Part 3

Those envious outworn souls Whose flaccid academic pulses Beat to no rythms of more Dionysiac scope Than metronomes,— Or dollar-twenty-five alarm-clocks,— They will forever Cavail at novelty, at beauty, at freshness; But, hell!— But, a thousand devils!— But, _Henri Quatre_ and the _Pont Neuf_!— We of the new age, who leap upon the mountains like goats upon the heaps of tin cans in the vacant lots, and butt the stars,— We know they are liars, And that we are what we are.

Could that be expressed in a sonnet? I think not. At least, it could not be expressed so vigorously, so wisely, so well.

There is, however, one obvious peril against which the enthusiast must guard himself. _Vers libre_ is not of itself a complete warranty of success; because a poem is in this form, it is not necessarily fine poetry. “Love is enough,” says William Morris; he would not have said the same about _vers libre_. A certain power of conception, beyond the brilliant and original idea involved in the very employing of the free verse-form, is requisite for real importance in the finished product.

Nor is the statement of the poet’s own unique and terrifying importance a sufficient theme to constitute the burden of all his work. Several of our most immortal living _vers librists_ have fallen into such an error. This “ego über alles” concept, though profound and of a startling originality, lacks variety if it be indefinitely repeated. Should the poet, however, feel deep in his soul that there is nothing else worth saying except this, let him at least take care to beautify his idea by the use of every artifice. After saying “I am I, and great,” let him not forget to add variety and contrast to the picture by means of the complementary idea: “You, O world, are you, and contemptible.” In such minglings of light and shade lies poetry’s special and proper beauty.

_Vers libre_ has one incontestable advantage over all those more artificial vehicles in which the poets of the past have essayed to ride into immortality. This newly popular verse-form can be used perfectly well when the poet is drunk. Let no one of temperate habits underestimate this advantage; let him think of others. Byron was drunk most of the time; had he been able to employ a form like this, how many volumes could he perhaps have added to the mere seventeen that now constitute his work! Shelley,—seldom alcoholicly affected, I believe,—was always intoxicated with ideas; he, equipped solely with the new instrument, could have written many more epics like _Queen Mab_, and would probably have felt less need of concentrating his work into the narrow limits of such formalistic poems as _The West Wind_.

Let it be understood that all the principles suggested in this monograph are intended only for the true devotee of _vers libre_. One can have nothing but contempt for the poet who, using generally the old-fashioned metres, turns sometimes to _vers libre_ as a medium, and carries over into it all those faults of restrained expression and patterned thought which were the curse of the old forms. Such a writer is beyond hope, beyond counsel. We can forgive Matthew Arnold, but not a contemporary.

Certain devoted American friends of poetry have been trying for some time to encourage poetry in this country; and I think they are on the right track when they go about it by way of encouraging _vers libre_. No other method could so swiftly and surely multiply the number of our verse-writers. For the new medium presents no difficulties to anyone; even the tired business-man will find himself tempted to record his evening woes in singless song. True, not everyone will be able at first trial to produce _vers libre_ of the quality that appears in the choruses of _Sampson Agonistes_:

This, this is he; softly a while; Let us not break in upon him. O change beyond report, thought, or belief! See how he lies at random, carelessly diffused, With languished head unpropt, As one past hope, abandoned, And by himself given over, In slavish habit, ill-fitted weeds O’er-worn and soiled. Or do my eyes misrepresent? Can this be he, That heroic, that renowned, Irresistible Sampson? whom, unarmed, No strength of man, or fiercest wild beast, could withstand?... Which first shall I bewail, Thy bondage or lost sight, Prison within prison Inseparably dark?

That is indeed admirable, and not so easy to write as it looks. But some kind of _vers libre_ can be turned out by anyone; and to encourage the use of this medium will be to encourage and vastly increase that multitudinous body of humble and industrious versifyers who are at present the most conspicuous ornament of American literature.

The Decorative Straight-Jacket: Rhymed Verse

MAXWELL BODENHEIM

The clamping of the inevitable strait-jacket, rhymed verse, upon the shrinking form of poetry has been the pastime of centuries. Those who would free poetry from the outworn metal bands and let her stretch her cramped limbs are labeled decadent, slothful, and futile. How easy it is to paste disagreeable labels upon the things one happens to dislike.

I admit that poetry freed from the bonds she has so long worn may become vulgar and over-demonstrative. A convict who has just been released from a penitentiary is perhaps inclined to caper down the road, and split the air with good red shouts. But after his first excesses he walks slowly, thinking of the way before him. With some poets free verse is still the boisterous convict; with others it is already the sober, determined individual. But I rather like even the laughing convict, looking back and flinging huge shouts at his imposing but petty prison.

Suppose I were a Bluebeard who had enticed a young girl into my dim chamber of poetic-thought. Suppose I took the little knife of rhyme and coolly sliced off one of her ears, two or three of her fingers, and finished by clawing out a generous handful of her shimmering, myriad-tinted hair, with the hands of meter. I might afterwards display her to the world, saying: “Look! Is she not still beautiful, still almost perfect?” But would that excuse my butchery? The lesson is perhaps fairly clear. Rhymed verse mutilates and cramps poetry. It is impossible for even the greatest poet completely to rise above its limitations. He may succeed in a measure, but that is due to his strength and not to the useless fetters he wears. But, say the defenders of the fetters, rhyme and meter are excellent disciplines. Does Poetry or does the Poet need to be disciplined? Are they cringing slaves who cannot be trusted to walk alone and unbound? These are obvious things, but one must sometimes be obvious when speaking to those who still possess a childish belief. Poetry is not determined by the monotonous form in which it is usually clothed, but by the strength or weakness of its voice. Because men have foolishly placed this voice in the mouth of a child, wearing a dress with so many checks on it, and a hat the blackness of which matches the ebony of its ugly shoes, it does not necessarily follow that the voice becomes miraculously changed when placed in some other mouth, whose owner wears a different garb. Then there is the rhythm difficulty. If the little child, Rhyme and Meter, does not swing his foot in time to what he is saying, adding rhythm, his words, according to some, change from poetry to prose. What delightful superstitions!

Poets can undoubtedly rise to great heights, in spite of the fact that they must replace stronger words with weaker ones, because “passion” does not rhyme with “above,” but “love” does. But how much higher could they rise if they were free? I do not say that to eliminate rhyme, meter, and rhythm is to make the way absolutely clear. The Poet must still be a Poet to climb. Nor do I say that if the Poet finds that rhyme, rhythm, and meter happen almost to fit his poetic thoughts, he must not use them. I only say that the poet who finds that the usual forms of poetry confine and mar his poetic thoughts should be able to discard them without receiving the usual chorus of sneers, and that if he does he is not miraculously changed from a poet to a writer of prose.

Harriet Monroe’s Poetry

EUNICE TIETJENS

_You and I_, by Harriet Monroe. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

Right here in Chicago, under our very noses, there is dwelling personified a Real Force. It is done up in a neat and compact little package, as most real forces are that are not of the Krupp variety, and it works with so little fuss and fury that it takes some discernment to recognize it for a force at all. Nevertheless it is a power which is felt throughout the length and breadth of the country, in California, in Florida, in Canada, and in England. And wherever it is felt it is a liberating force, a force that ruthlessly shatters the outworn conventions of the art in which it operates, that tears away the tinsel trappings and bids art and beauty spring forth clean and untrammeled, to forge for themselves new forms that shall be fitting for the urge of today.

The name by which this force is known in every day parlance is Miss Harriet Monroe, and its manifestations are twofold—as poet and as editor. As editor she has created and kept alive the courageous little magazine _Poetry: A Magazine of Verse_, which might almost, so far as Chicago is concerned, be called the spiritual older sister of THE LITTLE REVIEW. It, too, in its own field, stands for the revolt of today against the hide-bound spirit of yesterday, and it, too, is a thorn in the side of the Philistines.

The most recent manifestation of Miss Monroe’s influence is, however, in her character as poet. She has collected together a large number of poems, most of which have already appeared in the leading magazines and have been widely copied, and has brought them out under the title _You and I_. Seeing them so collected, one is much better able to get a perspective on the poems themselves, and on the very interesting personality behind them. And they bulk large. Unquestionably this is one of the most important of the recent books of poetry.

_You and I_ is essentially modern in spirit and in treatment. Miss Monroe has the power of looking with the eyes of the imagination at many of our modern institutions. _The Hotel_, _The Turbine_, _The Panama Canal_, _The Ocean Liner_—these are some of the subjects she treats with a real understanding and a sweep of vision that quite transfigures these work-a-day objects. And she is equally at home when writing of the great emotional complexity of _State Street at Night_ or the simpler but more profound poignancy of the _Elegy for a Child_. Indeed, one of the noticeable things about the book is the unusually large range of themes treated.

There is also in this book the primal, but unfortunately rare, gift of wonder. This is one of the essential qualities of true poetry, and it furnishes Miss Monroe with the key-note of the book, an open-eyed, courageous facing of fate, and an unshakable belief in the redeeming power of beauty.

This little lyric may serve as an introduction to the spirit of the book:

THE WONDER OF IT

How wild, how witch-like weird that life should be! That the insensate rock dared dream of me, And take to bursting out and burgeoning— Oh, long ago——yo ho!—— And wearing green! How stark and strange a thing That life should be!

Oh mystic mad, a rigadoon of glee, That dust should rise, and leap alive, and flee Afoot, awing, and shake the deep with cries— Oh, far away—yo hay! What moony mask, what arrogant disguise That life should be!

Scharmel Iris: Italian Poet

MILO WINTER

Scharmel Iris, the first of the Italians in America to write poetry in English is a Florentine who was brought to Chicago when but an infant. Before his tenth year his poems attracted attention and were warmly praised by such men as Ruskin, Swinburne and Gosse. Later Francis Thompson and Richard Le Gallienne expressed appreciation. These poems which originally appeared in leading publications of England and America are gathered together for the first time and printed by the Ralph Fletcher Seymour Company (Fine Arts Building, Chicago; $1.00 net). The volume, entitled _Lyrics of a Lad_, contains his most desirable and characteristic lyrics and is a serious contribution to our poetic literature. These poems came to be respected as art through their freshness and originality—there are no trite, worn-out, meaningless phrases, or words of an abstract, generalized significance. Immortal beauty is a vision in his eyes and a passion in his heart, and he has labored to reveal it to the world. Art is a creation of men’s minds, and because Mr. Iris’s creation is direct and spontaneous it becomes greater art. This volume is not post-Miltonic or post-Swinburnian or post-Kiplonian. This young poet has the good sense to speak naturally and to paint things as he sees them. Because this book is Scharmel Iris it is distinctive. It is without sham and without affectation. The announcement of its publication and his poems in THE LITTLE REVIEW brought the publisher three-hundred orders. The book, slender and well-printed, has more real poetry than any volume of modern verse it has been our good fortune to read.

It is difficult to do an important book justice in a short article. Perhaps a miscellaneous quotation of lines will help:

The thrush spills golden radiance From boughs of dusk;

The day was a chameleon;

In sweat and pangs the pregnant, Night Brings forth the wondrous infant, Light;

Within the sunset-press, incarnadine, The sun, a peasant, tramples out his wine;

You are the body-house of lust;

Where twilight-peacocks lord the place Spendthrifts of pride and grace;

And lo, at Heaven’s blue-windowed house God sets the moon for lamp;

The sunbeams sought her hair, And rested there;

These mute white Christs—the daily crucified;

Lucretia Borgia fair The poppy is.

The sunbeams dance in dawn’s ballet;

While sunset-panthers past her run To caverns of the Sun;

When from the husk of dusk I shake the stars;

O dusk, you brown cocoon, Release your moth, the moon,

Ah, since that night When to her window, she came forth as light, Have I been Beauty’s acolyte;

and there are many other striking lines. In _The Visionary_ a poet steals the pennies on a dead man’s eyes to buy himself bread, and, after his death, the money denied him in life is in turn placed on his sightless eyes. It is irony of the bitterest sort. _Late January_ is an excellent landscape—interpretive rather than descriptive. _Scarlet—White_ is struck at the double standard, and is a strong and powerful utterance. _April_, _Canzonette_, _Lady of the Titian Hair_ are exquisite and charming lyrics. Three graceful compositions are _The Heart-Cry of the Celtic Maid_, _Tarantella_ and _Song for a Rose_. _The Ugly Woman_ will cause discussion, but it is good art. The trio of _Spring Songs_ and _Her Room_ are well nigh perfect. _Mary’s Quest_ is very tender, as is also the _Twilight Lullaby_. _The Leopard_, _Fantasy of Dusk and Dawn_, _The Forest of the Sky_ are wonderfully imaginative, and were written in Chicago,—in the grime and barrenness of Halsted Street. There is a poignant thing of five lines, a mother who is going blind over the death of a son. Her despair is hopeless and tragic—she makes a true and awful picture of realism in her grief. _Heroes_ treats of the nameless heroes, daily met and overlooked. The love poems are sincere as all love poems must be. In _Foreboding_ the note of sadness is emphatic—almost dominant; but there is more than mere sadness in it; it is not a minor note. It is tragedy, really, that speaks in such poetry:

Her cold and rigid hands Will be as iron bands Around her lover’s heart;

and

O’er thee will winter through the sky’s gray sieve Sift down his charity of snow.

_The Mad Woman_ (printed in _Poetry_) is as excellent as it is unusual, and few finer things have been done in any literature.

There is a fine flowing harmony about the poetry of Scharmel Iris that denotes a power far beyond that revealed by many of today’s singers. The poems are colorful and certainly musical and they display an adequate technique. Such a gift as his, revealed in a number of very fine achievements, gives promise of genuine greatness. After many years of discouragement and the hardest work, he has at last found a publisher who bears the cost of the edition, purely on the merit of the work. It contains a preface by Dr. Egan, American minister in Copenhagen, an attractive title-page decoration by Michele Greco, and a photogravure portrait of the author. By advancing the work of living poets like Mr. Iris one can repay the debt he owes to the old poets. This poetry (as THE LITTLE REVIEW remarked) is not merely the sort which interests or attracts; it remains in your mind as part of that art treasure-house which is your religion and your life.

The Poetry of T. Sturge Moore

In an early number of THE LITTLE REVIEW a correspondent remarked that an article I had the honor of contributing sounded a rather curious note inasmuch as it was a piece of pure criticism in a magazine deliberately given over to exuberance.

Well, it is now my turn to stand up for exuberance as against a contributor, A. M., who gives the poetry of T. Sturge Moore criticism only, and, in my humble opinion, criticism as unfair as would be a description of Notre Dame rendered altogether in terms of gargoyles and their relative positions.

Would it not be more in the spirit of THE LITTLE REVIEW to point out in the title poem of Mr. Moore’s book, _The Sea is Kind_, such passages as the two following:

_Eucritos_—

Thou knowest, Menalcas, I built my hut not sheltered but exposed, Round not right-angled. A separate window like a mouth to breathe, No matter whence the breeze might blow,— A separate window like an eye to watch From off the headland lawn that prompting wink Of Ocean musing “Why,” wherever he May glimpse me at some pitiable task. Long sea arms reach behind me, and small hills Have waded half across the bay in front, Dividing my horizon many times But leaving every wind an open gate. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

There is a sorcery in well loved words: But unintelligible music still Probes to the buried Titan in the heart Whose strength, the vastness of forgotten life, Suffers but is not dead; Tune stirs him as no thought of ours nor aught Mere comprehension grasps, can him disquiet.

And these are parts of a dramatic poem full of fresh figures, colorful glimpses of the romance of ancient life, and what a school-boy would describe as a “perfectly corking” description of a sea fight with dead men slowly dropping through the green water—

As dead bird leaf-resisted Shot on tall plane tree’s top, Down, never truly stopping, Through green translucence dropping, They often seemed to stop.

And how, again could any thorough searcher of this book fail to mention that delightful recipe for wine “Sent From Egypt with a Fair Robe of Tissue to a Sicilian Vine-dresser, 276 B. C.” And surely no obscurity nor any uncouthness of figure—such as your critic objects to, as if poets did not have the faults of their virtues—mar those beautiful child poems:

That man who wishes not for wings, Must be the slave of care; For birds that have them move so well And softly through the air: They venture far into the sky, If not so far as thoughts or angels fly.

Were William Cory making a prediction rather than “An Invocation” when he ended his poem of that title with the line:

Two minds shall flow together, the English and the Greek.

I would feel like nominating Mr. T. Sturge Moore as its fulfillment.

LLEWELLYN JONES.

Amy Lowell’s Contribution

_Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_, by Amy Lowell. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

... And Amy Lowell’s new volume of verse refutes all the critical disparagement of _vers libre_, imagism, or “unrhymed cadence,” as Miss Lowell herself chooses to call her work. For she demonstrates that it is something new—that it is a clear-eyed workmanship which belongs distinctly to this keener age of ours. Miss Lowell’s technical debt to the French—to the so-called Parnassian school—has been paid in a poetical production that will put to shame our hackneyed and slovenly “accepted” poets. Most of the poems in her book are written in _vers libre_, and this is the way Miss Lowell analyzes them: “They are built upon ‘organic rhythm,’ or the rhythm of the speaking voice with its necessity for breathing, rather than upon a strict metrical system. They differ from ordinary prose rhythms by being more curved and containing more stress. The stress, and exceedingly marked curve, of any regular metre is easily perceived. These poems, built upon cadence, are more subtle, but the laws they follow are not less fixed. Merely chopping prose lines into lengths does not produce cadence; it is constructed upon mathematical and absolute laws of balance and time. In the preface to his Poems, Henley speaks of ‘those unrhyming rythms in which I had tried to quintessentialize, as (I believe) one scarce can do in rhyme.’ The desire to ‘quintessentialize,’ to head-up an emotion until it burns white-hot, seems to be an integral part of the modern temper, and certainly ‘unrhymed cadence’ is unique in its power of expressing this.”

Take Miss Lowell’s _White and Green_, for example:

Hey! My daffodil-crowned, Slim and without sandals! As the sudden spurt of flame upon darkness So my eyeballs are startled with you, Supple-limbed youth among the fruit-trees, Light runner through tasselled orchards. You are an almond flower unsheathed Leaping and flickering between the budded branches.

Or _Absence_:

My cup is empty tonight, Cold and dry are its sides, Chilled by the wind from the open window. Empty and void, it sparkles white in the moonlight. The room is filled with the strange scent Of wistaria blossoms. They sway in the moon’s radiance And tap against the wall. But the cup of my heart is still, And cold, and empty.

When you come, it brims Red and trembling with blood, Heart’s blood for your drinking; To fill your mouth with love And the bitter-sweet taste of a soul.

—M. C. A.

Star Trouble

HELEN HOYT

A little star Came into the heaven At the close of even. It seemed not very far, And it was young and soft. But the gray Got in its way, So that I longed to reach my hand aloft And push the clouds by From its little eye, From its little soft ray.

Parasite

CONRAD AIKEN

Nine days he suffered. It was in this wise.— He, being scion to Homer in our time, Must needs be telling tales, in prose or rhyme; He was a pair of large blue hungry eyes. Money he had, enough to live in ease;— Drank wine occasionally; would often sit— Child and critic alternate—in the Pit: Cheap at a half-crown he thought feasts like these. Plays held him by the throat—and cinemas too— They blanched his face and made him grip his seat; And oh, fine music to his soul was sweet— He said, “His ears towards that music _grew_!” And he kept watch with stars night after night, Spinning tales from the little of life he knew.— Of modern life he was the parasite.