utter seclusion,
and, however rich and suggestive might be
the nature around him, however full and ap-
preciative his sense of that which lay without,
and his consciousness of that which went on
1 W. D. Whitney, Language and the Study of Language, p. 404.
112 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 in-
herited ; 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. 1 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 transmis-
sion 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 instru-
ment 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
1 See Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology,
article "Language."
THE POET'S WORDS 113
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 Americanprof essor ignorant of the Chinese
language. <Tlt is clear that the power of any
person to convey his ideas and emotions to
others is conditioned upon the commpn pos-
session 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;
114 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 employ-
ers. They perpetuate the memory or pro-
long 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 ques-
tion is not what a word means, but what it
imputes.'* J
Now if the quiet and accurate statement of
1 Raleigh's Wordsworth. London, 1903.
THE POET'S WORDS 115
things as they are is the ideal language of
prose, it is obvious that the characteristic dic-
tion of poetry is unquiet, inaccurate, incur-
ably emotional. Herein lie its dangers and its
glories. No poet can keep for very long to
the "neutral style," to the cool gray wall-
paper words, so to speak; he wants more color
passionate words that will "stick fiery off"
against the neutral background of conven-
tional 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 edi-
torials utilize in certain passages these col-
ored, 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
116 POETRY IN GENERAL
potency is like sewing the purple patch upon
a faded garment. The predominant thought
and feeling of a passage give the richest indi-
vidual words their penetrating power, just
as the weight of the axe-head sinks the blade
into the wood. "Futurist" poets like Mari-
netti 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 vari-
ous forms of magnetism, and follow the unin-
terrupted dynamics of force." l 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 tele-
metre cross fire megaphone sight-at-thousand-
metres all-men-to-left enough every-man-to-his
post incline-7-degrees splendour jet pierce im-
mensity azure deflowering onslaught alleys cries
ft l There is an interesting discussion of Futurism in Sir Henry
Newbolt's New Study of English Poetry. Dutton, 1919.
THE POET'S WORDS 117
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 frag-
ments 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 colora-
tion, like Nature's devices for blending birds
and insects into their background; or, to
choose a more prosaic illustration, like dip-
ping 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 re-
118 POETRY IN GENERAL
fuse to be absorbed into the texture of the
poem: they remain as it were foreign sub-
stances 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 ex-
pressive words. Classic examples are Words-
worth'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 illustra-
tions of this law of connotation. The true po-
etic 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
THE POET'S WORDS 119
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 Mar-
lowe's "black," Shelley's "light," Tennyson's
"wind," Swinburne's "fire." Each of these
words becomes suffused with the whole per-
sonality 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 recog-
nition of the particular sensational and emo-
tional 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
120 POETRY IN GENERAL
words had a value of their own independently
of the life breathed into them by living men.
I recall a conversation at Bonnes with the
French poet Angellier. He was complaining
humorously of his friend L., a famous scholar
whose big book was "carrying all the treas-
ures 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 stud-
ied 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 instru-
ments 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
THE POET'S WORDS 121
possible place in the rose-window, it is true
that separate words possess special qualities of
physical and emotional suggestiveness. Dan-
gerous 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, play-
ing the same series of notes, it is usually pos-
sible to declare which instrument has the
richer tone or timbre. Words, likewise, differ
greatly in tone-quality. A great deal of in-
genuity 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: l
"Let us arrange the English vowel sounds in the
following scale:
1 (little)
I (I)
do (wood)
e (met)
u (due)
ow (cow)
a (mat)
ah (what)
6 (gold)
e (mete)
ah (father)
oo (gloom)
ai (fair)
oi (boil)
aw (awe)
a (mate)
u (but)
1 "The Symbolic Value of Sounds," in Hamlet and Other
Essays, by A. H. Tolman. Boston, 1904.
122 POETRY IN GENERAL
"The sounds at the beginning of this scale are
especially fitted to express uncontrollable joy and
delight, gayety, triviality, rapid movement, bright-
ness, 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 Tech-
nical Elements of Style in Literature, and many
other curious searchers into the secrets of
words, have attempted to explain the physio-
logical 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 mus-
cular effort or of muscular relaxation. High-
pitched vowels and low-pitched vowels, liquid
consonants and harsh consonants, are un-
questionably associated with muscular mem-
ories, 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 "
THE POET'S WORDS 123
thus represent, in their vowel and consonantal
expressiveness, the past history of countless
physical sensations, widely shared by innu-
merable 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. Some-
times they are due primarily to those rhyth-
mical 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 beauti-
ful 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, Cymodoce,
Agave, blue-eyed Hallia and Nessea,
Speio, and Thoe, Glauce and Acttea,
laira, Melite and Amphinome,
124 POETRY IN GENERAL
"Apseudes and Nemertes, Callianassa,
Cymothoe, Thaleia, Limnorrhea,
Clymene, laneira and lanassa,
Doris and Panope and Galatea,
Dynamene, Dexamene and Maira,
Ferusa, Doto, Proto, Callianeira,
Amphithoe, 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 at-
tribute joyous or foreboding qualities to the
bird's tone, and then transfer these associa-
tions 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 POET'S WORDS 125
"The sailor's heart," confesses Lincoln Col-
cord, 1 "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, bring-
ing 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
1 The New Republic, September 16, 1916.
126 POETRY IN GENERAL
analyse the sounds apart from the sense.
Professor C. M. Lewis l asserts bluntly:
"When you say Titan you mean something
big, and when you say tittle you mean some-
thing 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 ter-
rible Titan,' it is not the sound of the con-
sonants 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 shim-
mering." 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
1 Principles of English Verse. New York, 1906.
THE POET'S WORDS 127
turn to frank nonsense-verse, where the
formal elements of poetry surely exist with-
out 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! Some-
how 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 won-
derful 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
128 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 as-
sociation 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," l 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:
1 Quoted in Carolyn Wells, A Parody Anthology. New York,
1904. '
THE POET'S WORDS 129
"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 vo-
cabulary 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 " TJlalume " 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 sug-
gestiveness, 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.
130 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 character-
istically "tropical," and indeed every man
who uses metaphors is for the moment talk-
ing like a poet unless, as too often happens
both in prose and verse, the metaphor has
become conventionalized and therefore life-
less. The born poet thinks in "figures," in
"pictured" language, or, as it has been called,
in "re-presentative" language, 1 since he re-
presents, 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, re-
markable for its strength, size, graceful
figure, and extraordinary flight." He re-
presents these facts by making a picture:
1 G. L. Raymond, Poetry aa a Representative Art, chap. 19.
THE POET'S WORDS 131
"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." l
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." 8
It is true, of course, that a poet may some-
times prefer to use unornamented language,
"not elevated," as Wordsworth said, "above
1 Tennyson, "The Eagle."
* Sarah N. Cleghom, " Come, Captain Age."
132 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 per-
fection 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 utter-
ance, 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:
THE POET'S WORDS 133
"Scarcely had we started when from out the
mist and across our front, in furious pursuit, came
the first cruiser squadron the town class, Bir-
mingham, etc. each unit a match for three
Mainzes; and as we looked and reduced speed
they opened fire, and the clear ' bang-bang 1 ' 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 Zea-
land, our battle cruisers, great and grim and un-
couth as some antediluvian monsters. How solid
they looked ! How utterly earthquakingl "
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 employ-
ing metaphors as he turns from writing verse
to writing stories, and the rhetorician's
analysis of similes, personifications, allego-
ries, and all the other devices of "tropical"
language is precisely the same, whether he
134 POETRY IN GENERAL
is studying poetry or prose. Any good text-
book 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 vo-
cabulary 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 conscious-
ness of the enduring character of their cre-
ations, 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 in-
stinct of the men of his craft. Is it a delu-
sion? 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, decay-
THE POETS WORDS 185
ing when races decay and civilizations change.
What transiency, what waste and oblivion
like that which waits upon millions on mil-
lions of autumn leaves!
Yet nothing in human history is more in-
disputable 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 differ-
ence? 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 anti-
septic, 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
136 POETRY IN GENERAL
of permanence reside in the poet's general-
izing 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, hah* insane,
as the enduring voice of the soul and con-
science 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
THE POET'S WORDS 137
vision is surely a more important fact than the
Tightness 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 an-
nounced that his purpose had been "to
ascertain how far, by fitting to metrical ar-
rangement 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 in-
tention: "And at the same time to throw over
138 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 conversa-
tion of the middle and lower classes of society,
we are now assured that the language of po-
etry "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 High-
land 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
THE POET'S WORDS 139
"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 for-
sook gradually his early experiments with
matter-of-fact phrases, with quaintly gro-
tesque 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 singu-
larity, by making familiar words reveal new
potencies of expression.
For after all, we must come back to what
140 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 effec-
tively 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 alphabeti-
cally: 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, mel-
ancholy, melody, mercy, moon, mortal, na-
ture, noble, night, paradise, parting, peace,
pleasure, pride, regret, sea, sigh, sleep, soli-
tude, song, sorrow, soul, spirit, spring, star,
suffer, tears, tender, time, virtue, weep,
whisper, wind and youth. 1
1 See Nation, February 23, 1911.
THE POET'S WORDS 141
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 mo-
ment 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 re-
gard more closely, but which should be men-
tioned 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 im-
perfect instruments for signaling from one
brain to another. Yet these crumbling par-
ticles of speech may be miraculously held
142 POETRY IN GENERAL
together and built into a tune, and with the
tune comes another element of law, order,
permanence. The instinct for the drum-
beat lies deep down in our bodies; it affects
our mental life, the organization of our emo-
tions, 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."
ABISTOTLE, 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 tick-tock, tick-tock,
or else tick-tock, tick-tock, although psychol-
ogists assure us that the clock's wheels are
moving with indifferent, mechanical pre-
cision, and that it is simply our own focusing
of attention upon alternate beats which cre-
ates the impression of rhythm. We hear a
144 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 at-
tention, an identical psycho-physical organ-
ism. 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 vio-
linist's bow, in a close-hauled sailboat fight-
ing 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 our-
selves, some of us are instinctive "timers," 1
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
1 See W. M. Patterson, The Rhythm of Prose. Columbia
University Press, 1916.
RHYTHM AND METRE 145
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 sub-
consciously 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 remem-
bered is this: that neither the "timing" in-
stinct 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."
146 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 de-
ceptive 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 conven-
tionally 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 proso-
RHYTHM AND METRE 147
dists, 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 syl-
lable plus two short syllables, or of an accept-
able equivalent for that particular combi-
nation. 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 "meas-
ure" 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. 1
1 "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. Goodcll, Nation,
October 12, 1911.
148 POETRY IN GENERAL
That illustration is drearily hackneyed, no
doubt, but it has a double value. It is per-
fectly clear; and furthermore, it serves to
remind us of the instinctive differences be-
tween 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 experi-
ments of many psychological laboratories
have demonstrated beyond a question. Fur-
thermore, 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 feel-
ings, cannot be weighed by any absolutely
correct sound-scales. They cannot be meas-
ured 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,
RHYTHM AND METRE 149
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 chap-
ter, 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 /r-
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 ex-
perience a modification of the same pleasure
150 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 rela-
tive, 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 sig-
nificant that lovers of poetry have always
found pleasure in such compromises. 1 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
1 Compare the passage about Chopin's piano-playing, quoted
from Alden in the Notes and Illustrations for this chapter.
RHYTHM AND METRE 151
boat as closely into the wind as he conven-
iently can, making his actual course a com-
promise between the line as laid by the com-
pass, and the actual facts of wind and tide
and the behavior of his particular boat. It
is thus that the sailor "makes it," trium-
phantly! And the poet "makes it" likewise,
out of deep, strong-running tides of rhythmic
impulse, out of arbitrary words and rebel-
lious 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 liv-
ing 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 Dry den 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
152 POETRY IN GENERAL
Rhythm is a monumental collection of wonder-
ful prose passages in English, with the scan-
sion 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 hi our youth at the feet
of German masters were taught that the dis-
tinction 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 pub-
lished 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 indu-
bitable prose and
indubitable verse
as forming two intersecting circles, there is a
neutral zone, which some would call "prose
RHYTHM AND METRE 153
poetry" and some "free verse," and which,
according to the experiments of Dr. Pat-
terson l may be appropriated as "prose ex-
perience" 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 ac-
cording as we treat them. The difference
is hi ourselves, in the mental rhythm to
which we unconsciously adjust the words." 2
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. Patter-
1 The Rhythm of Prose, already cited.
1 Quoted in R. M. Alden, "The Mental Side of Metrical
Form," Modern Language Review, July, 1914.
154 POETRY IN GENERAL
son, by syncopated time, 1 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. 2 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
1 "For a 'timer' the definition of prose as distinguished
from verse experience depends upon a predominance of synco-
pation over coincidence in the coordination of the accented
syllables of the text with the measuring pulses." Rhythm of
Prose, p. 22.
2 Observe, in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter,
the frequency of the blank-verse lines in Robert G. IngersolT*
"Address over a Little Boy's Grave."
RHYTHM AND METRE 155
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 pre-
cisely the "four-stressed iambic" metre of
In Memorianiy 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 sec-
tion 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
156 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 con-
stantly 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 orator-
ical, liturgical and epistolary forms it strove
to imitate the various modes of cursus ("run-
ning") and clausula ("cadence") which had
characterized the rhythms of Isocrates and
Cicero. 1 From the Medieval Latin Missal and
1 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.
RHYTHM AND METRE 157
Breviary these devices of prose rhythm, par-
ticularly 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 in-
tricate harmonies of our "heightened" mod-
ern 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 appre-
ciation of English prose rhythms, as they
have been actually employed for many cen-
turies, requires a sensitiveness to the rhetori-
cal position of phrases and clauses, and to
"the use of sonorous words in the places of
rhetorical emphasis, which cannot be indi-
cated by the bare symbols of prosody." 1
For that sonority and cadence and balance
which constitute a harmonious prose sentence
cannot be adequately felt by a possibly illit-
erate scientist in his laboratory for acoustics;
the "literary" value of words, in all strongly
1 New York Nation, February 27, 1913.
158 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 be-
tween enduring prose harmonies and the
mere tinkling of the "musical glasses." l
The student of verse may very profitably
continue to exercise himself with the rhythms
of prose. He should learn to share the un-
wearied 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 tap-
ping syncopated time, or any painstaking
marking of macrons (-) breves (v) and caesuras
(||) will give him full initiation into the mys-
teries of prose cadences which have been
1 This point is suggestively discussed by C. E. Andrews,
The Writing and Reading of Verse, chap. 5. New York, 1918.
RHYTHM AND METRE 159
built, not merely out of stressed and un-
stressed 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 cer-
tainly not a wholly simple matter, is far
easier. It is practicable to indicate by con-
ventional printer's devices the general rhyth-
mical and metrical scheme of a poem, and to
indicate the more obvious, at least, of its
incidental variations from the expected pat-
tern. 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.
160 POETRY IN GENERAL
When you and I first began to study Virgil
and Horace, for instance, we were taught that
the Roman poets, imitating the Greeks, built
their verses upon the principle of Quantity.
The metrical unit was the foot, made up of
long and short syllables in various combina-
tions, two short syllables being equivalent to
one long one. The feet most commonly used
were the Iambus (v-), the Anapest (w-), the
Trochee (-^), the Dactyl (~ vw ), and the Spon-
dee ( ). 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 ^Eneid, as other school-
children had done ever since the time of
St. Augustine:
Armd vt\rumque c&\no \\ Tro\jae qui \ prtmiis &b\orls.
Or perhaps it was Horace's
Maecenas, dtavis \\ ecKte reg^lbtis.
We were told, of course, that it was not all
quite as simple as this: that there were fre-
quent metrical variations, such as trochees
RHYTHM AND METRE 161
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 hyper-
metric; 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 ccesura. 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 gov-
erned 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,
162 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 mat-
ter, 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 Cole-
ridge'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 col-
lege and listened to instructors who grew
strangely excited over prosody, that it was
RHYTHM AND METRE 163
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 hi 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, hi imitating Greek lyric measures,
had stubborn natural word-accents to recon-
cile with his quantitative measures; that the
Roman poets, who had originally allowed
normal word-accent and verse-pulse to coin-
cide for the most part, came gradually to
enjoy a certain clash between them, keep-
ing 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
164 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 be-
ginning of their poetizing, a popular type of
accented verse, as seen in the rude chant of
the Roman legionaries,
/ ' 1: __ It I III
Mille Francos mille semel Sarmatas occidimus. 1
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 miRe mitte decollavimus
which Professor Courthope scans as trochaic
verse, 2 seems to me nothing but "stress"
verse, like
/
"Hay-foot, strain-foot, belly full of bean-soup
Hep Hep!"
1 See C. M. Lewis, Foreign Sources of Modern English Verai>
fication. Halle, 1898.
2 History of English Poetry, vol. 1, p. 73.
RHYTHM AND METRE 165
Popular accentual verse persisted, then, while
the more cultivated Roman public acquired
and then gradually lost, in the course of cen-
turies, 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 prin-
ciple of versification to be reckoned with, not
depending on Quantity or Stress, but merely
Syllabic, or syllable-counting. This was im-
memorially old, it seemed, and it had reap-
peared mysteriously in Europe in the Dark
Ages.
Dr. Lewis cites from a Latin manuscript
poem of the ninth century: *
"Beatissimus namque Dionysius \Athenis quondam
episcopus,
Quern Sanctus Clemens direxit in Gattiam \propter
prcedicandi gratiam, etc.
Each verse contains 21 syllables, with a
caesura after the 12th. No further regularity,
either metrical or rhythmical, can be per-
ceived. Such a verse could probably not have
been written except for music." Church-
music, apparently, was also a factor in the
1 Foreign Sources, etc., p. 3.
166 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 irce, were written, the Syllabic principle
of versification, like the Quantitative prin-
ciple, dropped out of sight, and we witness
once more the emergence of the Stress or
accentual system, heavily ornamented with
rhymes. 1 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 sylla-
bles, 6 syllables) of the hymn books is a con-
venient illustration of thinking of metre in
terms of syllables alone.
1 See the quotation from Taylor's Classical Heritage of the
Middle Ages printed in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this
chapter.
RHYTHM AND METRE 167
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 Ger-
manic 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 Eng-
lish 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 reck-
oned, and the verse-accent seemed always to
fall upon a syllable long and strong enough to
168 POETRY IN GENERAL!
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 pre-
pared 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 ad-
mittedly 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" ele-
ment of cultivated Roman verse, and I now
quote from a personal letter of an American
RHYTHM AND METRE 169
poet, emphasizing the necessity of "reading
poetry as it was meant to be read": "My
point is not that English verse has no quan-
tity, 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 'ir-
regularities* and 'exceptions' becomes pain-
ful to the student and embarrassing to the
professor. He is put to fearful straits to ex-
plain 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 Eng-
lish 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 com-
170 POETRY IN GENERAL
posing 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 school-
boys, 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 pre-
cisely to the rules of Roman prosody. The
present Laureate, Robert Bridges, whose in-
vestigations in English and Roman prosody
have been incessant, has recently published a
book of experiments in writing English quan-
titative hexameters. 1 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
1 Ibant Obscuri, New York, Oxford University Press, 1917.
RHYTHM AND METRE 171
Vain dreams thickly nestle, clinging unto the foli-
age 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 difficul-
ties of English rhythm and metre must at
least be mentioned here, namely the "mu-
sical " theory of the American poet and musi-
cian, 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 assist-
ance, as in music, to the marking of time,
maintaining that the only necessary element
POETRY IN GENERAL
in rhythm is equal time-intervals, corre-
sponding to bars of music. According to
Lanier, the structure of English blank verse,
for .instance, is not an alternation of un-
stressed with stressed syllables, but a series of
bars of 3/8 time, thus:
r p r
r
A
t r
A
c r
Thomson, Dabney and other prosodists
have folio wed 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, 1 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
Introduction to Poetry, pp. 190-93. See also Alden's Eng~
Verte, Part 3, "The Time-Element in English Verse."
RHYTHM AND METRE 173
perfection of music lies in absolute accordance
with time, that of verse is continual slight
departures from time. This is why no mu-
sical representations of verse ever seem satis-
factory. They assume regularity where none
exists."
8. Prosody and Enjoyment
It must be expected then, that there will be
different preferences in choosing a nomencla-
ture for modern English metres, based upon
the differences in the individual physical or-
ganism of various metrists, and upon the
strictness of their adherence to the signifi-
cance of stress, quantity and number of sylla-
bles 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. Nat-
ural "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
5
174 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 par-
ticular label employed to indicate the nature
of the metre is unimportant. It may be left
to the choice of each student of metre, pro-
vided 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
RHYTHM AND METRE 175
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. 1 Miss Snell's experi-
ments 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 be-
comes 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
1 "Syllabic Quantity in English Verse," by Ada F. Snell,
Pub. of Mod. Lang. Asa., September, 1918.
176 POETRY IN GENERAL
of the chain mark the rhythm; and the
stressed or unstressed or lightly stressed syl-
lables 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 rhetori-
cal 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 pound-
ing monotony, and conversely, as in Milton's
famous line,
" Rocks, caves, lakes, dens, bogs, fens, and shades
of death,"
the rhetorical significance of the monosylla-
bles 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 illus-
trate the constant substitution and shifting of
stresses in order to secure variety of music
and suggestive adaptations of sound to sense.
RHYTHM AND METRE 177
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 in-
creasing 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 sat-
isfying 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 inter-
vals covered by the upward and downward
slides or "inflections" which indicate doubt
or affirmation. And these "rising " and "fall-
ing" and "circumflex" and "suspended" in-
flections, which make up what is called
"pitch-accent," are constantly varied, like
POETRY IN GENERAL
the duration and stress of syllables, by the
emotions evoked in reading. Words, phrases,
lines and stanzas become colored with emo-
tional overtones due to the feeling of the in-
stant. Poetry read aloud as something sen-
suous 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 execu-
tion. Many well-known poets Tennyson
being perhaps the most familiar example
have read aloud their own verses with a pe-
culiar 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 tradi-
tional prosody, when it is probable, as Mr.
C. E. Russell maintains, that Swinburne was
here composing in purely musical and not
prosodical rhythm? 1
1 "Swinburne and Music," by Charles E. Russell, North
American Review, November, 1907. See the quotation in the
"Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter.
RHYTHM AND METRE 179
Is it not true, furthermore, as some metri-
cal sceptics like to remind us, that if we once
admit the principle of substitution and equiv-
alence, of hypermetrical and truncated sylla-
bles, 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 trunca-
tion? 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 slen-
der 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, 1 confesses that these
contrasting concepts of rising and falling
metre are nothing more than concepts, alter-
able at will.
But while the experts in prosody continue
to differ and to dogmatize, the lover of poetry
should remember that versification is far
1 "The Mental Side of Metrical Form," already cited.
180 POETRY IN GENERAL
older than the science of prosody, and that
the enjoyment of verse is, for millions of hu-
man 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 mathe-
matics of music and of poetry, while heighten-
ing the intellectual pleasure of those capable
of comprehending it, is admittedly too diffi-
cult 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 intri-
cacies 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 Pro-
RHYTHM AND METRE 181
lessor Saintsbury's ear for prose and verse
rhythms while disagreeing wholly with his
dogmatic theories of the "foot," and his sys-
tem 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 considered a Mo-
notonous Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakspeare, & all
writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bond-
age 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 in-
ferior 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 con-
venience 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, mean-
ingless, and in poetry it ought not to be
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 183
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, l
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 modem
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 con-
veyed, 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 peril-
ously 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,
1 Page 147.
184 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 Shel-
ley with his "The distinction between poets
and prose writers in a vulgar error. . . . Plato
was essentially a poet the truth and splen-
dor of his imagery, and the melody of his
language, are the most intense that it is pos-
sible 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
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 185
other elements are relatively negligible. Mil-
ton, in his zeal for blank verse, attacked
rhyme, in which he had already proved him-
self a master, quite as fiercely as any of our
contemporary champions of free verse. Cam-
pion, a trained musician, argued for a quanti-
tative 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 De-
fense of Rhyme (1603) was a triumphant reply
to Campion's theory, gave courteous praise to
his opponent's practice. Dryden, most flexi-
ble-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 con-
scious 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
180 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 architec-
ture of verse. For Hebrew poetry, like the
poetry of many primitive peoples, utilized the
natural pleasure which the ear takes in listen-
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 187
ing for and perceiving again an already
uttered sound. Rhyme is a gratification of
expectation, like the repetition of a chord in
music 1 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 atten-
tion, through the reinforcement which it gives
to the pulsations of the psycho-physical or-
ganism.
"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 his-
torical forms of rhyme may serve. It may be
1 " 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 Re-
view, November, 1907.
188 POETRY IN GENERAL
Alliteration, the letter-rhyme or "beginning-
rhyme" of Old English poetry:
"Him be Aealfe stod hyse unweaxen,
Cniht on gecampe, se full caf lice. "
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 allit-
erative 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
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 189
abound), the accented vowel and all suc-
ceeding sounds are repeated, while the con-
sonants 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 har-
monious 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 (un-
certain 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 move-
ment 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
190 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 Eng-
lish 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 Swin-
burne, whose very profusion of rhyme-sounds
ends by cloying the taste of many a reader,
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 191
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 in-
terlaced, 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 prodi-
gality, 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 fresh-
ness disappear. For sheer improvising clever-
ness 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:
"From out the temple's pillared portico,
Thence to the gardens where blue poppies blow
192 POETRY IN GENERAL
The gold and emerald peacocks saunter slow,
Trailing their solemn ennui as they go,
Trailing their melancholy and their woe.
n
"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." l
Rhyme, then, is not merely a "jingle," it is
rather, as Samuel Johnson said of all versi-
fication, a "joining music with reason." Its
blending of decorative with structural pur-
pose 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 "spon-
1 Frederic Adrian Lopere, "World Wisdom," The Inter-
national, September, 1915.
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 193
taneous 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." "Nor-
mally, 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 correspond-
ing 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 passion-
ate feeling, or is their unity a mere mechani-
cal conformation to a pattern? In Theo-
dore Watts-Dunton's well-known article on
"Poetry" in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica l
1 Now reprinted, with many expansions, in his Poetry and
the Renascence of Wonder. E. P. Duttoo, New York.
194 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 independ-
ently 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 weTenjoy 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, itltnust 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
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 195
poetry has taken over from Latin and French
sources and developed through centuries of
experimentation, 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 conven-
iently indicated by using letters of the al-
phabet 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 oo^JJie 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 fa-
miliar 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,
196 POETRY IN GENERAL
"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 ab abbcc:
"'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 ab ab ab c c:
"A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and ship-
ping.
Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye
Could reach, with here and there a sail just skip-
ping
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 ababbcbcc,
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
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 197
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 feel-
ing-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 some-
times 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
198 POETRY IN GENERAL
packed into the fashionable fourfeen-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 embodi-
ment.
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 em-
bodiment of each poetic emotion in a form
delicately moulded to the particular species
of emotion revealed. We discover that pre-
cisely similar stanzaic patterns like similar
metrical patterns are often used to express
diametrically opposite feelings, let us say,
joy and sorrow, doubt and exultation, vic-
tory and defeat. The "common metre" of
English hymnology is thus seen to be a rough
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 199
mould into which almost any kind of re-
ligious 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 bal-
ladry are admittedly excellent for story-tell-
ing; Spenser's favorite stanza is unrivalled
for painting dream-pictures and rendering
dream-music, but less available for pure nar-
ration; Chaucer's seven-line stanza, so deli-
cately 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 Dry den 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.
200 POETRY IN GENERAL
But the significant point is this: "stan-
zaic law" makes for uniformity, for the end-
less repetition of the chosen pattern, which
must still be recognized as a pattern, how-
ever subtly the artist modulates his details;
and in adjusting the infinitely varied ma-
terial of thought and feeling, phrase and im-
age, picture and story to the fixed stanzaic
design, there are bound to be gaps and
patches, stretchings and foldings of the
though t-stuff , for even as in humble tailor-
craft, this many-colored coat of poetry must
be cut according to the cloth as well as ac-
cording 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 re-
morseless 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 be-
comes 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
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 201
of "form" and "significance" are miracu-
lously 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 con-
tent themselves, not with such "dictates of
nature" as these poems, but with approxi-
mations. Each stanzaic form has its con-
veniences, its "fatal facility," its natural fit-
ness for singing a song or telling a story or
turning a thought over and over into music.
Intellectual readers will always like the epi-
grammatic "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 stimu-
lates 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 in-
fluence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to
transitory brightness," why may it not be
202 POETRY IN GENERAL
the breath of rhyme, as well as any other
form of rhythmic energy, which quickens its
drooping flame? And few poets, further-
more, will admit that they are really in bond-
age to their stanzas. They love to dance in
these fetters, and even when wearing the
same fetters as another poet, they never-
theless invent movements of their own, so
that Mr. Masefield's "Chaucerian" stanzas
are really not so much Chaucer's as Mase-
field'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 funda-
mental form of dance-music. We must
allow for the infinite variety of creative in-
tention, technique and result. The true de-
fence of rhyme and stanza against the argu-
ments of extreme advocates of free verse is to
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 203
point out that rhyme and stanza are natural
structural devices for securing certain effects.
There are various types of bridges for cross-
ing 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 air-
plane if he chooses. But some method must
be found of getting his ideas and emo-
tions "across" into the mind and feelings of
the readers of his poetry. If this can ade-
quately be accomplished without recourse to
rhyme and stanza, very well; there is Par-
adise Lost, for instance, and Hamlet. But
here we are driven back again upon the count-
less varieties of artistic intention and crafts-
manship 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 re-
204 POETRY IN GENERAL
suit. 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 remem-
bering 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, in-
stinctively appropriate as "prose experience,"
and others as "verse experience." It re-
nounces metre or rather endeavors to re-
nounce 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 or-
dered 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
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 5205
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 compe-
tent 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." 1
And in the preface to his second edition, after
having listened to Miss Amy Lowell's read-
ings 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 make
1 The Rhythm of Prose, p. 77.
206 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 in-
finitely 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 elaborat-
ing 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
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 207
the most interesting of all experiments with
free verse, written as it was by an artist whose
natural rhythmical endowment was extra-
ordinary, 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 artifi-
cers who have endeavored to produce rhyth-
mic and tonal beauty through new structural
devices.
Readers who are familiar with the experi-
ments of contemporary poets will easily recog-
nize 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 predom-
inate, 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
208 POETRY IN GENERAL
are used exclusively, although in new combina-
tions 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, 111., Jan. 24. The Spoon River levee,
which protected thousands of acres of farm land
below Havana, 111., 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 re-
ported 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;
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 209
It was n'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 Asso-
ciated 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 me-
tre) of verse, and F. P. A. is here imitating
Mr. Masters's way of introducing a strongly
rhythmical and even metrical line into a pas-
sage 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 re-
sulting from heightened feeling, and finally
the frankly imitative and ornamented ca-
dences of descriptive and highly impassioned
prose. Let us take some illustrations from
210 POETRY IN GENERAL
Sidney Lanier's Poem Outlines, a posthu-
mously 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 sen-
tence, with the staccato rhythm and the al-
literative 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 scul-
lions 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
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 211
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 follow-
ing, 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
212 POETRY IN GENERAL
blended of verse and prose, like many rhap-
sodical passages in the private journals of
Thoreau and Emerson. When duly elabo-
rated, these passages usually become, in the
hands of the greater artists, either one thing or
the other, i.e. unmistakable prose or unmistak-
able verse. But it remains true, I think, that
there is another artistic instinct which impels
certain poets to blend the types in the en-
deavor to reach a new and hybrid beauty. 1
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 be-
tween 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.
1 Some examples of recent verse are printed in the "Notes
and Illustrations" for this chapter.
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 213
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."
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, phan-
tom 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." *
1 From Giovanitti's "The Walker."
* Whitman, "Song of the Exposition."
214 POETRY IN GENERAL
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.
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 215
" Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon
they surrender to us." 1
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 de-
part, 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 re-
mote, they sat.
Like a voice from the dim pillars Mirabeau rose;
the thunders subsided away;
1 Whitman, "Song of Myself."
216 POETRY IN GENERAL
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 hi 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." l
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
1 W. E. Henley, "To James McNeill Whistler."
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 217
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." l
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 ef-
fects of rhythmic prose, a common restless-
ness 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 bound-
ary lines, to secure in one art the effects
Arnold. "The Strayed Reveller."
L
218 POETRY IN GENERAL
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. 1 One may
legitimately maintain, with Edith Wyatt,
that the traditional methods of English verse
are to the true artist not oppressions but liber-
ations. 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 im-
pulse of rhythm, by the word-shadows of
assonance, by harmonies, overtones and the
still beat of ordered time, subconsciously per-
ceived but precise as the sense of the sym-
phony 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 oppres-
sions, but as great liberations for the commu-
nication of truth." 2 But many practitioners of
free verse would reply that this is not a matter
1 See, for instance, Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon.
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910.
8 New Republic, August 24, 1918.
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 219
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 se-
cured. That free verse has now and then
succeeded in creating lovely flowering hy-
brids seems to me as indubitable as the mag-
ical 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 pat-
terns 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 never-
theless 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
220 POETRY IN GENERAL
great deal of contemporary free verse has been
written by persons with an obviously incom-
plete command over the resources of expres-
sion. 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 momen-
tary 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 me-
dium soaks up the feeling like blotting-paper.
In order to live, poetry must be plastic, a
stark embodiment of emotion, and not a solu-
tion of emotion.
That fragile, transient fashions of expres-
sion have their own evanescent type of beauty
no one who knows the history of Euphuism
will deny. And much of the New Verse is
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 221
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,"f or 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 ad-
visable. . . . 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 ca-
dences. . . . Return in * polyphonic prose* is
222 POETRY IN GENERAL '
usually achieved by the recurrence of a
dominant thought or image, coming in irreg-
ularly 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 poly-
phonic prose even more cleverly than John
Lyly; and if one will read the admirable de-
scription of St. Mark's in Can Grande* 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
RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE 223
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 anti-
quarianism, 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 H
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 VH
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."
EBNEST RHYS, Lyric Poetry
THAT "confusion of the genres" which char-
acterizes 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. Corre-
sponding 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
228 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 objec-
tive, "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 Dejec-
tion near Naples," Coleridge's "Ode to De-
jection," Wordsworth's "She dwelt among
the untrodden ways," Tennyson's "Break
Break" will serve for illustrations. These
are subjective, personal poems. Their vision
THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY 229
is "relative" to the poet's actual circum-
stances. 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 mon-
ologue 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
230 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
"Sigurd the Volsung," and certainly in the
"JEneid" and the "Song of Roland," the
poet sinks his own personality, as far as possi-
ble, 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," Brown-
ing'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 them-
selves 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" pas-
sages 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 mouth-
piece of his own fancies: he will devise favorite
situations, and use them to reveal his moral
THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY 231
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 mu-
sical 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. 1 "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 subjec-
tive poetry begins," says Professor Schelling.
1 See the definitions in John Erskine's Elizabethan Lyric, E. B.
Reed'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.
232 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
"The characteristic of the lyric is that it is the
product of the pure poetic energy unasso-
ciated with other energies," says Mr. Drink-
water. 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 mu-
sical 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 sin-
gle 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
THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY 233
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 't is 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 "particu-
lar." 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. Some-
times 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 con-
temporary musical score:
"Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu."
234 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 Cole-
ridge 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 philosophi-
cal insight makes all things new to the poet
who possesses it. Thus Emerson's vision of
the "Eternal Unity," or Browning's concep-
tion 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," 1
gives the lyric poet this rapturous sense of
living in a world hitherto unrealized. The
1 See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY 235
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 un-
noted: 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, 1 and
which attributes to the external world quali-
ties 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
1 Modern Painters, vol. 3, chap. 12.
236 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 can-
opy, 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 him-
self 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 ^Eschylus,
the glory or the downfall of a race. And this
THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY 237
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 nation-
alistic 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 humanita-
rian, altruistic lyric, where the poet instinc-
tively thinks in terms of "us men" rather
238 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 sym-
pathy, 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 rdle 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 tern-
THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY 239
perament and the command of technique,
their cry of love or longing, of grief or patriot-
ism, is the inevitable resultant from a real
situation or desire. Sometimes, like chil-
dren, they do not tell us very clearly what
they are crying about, but it is easy to dis-
cover whether they are, like children, "mak-
ing 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 char-
acteristic 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 philosoph-
ical 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
240 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
"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 neverthe-
less Nature offers even to the most unphilo-
sophical 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 phenom-
enon
* 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
THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY 241
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 enrich-
ment from mind and mood." l 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 harmo-
nious 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."
1 The Nation, November 2, 1916.
242 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
But Wordsworth was wiser than this. He
saw that if the scientific fact were emotion-
alized, 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 employ-
ment of the newest scientific knowledge of
his day, for instance, in geology, chemistry
and astronomy. He set his facts to music.
EugeneLee-Hamilton's poignant sonnet about
immortality is an illustration of the ease with
which a lyric poet may find material in scien-
tific fact, if appropriated and made rich by
feeling. 1
If lyric poetry shows everywhere this tend-
ency to humanize its "bare vision" of Na-
ture, 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
1 Quoted in chap, vm, section 7.
THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY 243
the moods and lyric forms of one brief gener-
ation 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 tur-
bid 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, ab-
sorbed in the wider consciousness of kin-
ship, in the dawning recognition of the one-
ness 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 ! "
244 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
If Tennyson could not phrase anew the in-
effable, 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 hi con-
tent, and clothe them, as Whittier did, in
words of tender human association, hi par-
ables of longing and of consolation.
5. The Lyric Imagination
The material thus furnished by the lyric
poet's experience, thought and emotion is re-
shaped 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 hi May,
Although it fall and die that night;
It was the plant and flower of light."
The lyric emotion, it is true, does not al-
ways 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 h'ght 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 .
246 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 dis-
tinguish between the imagination and the
fancy, it remains true that the old distinction
between superficial or "fanciful" resem-
blances, and deeper or "imaginative" like-
nesses, 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 Amer-
ica was some adult male verse. The verbal
felicity and richness of fancy that character-
ized the Elizabethan lyric were matched
by its sudden gleams of penetrative imag-
ination, which may be, after all, only the
"fancy" taking a deeper plunge. In the
familiar song from The Tempest, for exam-
ple, we have in the second and third lines
examples of those fanciful conceits in which
the age delighted, but that does not impair
THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY 247
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.
248 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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." l Taking expression, in this
larger sense, as the final element in that three-
fold 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 de-
serves its title only inasmuch as it excites,
by elevating the soul. The value of the
poem is in the ratio of this derating excite-
ment. 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 through-
out a composition of any great length. After
the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost,
1 Gray's Letters, vol. 2, p. 333. (Gosse ed.)
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 lit-
erary 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 im-
pression is a point of the greatest importance. It
is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be
thoroughly preserved in productions whose peru-
sal 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 sus-
tained. All high excitements are necessarily
transient. Thus a long poem is a paradox. And,
without unity of impression, the deepest effects
250 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
cannot be brought about. Epics were the off-
spring 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 im-
pression. 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). . ." l
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
1 Gray's Letters, vol. 2, p. 304. (Gosse ed.)
THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY 251
story. It is this fact which Palgrave stressed
in his emphasis upon "some single thought,
feeling, or situation." The sonnets, for in-
stance, 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. Brown-
ing 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
252 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
once more, for he had an unerring sense of the
difficulty of moulding ideas into "pure, per-
spicuous 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 (other-
wise well invented, well turned, and well placed) is
often weakened by it. Do I talk nonsense, or do
you understand me?" l
Poe, whose theory of poetry comprehends
only the lyric, and indeed chiefly that re-
stricted type of lyric verse in which he him-
self 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 ele-
ment of the true music I mean of the true
musical expression. Give to it any undue
decision imbue it with any very determi-
nate tone and you deprive it, at once, of its
1 Gray's Letters, vol. 2, p. 352. (Gosse ed.)
THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY 253
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 faery. It now becomes a tangible
and easily appreciable idea a thing of the
earth, earthy."
This reads like a defence of Poe's own pri-
vate 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 ex-
pression 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 deter-
mining 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." 1
This doctrine, it will be observed, is in direct
opposition to the Imagist theory of "hard-
ness and economy of speech; the exact word,"
and it also would rule out the highly technical
1 What is Poetry, p. 77. London and New York, 1900.
254 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
vocabulary of camp and trail, steamship and
jungle, with which Mr. Kipling has greatly
delighted our generation. No one who ad-
mires 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 Eva-
nescence. 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 re-
member what Duke Orsino says in Twelfth
Night:
"Enough; no more:
'T is not so sweet now as it was before."
THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY 255
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 pe-
culiar 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 conceiva-
ble "states of soul." Is it possible, therefore,
to lay down any general formula for it, some-
thing corresponding to the golfer's "keep your
eye on the ball" and "follow through" ?
256 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 Gre-
cian urn, to justify himself he must first show
us the urn." Admitted. Can one go far-
ther? 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 ele-
ment reasserts itself. In the third part the
emotion is finally resolved into a thought, a
mental resolution, or an attribute.'* * 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
1 The Elizabethan Lyric, p. 17.
THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY 257
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 fin-
ished, 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, conven-
tionality. 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 Huh" 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
258 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
lyric is the commonest, and yet, in its perfec-
tion, the rarest type of poetry; the earliest,
and yet the most modern; the simplest, and
yet in its laws of emotional association, per-
haps the most complex; and it is all these be-
cause it expresses, more intimately than other
types of verse, the personality of the poet.
CHAPTER VIH
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 Arm-
strong'? or, 'Troy Town'?"
ISAAC WALTON, The Complete Angler
WE have already considered, at the beginning
of the previous chapter, the general relation-
ship 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, pro-
vides 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 drama-
tists who were compelled, in a period when the
260 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
theatre fell into disrepute, to give their ma-
terial a narrative form. But we must also
take into account the dominant mood or
quality of certain poetic minds. Many pas-
sages in narrative and dramatic verse, for
instance, while fulfilling their primary func-
tion 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 ex-
pression is in song. In Marlowe's Tambur-
laine, 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 Tambur-
laine 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, per-
meated with the same tender stoicism which
colors Arnold's "Dover Beach" and "A Sum-
mer Night." The device of using a Nature
picture at the end of a narrative, to heighten,
by harmony or contrast, the mood induced by
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 261
the story itself, was freely utilized by Tenny-
son 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 pas-
sages, 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 spe-
cific 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. Pigeon-
hole 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" (Ox-
ford, 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 nar-
262 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
rative, 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 re-
mains 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
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 268
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-mo-
tives, 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 ele-
ments, 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
264 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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." l 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 com-
mon 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
Gummere, The Popular Ballad, p. 106.
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 265
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 cer-
tain 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 com-
mand of song-words is universally recognized.
266 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 theatri-
cal effects, enabled him to surpass all of his
contemporaries in the art of using songs to
bring actors on and off the stage, to antici-
pate following action, to characterize person-
ages, to heighten climaxes, and to express
emotions beyond the reach of spoken words. 1
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 in-
struments of character revelation and of
dramatic passion, until they became, on the
lips of an Ophelia or a Desdemona, the most
1 These points are fully discussed in J. Robert Moore's Har-
vard dissertation (unpublished) on The Songs in the English
Drama.
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 267
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 pur-
pose 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, how-
ever, 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
o
268 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 oc-
casion, 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 over-
heard. There is a listener, who, though
without a speaking part, plays a very real
r6le 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 Strat-
ford." 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
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 269
poem than many of the dramatis persona of
famous plays. Tennyson's "Ulysses" and
"Sir Galahad" and "The Voyage of Mael-
dune" 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 "con-
frontation" type. We see a whole soul in
action.
Now this intense, dynamic fashion of re-
vealing 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
270 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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. The-
oretically, narrative or "epic" poetry is
based upon an objective experience. Some-
thing 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 some-
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 271
thing 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 objec-
tivity 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 char-
acteristics 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 accomplish-
ing a deed, as a factor in an event. His
primary business is to report action, not
272 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 re-
flecting 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 justi-
fies 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 wit-
ness 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 trans-
formation of his material. It is like the Ro-
man murder story told so many times over in
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 273
Browning's Ring and the Book : the main facts
are conceded by each witness, and yet the in-
ferences 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 lyri-
cising and dramatizing his narrative material,
any more than he can help making all his
characters talk "Browningese." But By-
ron'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 Chau-
cer 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 Ro-
mances, indeed, illustrates this lyrical tend-
ency to rehandle inherited material. Tales
of love, of enchantment, of adventure, could
274 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
not be held down to prosaic fact. Whether
they dealt with "matter of France," or "mat-
ter 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 "Rey-
nard 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 de-
stroys 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 ap-
plications of the eternal truth which it con-
tains. ... 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
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 275
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," "Por-
phyria'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 An-
cient 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 cou-
plets 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 varie-
ties of cadence many a bar of music long as-
sociated 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
276 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAB
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 first-
hand, simple or complex, rude or delicate, de-
mands the finest artistic instinct. Yet it
appears certain that many narrative meas-
ures affect us fully as much through their in-
timate association with the moods of song as
through their specific adaptiveness to the
purposes of narrative.
6. 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 pri-
marily a French form of lyric verse, not a
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 277
narrative lyric specifically. In the Eliza-
bethan 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 grad-
ually to imply a special type of story-telling
song, with no traces of individual author-
ship, 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" com-
position, 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, danc-
ing crowd carries a refrain, and improvises,
through some quick-tongued individual, a
new phrase, line or stanza of immediate popu-
lar 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
278 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAK
unlettered people during the course of cen-
turies. 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. 1
"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 tradi-
tion, or set down on paper by the solitary and
deliberate poet, have given birth to that dis-
tinction of 'popular* and * artistic,' or what-
ever 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 "popu-
lar" ballads as they are shown in Child's col-
lection. 2 They are impersonal. There is
1 See Louise Pound, "The Ballad and the Dance," Pub.
Mod. Lang. Ass., vol. 34, No. 3 (September, 1919), and An-
drew Lang's article on "Ballads" in Chambers' Cyclopedia of
Eng. Lit., ed. of 1902.
2 Now reprinted in a single volume of the "Cambridge
Poets" (Houghton Mifflin Company), edited with an introduc-
tion by G. L. Kittrcdge.
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 279
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 sentimen-
talize. 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 dia-
logue 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 con-
veniently held by the memory and which may
appear in dozens of different ballads. They
are not afraid of repetition, indeed the
280 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
theory of choral collaboration implies a con-
stant 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 Gum-
mere 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 de-
vice:
"I started up the trail October twenty-third,
I started up the trail with the 2-U herd."
Strikingly as the ballads differ from con-
sciously "artistic" narrative in their broken
movement and allusive method, the contrast
is even more different if we consider the nai've
quality of their refrains. Sometimes the re-
frain is only a sort of musical accompaniment:
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 281
"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} "
"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 t
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 faery-land magic:
"He's ta'en three locks o' her yellow hair,
Binnorie, Binnoriel
And wi' them strung his harp sae rare
By the bonnie milldams o' Binnorie."
(Oxford, No. 376.)
282 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 sug-
gestive in their handling of narrative and
dramatic material, while to students of folk-
lore and of primitive society they are inex-
haustible 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 per-
suasively than any type of poetry, the con-
viction 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." l
1 Encyclopaedia Brittanica, article " Ballads."
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 283
6. The Ode
If the ballad is thus an example of "popu-
lar" 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 struc-
ture. 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 enthu-
siastic and exalted lyrical verse directed to a
fixed purpose and dealing progressively with
one dignified theme." Spenser's "Epithala-
mium" or marriage ode, Wordsworth's "Ode
on the Intimations of Immortality," Tenny-
son'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.
284 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 "Mo-
lian" or "Horatian," since Horace imi-
tated the simple, regular strophes of his Greek
models. The other species of ode, the "Do-
rian," 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," "an-
swering 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." 1
It must be observed, however, that the
English odes written in strictly uniform stan-
zas differ greatly in the simplicity of the
stanzaic pattern. Andrew Marvell's "Hora-
tian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ire-
1 See Branson's edition of the poems of Collins. Athe-
naeum Press.
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 285
land," 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 com-
plicated patterns, though all the stanzas are
alike. The English "Horatian" ode, then,
while exhibiting the greatest differences in
complexity of stanzaic forms, is "homo-
strophic."
To understand the "Pindaric" English ode,
we must remember that a few scholars, like
Ben Jonson, Congreve and Gray, took pe-
culiar pleasure in reproducing the general
effect of the Greek strophic arrangement of
"turn," "counter-turn" 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 popu-
larity of the so-called "Pindaric" ode in Eng-
lish in the seventeenth century was due to
Cowley, and to one of those periodic loyalties
to lawlessness which are characteristic of the
286 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
English. For Cowley, failing to perceive that
Pindar's apparent lawlessness was due to the
corruption of the Greek text and to the mod-
ern 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 met-
rical restraint the ode grew declamatory,
bombastic, and lowest stage of all, "official, 5 *
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 neg-
lected.
With the revival of Romantic imagination,
however, came a new interest in the " irregu-
lar " ode, whose strophic arrangement ebbs and
flows without apparent restraint, subject only
to what Watts-Dunton termed "emotional
law." Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intima-
tions of Immortality " moves in obedience to
its own rhythmic impulses only, like Cole-
ridge's "Kubla Khan" and Emerson's "Bac-
chus." Metrical variety can nowhere be
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 287
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 cor-
responding to the "movement" of a sym-
phony. 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 intri-
cate sound-patterns employed in such elegies
as Arnold's "Scholar Gypsy" (Oxford, No.
751) or Swinburne's "Ave atque Vale" (Oa>
288 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
ford, 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 in-
tellectual 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 mas-
ters 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 free-
dom and restraint. Let us look first at its
structure, and then at its capacity for express-
ing 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 ac-
companiment. It must have fourteen lines,
neither more nor less, with five beats or
"stresses" to the line. Each line must end
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 289
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 pass-
ing 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, abb a abb a;
for the sestet, either cdecdeoTcdcdcd.
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 nota-
ble 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 pol-
290 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
ished our rude and homely manner of vulgar
poesie. . . . Their conceits were lofty, their
style stately, their conveyance cleanly, their
terms proper, 1 their metre sweet and well-pro-
portioned, 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:
ababcdcdefefgg. 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
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 91
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 i 1
"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, sum-
ming 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
D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1883.
292 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
before it is only there for the sake of the surprise
of the end, or denouement, 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, 1
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
1 Sonnets, English and American, selected by Laura E. Lock-
wood. Houghton Mifllin Company, 1916.
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 293
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 possi-
ble 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 Chap-
man's Homer":
"Much have I travell'd hi the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollt) 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 son-
net, where the thought divisions of quatrains
and tercets are marked with exceptional clear-
294 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
ness, 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.
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 295
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 Ox-
ford 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 in-
creasingly 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.
296 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
For the sonnet, an intricately wrought
model of the reflective lyric, requires a pecul-
iarly 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 un-
controlled, 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 appre-
hension. . . . 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
TYPES OF THE LYRIC 297
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 cou-
plet 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, how-
ever 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 Christ-
mas 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 stimu-
lus for his thought. Conventionality of
subject and treatment, like the endless imita-
tion of Italian and French sonnet-motives and
298 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 idi-
oms 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 quali-
ties and forms of lyric poetry. Let us now
attempt a rapid survey of some of the condi-
tions 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 re-
mains a monument to the suggestiveness and
to the dangers of his method. Some of his
countrymen, notably Brunetiere in the Evolu-
tion de la Poesie Lyrique en France au XIX
SiecUy and Legouis in the Defense de la Poesie
Franqaise, have discussed more cautiously and
SOO THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 tend-
ency 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 sim-
ple terms, as Madame de Stael attempted
to do, for instance, in her famous book on
Germany. We endeavor to distinguish, more
accurately than of old, between ethnic, lin-
guistic and political divisions of men. We
try to look behind the name at the thing it-
self: we remember that "Spanish" architec-
ture 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
RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL 301
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." 1
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 be-
wildering and stimulating confusion. Pre-
cisely 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
1 See Royce's Race-Questions. New York, 1908.
302 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
verse of specific periods in the various na-
tional literatures? We all use catch- words,
and I shall use them myself later in this chap-
ter, 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: his-
toric-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 his-
toric 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
RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL 803
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 an-
swer. An American collector of Japanese
prints recognizes in these specimens of Orien-
tal craftsmanship that mastery of line and
composition which are a part of the universal
language of the graphic arts. Any human
being, hi fact, who has developed a sensitive-
ness 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 gen-
eral enthusiasm into a quite particular interest
in the handicraft of special artists, a Moto-
nobu, 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,
304 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
a certain Japanese draughtsman of the eight-
eenth 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 re-
cently been presented to us in English trans-
lations. The American's ignorance of the
Oriental languages cuts him off from any ap-
preciation of the individual handling of dic-
tion and metre. A Lafcadio Hearn may
write delightfully about that special seven-
teen 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, 1 and ex-
plains that the verses are intended to suggest
the joyous feeling of spring-time:
"Oki, okiyo!
Waga tomo ni sen
Neru kocho! "
(Wake up ! Wake up ! I will make thee my
comrade, thou sleeping butterfly.) An Occi-
dental reader may recognize, through the
translation, the charm of the poetic image,
and he may be interested in a technical lyric
1 Kwaidan, p. 188. Houghton Miffliu Company, 1904.
RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL 305
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 1
" 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
Chu-I (A.D. 772-846), as clear and simple as
anything in the Greek Anthology:
The Grass l
"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
1 These Chinese lyrics are quoted from The Lute of Jade,
London, 1909. The translations are by L. Cranmer-Byng.
306 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
by the Chinese poet. But all that is specifi-
cally 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 tra-
dition 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 individ-
ual 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
RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL 307
traditions, one must remember that the over-
whelming 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 Gum-
mere's Beginnings of Poetry, glancing as it
does at the origins of so many national litera-
tures 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 slender-ness 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 pos-
sess 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 An-
thology tantalize us with their reminder of
what has been lost beyond recall.
Yet if we keep to the line of Hebrew-Greek-
308 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 ver-
sion 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 clar-
ity and unity, its dislike of vagueness and
RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL 309
excess, its finely artistic restraint, are char-
acteristic of the race. The simpler Greek
lyrical measures were taken over by Catul-
lus, 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 heri-
tage. It is doubtless true, as Dr. Henry
Osborn Taylor has pointed out, 1 that the
Greek and Roman classical metres became in
time inadequate to express the new Christian
spirit "which knew neither clarity nor meas-
ure.'* "The antique sense of form and pro-
portion, 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."
1 See his Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages, chap. 9, and
particularly the passage quoted in the "Notes and Illustra-
tions" to chap, v of this volume.
310 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 natu-
rally in the rise of the vernacular literatures,
during the Middle Ages, that we trace the
signs of ethnic 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 re-
mains of Anglo-Saxon lyrical verse are col-
ored 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. 1
The last strophe of " Deor's Lament," our
oldest English lyric, ends with the line:
" pees ofereode, pisses swa mag"
" That he surmounted, so this may II"
The wandering Ulysses says something like
this, it is true, in a line of the Odyssey, but to
1 See Cook and Tinker, Select Translations from Old English
Poetry (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, Early English
Poems (New York, 1911).
RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL 311
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 'U 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 tri-
umphs of French song in England. 1 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 Noel, amorous songs of French
courtiers, pious hymns of French monks, be-
gan to sing themselves in England. The new
1 See E. B. Reed, English Lyrical Poetry, chap. 2. 1912. J
312 THE LYKIC IN PARTICULAR
grace and delicacy is upon every page of
Chaucer. What was first Provencal 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. 1 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 savle"
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 con-
tinually before the altars and in the crypts; and
1 See the passage from Legouis quoted in the "Notes and
Illustrations" for this chapter.
RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL 313
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 Nico-
lette, 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 Eliza-
bethan poetry the classical influence was on
314 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 Eng-
lishmen, 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 TotteVs 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, Davi-
son'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 idyl-
lic mood, how the study of prosody yielded
rich and various stanzaic effects, how the
RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL 315
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
316 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
prodigals such as Peele and Greene and Mar-
lowe. 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 "Eliza-
bethan." Spenser's "vine-like" luxuriance,
Marlowe's soaring energy, Donne's grave real
istic subtleties, illustrate indeed that note of
individualism which is never lacking in the
great poetic periods. This individualism be-
trays 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, in-
imitable 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 increas-
ingly conscious of a change in atmosphere.
The moment of expansion has passed. The
RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL 317
"first fine careless rapture" is over. Clas-
sical "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 1 ' 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, ex-
cept 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."
318 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
The mystics like Crashaw, Vaughan and Tra-
herne wished and secured a wider metrical
liberty, and it is, in truth, these complicated
patterns of the devotional lyric of the seven-
teenth 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, let-
ting Cowley and Quarles experiment as fan-
tastically as they pleased. Andrew Marvell,
too, a Puritan writing in the Restoration
epoch, composed as "smoothly" as Waller.
Herrick, likewise, though fond of minor met-
rical 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
RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL 819
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 rich-
ness in the Past, a new picturesque and savor
in the life of other races, particularly in the
320 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 "sensibil-
ity," 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 inven-
tion of new and freer forms, growing ever more
lyrical. Poetic diction rebelled against the
Augustan conventions, the stereotyped epi-
thets, the frigid personifications. It aban-
doned the abstract and general for the specific
and the picturesque. It turned to the lan-
guage 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,
RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL 821
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 ex-
pression 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 Ro-
mantic 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 delib-
erate extravagance, a cultivated egoism.
Vagueness has its legitimate poetic charm,
but in England no less than in Germany or
France lyric vagueness often became incoher-
ence. Symbolism degenerated into meaning-
lessness. But the fantastic and grotesque
side of Romantic individualism should not
blind us to the central fact that a rich person-
322 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
ality 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 eccen-
tricities. 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 remem-
bered, betrayed his personality not so much
through any external peculiarity of the Ro-
mantic 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 brush-
strokes and pigments of some picture attrib-
uted to this or that master: you will see that
Keats, like all the supreme masters of poetic
diction, enciphered his lyric message in a lan-
guage peculiarly his own. It is for us to de-
cipher 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
RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL 323
with the "owl** and the "midnight** and the
"solitary mere,** stock properties of eight-
eenth-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 per-
sonality 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 pre-
ceded 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 su-
preme and "propria communia dicere'* was
the literary motto there was nevertheless
a rapidly growing curiosity about races and
literatures outside the charmed circle of West-
ern Europe. It was the era of the Oriental
tale, of Northern mythology. Then the poets
324 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 Orientates and in Leconte de Lisle's Poemes
Barbares. Modern music has shown the same
tendency: Strauss of Vienna writes waltzes in
Arab rhythms, Grieg composes a Scotch sym-
phony, Dvorak writes an American national
anthem utilizing negro melodies. As commu-
nication between races has grown easier, and
the interest in race-characteristics more in-
tense, it would be strange indeed if lovers
of lyric poetry did not range far afield in
their search for new complexities of lyric
feeling.
EPOCH, RACE AND INDIVIDUAL 325
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 shar-
ing 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 instinc-
tive 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,
326 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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,
I know we should be brethren and lovers,
1 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 "cen-
tral " utterance of a race, a period and an indi-
vidual. Each is an open-air poem, written by
a young Englishman; each is lyrical, elegiac
a song of mourning and of consolation. " Lyci-
das "is the last flawless music of the English
Renaissance, an epitome of classical and pasto-
ral convention, yet at once Christian, political
RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL 827
and personal. Beneath the quiet perfection
of Gray's "Elegy "there is the undertone of
passionate sympathy for obscure lives: pas-
sionate, 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 im-
mortal 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, lanthe, 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 English-
man, and the lover in that quatrain!
Or, if Landor seems too remote, turn to
Amherst, Massachusetts, and read this amaz-
328 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
ing 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 con-
temporary 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
330 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
Voices, and Mr. Lowes's Convention and Re-
volt. 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 con-
tribution to a critical battle which is just now
being waged, 1 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
1 See the Introduction and the closing chapter of Stuart P.
Sherman's Contemporary Literature. Holt, 1917.
THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC 331
the poets are not always quite capable of
knowing what is good or evil?" "There is
also," says Socrates in the Ph&drus, "a third
kind of madness, which is the possession of
the Muses; this enters into a delicate and
virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awak-
ens 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, com-
pose 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 pos-
sessed; 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 unable
332 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 dithy-
rambs, 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." 1
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
1 Plato's Ion. Jowett's translation.
THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC 833
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 har-
monies I ask you to leave; the strain of necessity
and the strain of freedom, the strain of the unfor-
tunate 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 con-
versely, 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 "imi-
tation," 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
334 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
calls "dissolute," i.e. dissolving or relaxing
the fibres of the will, like certain Russian
dance-music. I asked an American com-
poser the other day: "Is there anything at all
in the old distinction between secular and sa-
cred music? " " Certainly," he replied; " sec-
ular 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 Plato-
nists, have an indictment to bring against
modern verse, and particularly against the
THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC 335
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 philo-
sophical, 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 philoso-
phy, abundance of just classification and subtle
analysis, abundance of wit and eloquence, abun-
dance of verses and even of good ones, but little
poetry." In the essay on Dryden (1828) Macaulay
renews the charge: "Poetry requires not an ex-
amining 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. 1
1 Reprinted in A. S. Cook's edition of Shelley's Defense of
Poetry. Boston, 1891.
336 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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, associa-
tions, 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 resolv-
able into three ingredients: the rant of unregu-
lated 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 com-
forts and utilities of life, of which we have wit-
nessed 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 de-
crease either of intellectual power or intellectual
acquisition, but because intellectual power and
intellectual acquisition have turned themselves
into other and better channels, and have aban-
doned the cultivation and the fate of poetry to the
degenerate fry of modern rimesters, and their
Olympic judges, the magazine critics, who con-
tinue 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
THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC 337
if there were no such things in existence as mathe-
maticians, 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 criti-
cal 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 Ma-
caulay wrote nearly a century ago, but their
statements as to the uselessness of poetry, as
compared with the value of intellectual ex-
ertion 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."
8. An JEsihetic Objection
In Aristotle's well-known definition of
Tragedy in the fifth section of the Poetics,
838 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 con-
templation, 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,*
"requires imaginative powers superfluous in
a short one, and it would be easy to show that
it admits of strictly poetic effects of the high-
est 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
1 London, 1909. The passage cited is from the chapter on
"The Long Poem in the Age of Wordsworth."
THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC 839
a plantation of carefully tended little trees,
rather than a forest? The most ardent col-
lector of butterflies is aware that he is hunt-
ing 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 illus-
trated 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 "mag-
nitude," but rather that they lack an ade-
quate 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 com-
positions, let us say the songs in "Pippa
Passes" or Ariel's songs in The Tempest, are
those where the train of emotional associa-
tion or contrast has been carefully laid and
340 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 "Marseil-
laise" 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 asso-
ciation 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 intrud-
ing prose. One turns their pages as he turns
leaves of music until he finds some composi-
tion in accordance with his mood of the mo-
ment. The long poem or the drama creates
THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC 341
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 struc-
ture. The isolated magazine lyric, on the
other hand, is like one swallow trying to make
a summer. Even the lyrics collected in an-
thologies are often "mutually repellent parti-
cles," requiring through their very brevity
and lack of relation with one another, a per-
' petual re-focussing of the attention, a con-
stant 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 re-
newed 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 dis-
tinct 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, in-
342 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
asmuch 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, 1 that more objective forms of
poetry, particularly epic and dramatic han-
dling of local and historic American material,
was far healthier stuff for a poet to work with.
This objection to the lyric as an encour-
ager of subjective excitement, of egoistic in-
trospection, like the other objections already
stated, is one of old standing. Goethe re-
marked 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-individ-
ualism has often been drawn, our own times
are a fresh proof of its validity. If the reve-
lation 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
1 Published by the author at College Station, Texas.
THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC 343
which each generation has its own require-
ments and its own standard of taste; and the
critic who urges contemporary poets to make
their work as individual as possible is delib-
erately inviting them to build their structures
on sand instead of rock." 1 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 Var-
sity 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-conscious-
ness are exploited for commercial purposes,
and the "lutanists of October" are duly pho-
tographed at their desks.
1 Edmond Holmes. What is Poetry, p. 68.
344 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
5. Mere Technique
There is one other count in the old indict-
ment of the lyric which is sure to be empha-
sized 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, pas-
sion 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 com-
pared 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 enthu-
siasm for new experiments in versification,
new feats of technique, the borderland be-
tween 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
THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC 345
many of the elect. 1 .1 have never believed
that Emerson meant to decry Poe when he
referred to him as "the jingle-man." Emer-
son'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 vio-
linist who could play upon a single string.
Every " amplificator imperii" every wid-
ener 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 con-
tent: the ideas of a poet, his total vision of
1 See Untermeyer's New Era, etc., pp. 820-123.
346 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
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 vir-
tuosity 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
THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC 347
past. I am sorry for the traditionalist who
cannot enjoy Robert Frost and Edwin Arling-
ton 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 Dejec-
tion " 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 tran-
scends all purely moralistic and utilitarian, as
it does all historical and technical considera-
tions, 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, Cole-
ridge and Wordsworth and Shelley defended it
against the Georgian Philistines, Carlyle, New-
man and Arnold championed it through every
era of Victorian materialism. In the twen-
tieth 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
848 THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
with a knowledge, a sympathy and an elo-
quence 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 per-
petually 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 as-
pect 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 sur-
viving 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
THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC 349
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 thea-
tre. 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 emo-
tion. 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 in-
conceivable 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 spir-
itual possessions of every civilized man.
"Die GeisterweU ist nicht verschlossen ;
Dein Sinn ist zu, dein Herz ist todtt
AufI bade, Schiller, 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 dis-
cussions of the special topic. There is also some addi-
tional 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 hi poetry. One of them is the general in-
troductory course, which usually begins with the lyric
rather than with the epic or the drama, and which uti-
lizes some such collection as the Golden Treasury or the
Oxford Book of English Verge. Any such collection of
standard verse, or any of the anthologies of recent po-
etry, 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. Spen-
ser, 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
352 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS
theory as far as they bear upon the study of poetry.
James Sully's article on "^Esthetics" in the Encyclopce-
dia Britannica, and Sidney Colvin's article on "The
Fine Arts," afford a good preliminary survey of the
field. K. Gordon's ^Esthetics, 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
^Esthetic is commended to those advanced students who
have not time to read his voluminous History of ^Es-
thetic, 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 Aristo-
tle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. In the same way,
Spingarn's Creative Criticism is a good preparation for
Croce's monumental ^Esthetics. The student should
certainly make some acquaintance with Lessing's
Laokoon, and he will find Babbitt's New Laokoon a bril-
liant 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 class-
room discussions may begin with chapter n. 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 tem-
porary bewilderment.
CHAPTER n
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
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 353
the textj 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 Teach-
ing of Poetry in the High School, and John Erskine's
paper on "The Teaching of Poetry" (Columbia Univer-
sity Quarterly, December, 1915). Alfred Hayes's "Re-
lation of Music to Poetry" (Atlantic, January, 1914) is
pertinent to this chapter. But the student should cer-
tainly familiarize himself with Theodore Watts-Dun-
ton's famous article on "Poetry" in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, now reprinted with additions in his Renas-
cence 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, Sted-
man'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 under-
stood by successive generations of Englishmen.
CHAPTER HI
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 "Imagina-
tion " in his Essentials of Poetry, the first four chapters
of Fairchild, chapters 4, 13, 14, and 15 of Coleridge's
Biographia Liter aria, 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
854 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS
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 walk-
ing 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 be-
tween 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 prob-
lem to have been at that moment solved an intellectual
want relieved which had haunted me for at least
fifteen years before. Less than an hour elapsed before 1
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-Abercrom-
bie'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 con-
sciousness 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
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 355
ay 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 discom-
fort) is completely formed into vivid trains of imagery,
and in that form only is presented to the dreamer's con-
sciousness. This, however, merely shows the presence
of the active desire to shape sensation into what con-
sciousness 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 or-
dinary 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
356 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS
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 hi Fairchild and East-
man, 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 L&eraria is
famous. Walt Whitman's An American Primer, first
published hi 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 analy-.
ses 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 exer-
cise hi the study of diction :
1. " The falls were hi 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
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 357
brief, that picture a remembrance always after-
ward."
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 prop-
erties 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!"
S. "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 then* 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,"
358 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS
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 govern-
ing 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 Bibliog-
raphy. 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 termi-
nology 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 inter-
pretations 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
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 859
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 leaves 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, ob-
jects, 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 rela-
tions. 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 uni-
form or standard rhythmical arrangement."
FAIBCHILD, The Making of Poetry, p. 117.
8. "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 syl-
lables in corkscrew. Further, a syllable may be heavy or
light (also called accented or unaccented) according as it
360 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS
receives more or less force or stress of tone: compare the
two syllables of streamer. 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 axe 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 unac-
cented 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 per-
ceives 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 emo-
tions find their noblest expression."
GUMMEEE, 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 tune. 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
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 361
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
tune-intervals moving on in infinitely perfect progres-
sion; the other, represented by the actual movement
of the verse, is constantly shifting by quickening, retard-
ing, 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 tune
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. Swin-
burne, carelessly, inadvertently, or for some occult
purpose, interjected one line of five feet among his
hexameters and the scansion usually followed is by ar-
rangement 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.'
362 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS
" 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 any-
thing 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 hi
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 Cole-
ridge'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. Hex-
ameters 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
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 363
Christian times. Such unmeasured feelings could not
be held within the controlled harmonies of the hexam-
eter nor within sapphic or alcaic or Pindaric strophes.
These antique forms of poetry definitely expressed their
contents, although sometimes suggesting further un-
spoken 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 child-
like, having often a narrow clearness in then- literal
sense; and they may be childlike, too, in their expressed
symbolism. Their significance reaches far beyond then'
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 ilia that line says little, but mountains
of wrath press on it, from which the soul shall not
escape.
"Christian emotion quivers differently from any move-
ment 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,
Me" Jesu; quando venies?
Me laetum quando facies,
Ut vultu tuo saties?
Quo dolore
Quo moerore
Deprimuntur miseri,
Qui abyssis
Pro commissis
Submergentur inferi.
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS
Recordare, Jesu pie,
Quod sum causa tuae viae;
Ne me perdas ilia die.
Lacrymosa dies ilia
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.
NOTES ANP ILLUSTRATIONS 365
Neither can we tell which is the more fortunate the
child dying hi 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.
366 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS
" 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 funda-
mental principles involved is given in W. H. Carruth's
Verse Writing.
Free verse is suggestively discussed by Lowes, Con-
vention 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 rain, 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
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 867
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 ram;
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 stair-
ways; 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,
368 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS
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."
8. "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. I
They and you and I, the cowherds and the cows,
the jewels and the potter's wheel, the moth-
ers 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."
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 369
CHAPTER VIE
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 indi-
cated 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 fur-
nishes 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 associa-
tions are involved?
(6) What sort of imaginative transformation of the
material furnished by the senses? What kind of im-
agery? Is it true poetry or only verse?
(c) What degree of technical mastery of lyric struc-
ture? Subordination of material to unity of "tone"?
What devices of rhythm or sound to heighten the in-
tended effect? Noticeable words or phrases? Does the
370 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS
author's power of artistic expression keep pace with his
feeling and imagination?
CHAPTER VULt
For a discussion of narrative verse in general, see
Gummere's Poetics and Oldest English Epic, Hart's
Epic and Ballad, Connell'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 Pop-
ular Ballads, Gummere's Popular Ballad, G. H. Stem-
pel'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 Lock-
wood's collection. There are other well-known collec-
tions 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 cov-
ered, 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,
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 371
is excellent, as is C. S. Baldwin's English Mediaeval Lit-
erature. 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 hi atmos-
phere 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 1'impression de sortir d'un lieu sombre
pour entrer dans la lumiere. Cette impression vous
vient de tous les cdtes a la fois, des lieux decrits, des
sujets, de la maniere de raconter, de 1'esprit qui anime,
de 1'intelligence qui ordonne, mais, d'une fagon encore
plus immediate et plus diffuse, de la difference des deux
langues. On reconnalt sans doute generalement a nos
vieux ecrivains ce merite d'etre clairs, mais on est trop
habitue a ne voir dans ce don que ce qui decoule des
tendances analytiques et des aptitudes logiques de leurs
esprit. Aussi plusieurs critiques, quelques-uns frangais,
ont-ils fait de cet attribut une maniere de pretexte pour
leur assigner en partage la prose et pour leur retirer
la faculte poetique. II n'en est pas ainsi. Cette
clarte n'est pas purement abstraite. Elle est une veri-
table lumiere qui rayonne mme des voyelles et dans
372 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS
laquelle les meilleurs vers des trouveres les seuls qui
comptent sont baignes. Comment dire I'eblouisse-
ment des yeux longtemps retenus dans la penombre du
Codex Exoniensis et devant qui passent soudaiu avec
leurs brillantes syllables 'Halte-Clere,' Tepee d'Olivier,
'Joyeuse' celle de Charlemagne, 'Monjoie' 1'etendard
des Francs? Avant toute description on est saisi
conirne par un brusque lever de soleil. II est tels vers
de nos vieilles romances d'ou la lumiere ruisselle sans
meme qu'on ait besoin de prendre garde a leur sens:
'" Bele Erembors a la fenestre au jor
Sor ses genolz tient paile de color,' *
ou bien
' ' Bele Yolanz en chambre coie
Sor ses genolz pailes desploie
Coust un fil d'or, 1'autre de soie. . . .' a
C'est plus que de la lumiere qui s'echappe de ces mots,
c'est de la couleur et de la plus riche." 8
CHAPTER X
While this chapter does not attempt to comment upon
the work of living American authors, except as illus-
trating 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
1 " Fair Erembor at her window in daylight
Holds a coloured silk stuff on her knees."
1 "Fair Yoland in her quiet bower
Unfolds silk stuffs on her knees
Sewing now a thread of gold, now one of silk."
* Emile Legouis, Defense de la Po6sie Franyaise, p. 44.
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 373
strictly contemporary poetry, and I have found them
keenly interested in criticizing the work that is appear-
ing, month by month, in the magazines. The tempera-
ment 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 ad-
vised 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 syntheti-
cally, i. e., in its total appeal to the aesthetic judgment, rather
than mechanically and part by part.]
376 j
j
i
A
"IMPRESSION"
B
" TRANSFORMING
IMAGINATION "
C
"EXPRESSION"
APPENDIX
Of Nature. What sort of observa-
tion of natural phenomena is revealed
in this poem? Impressions of move-
ment, 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 ac-
quaintance 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?
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 pres-
ence of a creative personality? j
What evidence of poetic instinct in
the selection of characteristic traits?
In power of representation through
images? In idealization?
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? Imita-
tive effects?
In general, is there harmony be-
tween form and content, or is there
evidence of the artist's caring for one
. rather than the other?
APPENDIX 377
n
TENNYSON'S LYRIC POETRY
[Write a criticism of the distinctively lyrical work of Tenny-
son, based upon an investigation at first hand of the topics sug-
gested below. Do not deal with any poems in which the nar-
rative or dramatic element seems to you the predominant one,
as those forms of expression will be made the subject of sub-
sequent 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 sensitive-
ness 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 sus-
tained 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 friend-
ship? 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?
378 APPENDIX
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 atti-
tude clearly evident?
B. "TRANSFORMING IMAGINATION."
What evidence of poetic instinct hi the selection of charac-
teristic 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.
in
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 objec-
tive, 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 nse of narrative material ever show a de-
APPENDIX 379
ficiency 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 out-
lined 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 charac-
ter? 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 Tenny-
son'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
380 APPENDIX
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 criti-
cism 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 indi-
vidual 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 prob-
lems 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 char-
acter, 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
APPENDIX 881
management of the web of circumstance in which the charac-
ters 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 pas-
sages 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.
The Writing and Reading of Verse. New York, 1918.
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 ^Esthetic. New York, 1892.
Three Lectures on ^Esthetic. London, 1915.
BRADLEY, A. C.
Oxford Lectures on Poetry. London, 1909.
384 BIBLIOGRAPHY
BRAITHWAITE, WILLIAM S., editor.
The Book of Elizabethan Verse. Boston, 1907.
Anthology of Magazine Verse 1913-19. New York,
1915.
BRIDGES, ROBERT.
Ibant Obscures. 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.
/Esthetics. London, 1909.
CROLL, MORRIS W.
"The Cadence of English Oratorical Prose," in Stud-
ies in Philology, January, 1919.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 385
See also Croll and Clemens, Preface to Lyly's Euphues.
New York, 1916.
DRINKWATER, JOHN.
The Lyric. New York (n.d.).
EASTMAN, MAX.
Enjoyment of Poetry. New York, 1918.
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.
Esthetics. 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 also his summary of Child's views in Pub. Mod.
Lang. Ass., 21, 1906.
386 BIBLIOGRAPHY
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 FAROE, JOHN.
Considerations on Painting. New York, 1895.
LANIER, SIDNEY.
Science of English Verse. New York, 1880.
Poem Outlines. New York, 1908.
LEGOUIS, EMILE.
Defense de la Poesie Frangaise. London, 1912.
LEWIS, CHARLTON M.
The Foreign Sources of Modern English Versification.
Halle, 1898.
The Principles of English Verse. New York, 1906.
LlDDELL, M. H.
Introduction to the 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.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 887
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.
LTLY, JOHN.
Euphues, edited by Croll, M. W., and demons, H.
New York, 1916.
MACKAIL, J. W.
The Springs of Helicon. New York, 1909.
MAHSHALL, HENRY R.
/Esthetic Principles. New York, 1895.
MAYOR, J. B.
Chapters on English Metre. London, 1886.
MILL, J. S.
"Thoughts on Poetry," hi Dissertations, vol. 1.
MOORE, J. ROBERT.
"The Songs in the English Drama" (Harvard Dis-
sertation, 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, Sm 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.
388 BIBLIOGRAPHY
PANCOAST, H. S. and SPAETH, J. D.
Early English Poems. New York, 1911.
PATTERSON, WILLIAM M.
The Rhythm of Prose. New York, 1916.
PATTISON, MABK, 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.
QuiLLEB-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.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 880
SAINTSBURY, GEORGE.
History of English Prosody. London, 1900-10.
History of English Prose Rhythm. London, 1912.
SANTAYANA, GEORGE.
The Sense of Beauty. New York, 1896.
Interpretation of Poetry and Religion. New York,
1900.
SCHELLING, 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. Bos-
ton, 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.
890 BIBLIOGRAPHY
STEWART, J. A.
The Myths of Plato. London, 1905.
SYMONS, AKTHUB.
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., Decem*
ber, 1918.
WHITNEY, W. D.
Language and the Study of Language. New York,
1867.
WILKINSON, MARGUERITE.
The NMD Voices. Nw York, 1919.
INDEX
Abercrombie, Lascelles, 169,
354, 355.
Accent, 169-71.
Adams, F. P., free verae par-
ody by, 208, 209.
Esthetics, and poetry, 7-11.
Alden, R. M., Introduction to
Poetry, 153, 172, 179, 193,
360, 361.
Aldington, Richard, 86, 87, 89.
Alexander, Hartley B., Poetry
and the Individual, 67, 68.
Alliteration, 188.
Andrews, C. E., Writing and
Reading of Verse, 158.
Angellier, Auguste, 120.
Anglo-Saxon lyrical verse,
167, 310.
Aristotle, Poetics, 7, 11, 143;
definition of Tragedy, 337,
338.
Arnold, Matthew, 5, 260; "The
Strayed Reveller," 216, 217.
Artistic imagination, 65-68.
Artistic production, the im-
pulse to, 12-21.
Asbury, Samuel, 341, 342.
Assonance, 189.
Babbitt, Irving, New Laokoon,
218.
Ballad, the, 276-82.
Baumgarten, A. G., 8.
Beauty, 8-11.
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 19.
Blake, William, 182, 215, 322.
Blunt, Wilfrid, sonnet on Gi-
braltar, 237.
Boethius, De Consolatione Phi-
losophia, 41.
Bosanquet, Bernard, 25, 28;
History of ^Esthetic, 10, 27.
Bradley, A. C., 338.
Bridges, Robert, 123, 170, 171.
Brooke, Stopford, 64.
Brownell, Baker, 90.
Browning, Robert, 50, 75, 107,
233, 268, 273; The Ring and
the Book, 27.
Bryant, F. E., 40.
Burns, Robert, 238, 245.
Butcher, S. H., Aristotle's The-
ory of Poetry and Fine Art,
183.
Bynner, Witter, 344.
Byron, 191, 273; "ottava
rima," 196, 199.
Calverley, C. S., parody of
Browning, 128, 129.
Campion, Thomas, 185.
Carlyle, Thomas, 72, 73, 329.
Chase, W. M., 240, 241.
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 166, 167.
168, 190, 222, 273, 312.
Chaucerian stanza, the, 196,
199.
Child, F. J., English and
Scottish Popular Ballads.
277, 278.
Chinese lyrics, 305.
Chopin, Frfcteric, 150, 360.
Church music, 165, 166.
Clark, A. C., Prose Rhythm in
English, 156.
Cleghorn, Sarah N., "Come,
Captain Age," 131.
Colcord, Lincoln, 125.
Coleridge, S. T., 94, 96; Bi-
ographia Literaria, 21, 71,73,
392
INDEX
74, 78, 91, 184; Kubla Khan,
80,81; Christabel, 162.
Colvin, Sidney, "The Fine
Arts," 21.
Content and form, 22-28.
Coquelin, E. H. A., 17.
Corson, Hiram, 176.
Counsel upon the Reading of
Books, 35, 59.
Courthope, W. J., History of
English Poetry, 136, 164.
Cowley, Abraham, Pindaric
ode in English, 285, 286.
Cranmer-Byng, L., The Lute of
Jade, 305.
Creative imagination, 65-68.
Croce, B., 33.
Croll, Morris W., 156.
Dances and poetry, 263, 278.
Daniel, Samuel, 185.
Debussy, Claude, 15, 67.
Dickens, Charles, 154, 343.
Dickinson, Emily, 328.
Dolmetsch, Arnold, 315.
Drama, 261; lyrical element
in, 264-67; dramatic mono-
logue, 267-70.
Drinkwater, John, 231, 232.
Dryden, John, 151, 185, 199,
318, 319.
Duran, Carolus, 30.
Ear, the, appeal to, 167.
Eastman, Max, Enjoyment of
Poetry, 220, 359.
Elizabethan lyric, the, 313-16.
Elton, Oliver W., 156.
Emerson, R. W., 48, 97, 182,
345, 366, 367.
Enjoyment of Verse, 173-81.
Erskinc, John, 231, 256, 315.
Euphuism, 220-22.
" Eye-minded " or " ear-
minded," 99-101.
Fairchild, A. H. R., Making of
Poetry, 63, 70, 71, 76, 93;
359.
Feeling, and imagination, 62-
65; conveyed by words,
101-10.
Feet, in verse, 160-63, 175,
179, 181.
Feminine rhymes, 189.
Figures of speech, 129-34.
Fine arts, "form" and "sig-
nificance" in, 21-28; the
man in, 28-37.
Firkins, O. W., 55.
FitzGerald, Edward, 12.
Fletcher, John Gould, 88, 339.
Form, in the arts, 21-28, 149.
Fort, Paul, 221.
Free verse, 55, 204-23; four
types of, 207, 208, 217.
French song in England, 311,
312.
Fromentin, E., 46.
Frost, Robert, 261, 267, 345.
Futurist poets, 116.
Gardiner, J. H., 108.
Gates, Lewis E., 78, 85.
Genius and inspiration, 91, 92.
Giovanitti, Arturo, 212, 213.
Gluck, C. W., opera, 43.
Goethe, 50, 70, 342.
Goodell, T. D., 147.
Gosse, Edmund, definition of
the ode, 283.
Graphic arts and the lyric,
303-306.
Gray, Thomas, 15, 248, 250,
252, 326, 327.
Greek poetry, 109.
Gummere, F. B., Handbook of
Poetics, 264, 278, 359, 360.
Hamilton, Sir W. R., quater-
nions, 66, 354.
Hamlet, 132, 233, 235.
Hardy, Thomas, 26.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Won-
INDEX
393
der-Book, 42; Scarlet Letter,
84.
Beam, Lafcadio, 304.
Hebrew lyric, the, 308.
Hebrew poetry, 108, 186.
Henley, W. E., 216.
Herford, C. H., 107.
Hexameters, 147; English, 170,
171.
Holmes, Edmond, What is
Poetry? 253, 343.
Holmes, Justice Oliver Wen-
dell, 98.
Horace, 115, 163.
Horatian ode, English, 284.
Hudson, W. H., 60.
Hugo, Victor, 75, 260, 322, 346.
Images, verbal, 74-77; selec-
tion and control of, 77-85;
visual, 94; auditory, 94;
tactile, 95; motor, 95.
Imagination, or imaginations,
47; the poet's, 61-97; and
feeling, 62-65; creative and
artistic, 65-68; poetic, 68-
74; lyric, 244-47.
Imagist poets, 54, 55, 240, 241.
Imagist verse, 86-91.
In Memoriam stanza, the, 189,
190, 195, 196.
Individualism in poetry, 342,
343.
Ingersoll, Robert G., 164,
364-66.
Inspiration, 91, 92.
James, Henry, 15.
James, William, 34, 47, 234;
an illustration from, 51-53.
Japanese lyrics, 304.
Japanese prints, 303.'
Johnson, Samuel, 61, 192.
Jonson, Ben, 316, 317.
Keats, John, 14, 58, 70, 287,
293, 322.
Kipling, Rudyard, 9, 133, 254.
La Farge, John, Considerations
on Painting, 31-33.
Lamb, Charles, 58, 80.
Landor, Walter Savage, 327.
Lang, Andrew, 278, 282.
Lanier, Sidney, musical theory
of verse, 171, 172; Poem
Outlines, 210, 211.
Latin poets, 160, 163, 165.
Lee-Hamilton, Eugene, 242,
294.
Legouis, Emile, Defense de la
Poesie Franyaise, 371, 372.
Leighton, Sir Frederick, 44.
Lessing, Laokoon, 29, 39, 43.
Lewis, C. M., 126, 164, 165.
Lindsay, Vachel, 101, 345;
"The Congo," 262, 263.
"Literary" language, 98, 99.
Locke, John, 98.
Lockwood, Laura E., 292.
Lopere, Frederic A., 192.
Lowell, Amy, 87, 88, 91, 156,
205, 221, 267, 345.
Lowes, J. L., 55, 88.
Lyric, the field of, 227-58:
classification, 228-30; defi-
nitions, 231, 232; general
characteristics, 232-38; ob-
jects of the lyric vision, 239-
43; imagination, 241-47; ex-
pression, 248-58; relation-
ships and types of, 259-98;
lyrical element in drama,
264-67; and narrative, 270-
76; and graphic arts, 303-
06; Japanese and Chinese,
304, 305; decay and sur-
vival, 306-09; Hebrew,
308; Greek and Roman, 309;
of Western Europe, 310-13;
the Elizabethan, 313-16;
the Romantic, 319-24; pres-
ent status of, 329-49; objec-
tions to, 334-43.
INDEX
Macaulay, T. B., 335.
Marinetti, F. T., 116, 117.
Marquis, Don, 254.
Masculine rhymes, 189.
Masefield, John, 202, 311.
Masters, Edgar Lee, 208, 209.
Matthews, Brander, 103.
Meredith, George, 55, 88.
Metre, and rhythm, 143-81.
Midsummer Night's Dream, 83.
Mill, John Stuart, 106, 107.
Millet, J. F., 23, 24.
Milton, John, 143, 176, 185,
326.
Monroe, Harriet, 340.
Moody, William Vaughn, 225,
287.
Moore, J. Robert, 266.
Morris, William, 273.
Moving picture, 45.
Murray, Gilbert, 109.
Music and poetry, 165, 166,
171-73, 334.
Narrative poetry, 261, 270-76.
Neilson, W. A., 92.
Newbolt, Sir Henry, 116.
Nonsense-verse, 25, 127.
Ode, the, 283-88.
Omond, T. S., 153, 172.
Orpheus and Eurydice, myth
of, 40-46.
Page, Walter H., 340.
Palgrave, F. T., 232.
"Parallelogram of Forces,
The," 155.
Pattern-instinct, the, 18-20.
Patterson, W. M., Rhythm of
Prose, 144, 153, 154, 205.
Pattison, Mark, 291, 296.
Peacock, Thomas Love, 335-
37.
Persian carpet theory of paint-
ing, 24.
Pindaric ode, English, 285, 286.
Plato, 12, 329, 330-34.
Play-instinct, the, 15, 16.
Poe, Edgar Allan, 81, 129, 248,
249, 252, 341, 344, 345.
"Poet, the," 47-51; and other
men, 55-60; his imagina-
tion, 61-97; his words, 98-
142.
Poetry, some potencies of, 5;
nature of, 6, 7 ; and aesthetics,
7-11; an art, 8; the province
of, 38-60; imagist, 86-91;
Hebrew, 108; Greek, 109;
and music, 165, 166, 171-
73, 334; three main types,
261; and dances, 263, 278; of
alien races, 323, 324, 325.
See also Lyric.
Polyphonic prose, 156, 221.
Pope, Alexander, 199, 319.
Pound, Louise, 278.
Prosody and enjoyment, 173-
81.
Puttenham, George, Arte of
English Poesie, 289, 290.
Quantity, 159-66, 174, 175.
Racial differences, 300-02.
Raleigh, Prof. Walter, 114.
Raymond, G. L., 33, 130.
Real effects, 17.
Reed, E. B., English Lyrical
Poetry, 231.
Renan, Ernest, 108, 109.
Rhyme, as a form of rhythm,
185-92.
Rhys, Ernest, 227, 231, 299.
Rhythm, and metre, 143-81;
nature of, 14345; measure-
ment of, 146-49; of prose,
151-59; rhyme and, 185-92.
Ribot, Th., Essay on the Cre-
ative Imagination, 6567.
Ripley, W. Z., 300.
Robinson, Edwin Arlington,
267, 268.
INDEX
395
Romantic lyric, the, 319-24.
Royce, Josiah, 300, 301.
Ruskin, John, 93, 222, 235.
Russell, C. ., "Swinburne
and Music," 178, 187, 361,
362.
Saintsbury, George, History of
English Prose Rhythm, 151,
152, 158, 181.
Santayana, George, 18, 25.
Schelling, F. E., 231, 318.
Soberer, Edmond, 232.
Scott, Sir Walter, 48, 275, 324.
Sea, a quiet, in the arts, 46,
47.
Shackford, M. H., 143.
Shakspere, William, 56, 57,
72, 83, 118, 132, 134, 177,
233, 235, 265, 266, 316.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 14, 76,
79, 184, 247, 274.
Sherman, Stuart P., 330.
Sidney, Sir Philip, 183.
Significance, in the arts, 21-
28, 149.
Size of poetic thoughts, 197.
Smith, L. W., 54.
Snell, Ada F., 175.
Sonnet, the, 288-98; Petrarch-
an, 289, 291; Shaksperean,
290, 294, 295.
South, Robert, 98.
Space-arts, 40, 43, 45.
Spaced prose, 205.
Spectra hoax, the, 344.
Spencer, Herbert, 16.
Spenser, Edmund, the "poet's
poet," 201.
Spenserian stanza, the, 191,
196, 199.
Stanza, 189, 191, 192-203.
Stanzaio law, 194, 198, 200.
Stedman, E. C., 192, 246, 254.
Stevenson, R. L., 118, 122.
Stewart, J. A., The Myths of
Plato, 38.
Story, W. W., 30.
Stress, in verse, 162-64, 173-
76.
"Stressers," 145, 173.
Subjectivity and the lyric,
34143
Swinburne, A. 8., 75, 128, 178,
190, 361, 362.
Syllabic principle of versifica-
tion, 159-66, 175.
Taine, H. A., 33, 299.
Tasso, 271.
Taylor, Henry Osborn, 166;
309, 362-64.
Teasdale, Sara, 35.
Technique, 344-46.
Tennyson, Alfred, 25, 35, 58,
74, 122, 131, 167, 170, 178,
188, 233, 238, 261, 268, 269,
322, 323.
Thinking without words, 69.
Thompson, Francis, 76, 287.
Thoreau, H. D., 107.
Time-arts, 39, 41, 43, 45.
"Timers," 144, 145.
Tolman, A. H., 121.
Tolstoy, 14, 15, 92.
Tone-color, 120-29.
Tone-feeling, 117-20.
Tynan, Katharine, "Planting
Bulbs," 3.
Verbal images, 74-77.
Voice-waves, photographs of.
177.
Walton, Isaac, 259.
Watts, G. F., 23, 24.
Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 193,
194, 227, 228, 235, 251.
Wells, Carolyn, 128.
Whistler, James, 27, 29, 40.
Whitefield, George, 128.
Whitman, Walt, 61, 71, 206,
207, 213, 214.
Whitmore, C. E., 231.
396
INDEX
Whitney, W. D., Ill, 112.
Whittling, 19.
Wilkinson, Florence, New
Voices, 35.
Words, the poet's, 98-142;
how they convey feeling,
101-10; as current coin, 110-
13; an imperfect medium, Wyatt, Edith, 205, 218.
113-17; unpoetic, 118; em-
bodiment of poetic feeling,
134-42; Bound-values and
meaning- values, 149-51.
Wordsworth, William, 14, 23,
35, 49, 72, 73, 81, 119, 137-
39, 247, 326, 327.
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Langfeld and Allport's Elementary Laboratory Course it
Psychology
Leake's Industrial Education: Its Problems, Methods, and Dan*
gers
Leake's Means and Methods of Agricultural Education
McMurry's (C. A.) Conflicting Principles in Teaching
McMurry's (F. M.) How to Study
Nolan's Teaching of Agriculture
O'Shea's Social Development and Education
Rand's The Classical Psychologists
Ruediger's The Principles of Education
Smith's An Introduction to Educational Sociology
Snedden's Problems of Educational Readjustment
Snedden's Problems of Secondary Education
Terman's The Hygiene of the School Child
Thomas's Training for Effective Study
Tyler's Growth and Education
Waddle's An Introduction to Child Psychology
Warren's Human Psychology
Wilson's Motivation of School Work
Woodley's The Profession of Teaching
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
For College Classes
BUSINESS
Cole's Fundamentals of Accounting
Solutions and Answers for Cole's Fundamentals of Accounting.
Cole's Accounts: Their Construction and Interpretation
Hall's Writing an Advertisement
Harris's Practical Banking
Lyon's Corporation Finance
Lyon's The Principles of Taxation
Miinstcrberg's Psychology and Industrial Efficiency
Raymond's American and Foreign Investment Bonds
Thompson's The Theory and Practice of Scientific Manage^
L ment
SOCIOLOGY
Calkins's Substitutes for the Saloon
Cleveland and Schafcr's Democracy in Reconstruction
Dealey's The Family in Its Sociological Aspects
Foster's The Social Emergency
Hollander's The Abolition of Poverty
Eirkpatrick's Fundamentals of Sociology
ShotwelFs The Religious Revolution of To-day
JOURNALISM
Bleyer's Newspaper Writing and Editing
Bleyer's Types of News Writing
Bleyer's How to Write Special Feature Articles
Lee's History of Journalism
PUBLIC SPEAKING
Bassett's Handbook of Oral Expression
Foster's Argumentation and Debating
Russell's Vocal Culture
SPANISH
McHale's Spanish Taught hi Spanish
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
1943
For College Classes
HISTORY
Paxson's Recent History of the United States
The Riverside History of the United States. Four volumes
(i) Becker's Beginnings of the American People (a) John-
son's Union and Democracy (3) Dodd's Expansion and
Conflict (4) Paxson's The New Nation.
Harris's Intervention and Colonization in Africa
Jeffery's The New Europe, 1789-1889
Johnson's Readings in American Constitutional History
Landon's The Constitutional History and Government of the
United States
Lowell's The Eve of the French Revolution
Murdock's The Reconstruction of Europe
Perkins's France in the American Revolution
Perkins's France under the Regency
Perkins's France under Louis XV, Two Volumes
Ploetz's Manual of Universal History
Ropes's The First Napoleon
Schapiro's Modern and Contemporary European History
Semple's American History and Its Geographic Conditions
Slater's The Making of Modern England
Stanwood's History of the Presidency, Two Volumes
Taylor's The Origin and Growth of the American Constitution
Taylor's The Origin and Growth of the English Constitution
Taswell-Langmead's English Constitutional History
Thomdike's The History of Mediaeval Europe
Usher's Industrial History of England
GOVERNMENT
Johnson's Readings hi American Constitutional History
Leacock's The Elements of Political Science
Stowell's International Cases. Vol. I. Peace. Vol. H. War
and Neutrality.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
1941
THE HISTORY OF EUROPE
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY
EUROPEAN HISTORY
By J. SALWYN SCHAPIRO, Ph.D., of the College of the City o!
New York. Seventh Impression. Revised to the close of the
Great War. 774 pages. 28 maps.
A textbook written especially for American college classes.
With the point of view of the impartial historian, Professor
Schapiro interprets European civilization on the basis of
intellectual and material progress. Military and political
events alone no longer constitute the complete scope of a
textbook in history; social and economic problems and
achievements have come to earn an equally important place.
That the author recognizes this significant tendency is proved
by his emphatic and generous treatment of the development
of the democratic ideal, its influence and its expressions,
found in such movements as socialism, syndicalism and
feminism. An accurate perspective is secured for the stu-
dent, inasmuch as increasingly more attention is given to
the periods as they approach our own time.
THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE
By LYNN THORNDIKE, Ph.D., of Western Reserve University.
Edited by James T. Shotwell, of Columbia University. 640
pages. 24 maps.
A textbook written especially for American college classes.
It " traces the history of the European and Mediterranean
countries from the decline of the Roman Empire, from the
beginning of Christianity, to the discovery of the American
continents, and to the eve of the revolt of the Protestants
from the church of Rome." In attention to the significance
of economic and social conditions, to the influence of geog-
raphy upon civilization, and in furnishing a vivid and selec-
tive background for the events of history, this volume is a
distinctive addition to the list of textbooks on European
history of the Middle Ages. A particular appeal to the
student is made by the focusing of interest and attention
upon a few of the greatest personalities of the times, like
Gregory the Great, Mohammed and Justinian.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
1803
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