Are no longer your safeguard: They are now your danger and difficulty! And you must live the life you started to imitate In spite of these perilous waters. For they keep you now from being neutral— You only pretend to be. You are not free, independent, brave, You are shackled, cowardly For what could happen to you overnight In the Orient, If you stood with your shoulders up, Suppose you do it, Republic. Get some class, Throw out your chest, lift up your head, Be a ruler in the world, And not a hermit in regimentals with a flint-lock. And one in China, Quit looking between your legs for the re-appearance Stand up and be a man! Edgar Lee Masters (1869-) Carl Sandburg's best known poem, "Chicago," is quoted in the following chapter. The poem which we quote here is a cutting satire upon a certain type of American millionaire. A FENCE Now the stone house on the lake front is finished and the workmen are beginning the fence. The palings are made of iron bars with steel points that can stab the life out of any man who falls on them. As a fence, it is a masterpiece, and will shut off the rabble and all vagabonds and hungry men and all wandering children looking for a place to play. Passing through the bars and over the steel points will go nothing except Death and the Rain and To-morrow. Carl Sandburg (1878-) On the part of the best contemporary writers of free verse, there is a tendency toward a greater regularity of form. It is felt that free verse is too easy to write and that its facility betrays the poet into diffuseness and feebleness. Hence the attempt to define free verse and to lay down certain laws for its composition. The Imagists define free verse as "a verse-form based upon cadence." One of the rules for the writing of poetry laid down by the Imagists is, in part: "To create new rhythms -as the expressions of new moods-and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. . . . In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea." The Imagists insist that the unit is not the foot or the line but the strophe, which may comprise the whole poem or only a part of it. Each strophe is conceived as a circle, a departure and a return., The following poem by John Gould Fletcher shows this tendency toward greater regularity of form. EXIT Thus would I have it: The scene of my departure. The pale brown sand And then, afar off, One ship with sails full-set John Gould Fletcher (1886-) Free verse is a hybrid form; it is the result of an attempt to explore the no man's land which divides prose from verse. Of late years there has been much confusion of the arts. Music, poetry, and painting have all overstepped their traditional boundaries. Some of the later poets, not satisfied with free verse, have borrowed from the French a form called "polyphonic prose." This form, however, differs even less than free verse from what used to be called prose poetry or poetic prose. Mr. Patterson, in his excellent study, The Rhythm of Prose, states his conviction that the rhythm of free verse is not that of poetry but of prose "spaced prose," he calls it. In other words, free verse is, in the main, only a new name for a very old thing, poetic or impassioned prose. The bulk of current free verse is, like the great majority of rimed poems printed in our newspapers and magazines, not poetry at all; it is not even good prose. There are, however, poems in free verse which challenge comparison with anything that has been said or sung in rime. This anomalous form seems especially effective in poems which attempt to describe the complex industrial civilization of our time. Skyscrapers, railroads, and cot ton mills do not lend themselves readily to conventional poetic treatment. Theoretically, free verse permits the writer to use all the resources of both prose and poetry in his effort to say what has never been effectively said before. Free verse is least suited to lyric poetry; it is nearer the prose level and farther from the song than any other type of poetry. It is, however, excellent in realistic narrative and descriptive poetry. CHAPTER XI POEMS STUDIED BY THEME Cynics have said since the first outpourings of men's hearts, "There is nothing new in art; there are no new subjects." But the very reverse is true. There are no old subjects; every subject is new as soon as it has been transformed by the imagination of the poet.-Joel Elias Spingarn: "Creative Criticism" Up to this point we have studied poems either according to metrical form, as in the sonnet, or according to type, as in the song. There are, of course, many other ways of studying poetry, and each of them has its special merits. The method employed in this chapter, though seldom used, has decided advantages. A very illuminating comparison can be made of what poets in various countries and epochs have found to say of such perennially interesting subjects as nature, patriotism, love, war, death, and immortality. The comparative test is also an excellent test to apply to the work of a poet whose rank we wish to determine. After reading the poems contained in this chapter, the reader should decide whether, in his estimation, the American poets come up to the level of the British, and whether the present-day poets of either country measure up to older writers like Wordsworth and Poe. We shall consider four widely dif |