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 Allannerismns of Free Verse

MANNERISMS OF FREE VERSE

Howevermuch itmay be claimedthatfreeverse is closer

tonatural speech,to thenaturalbreath-cadenceand pause,
thanmetrical poetry,the reverseis actually true of the
majorityof examplespublishedtoday. Open anymaga
zine at random and you will find that the score of the poem
resemblesa scoreof music inwhich the restsexceed the
notes. Nor does thepattern,even so, resolve itselfinto
music, intoany organicrhythmof any sort; it is, rather,
as jerky as a doll that is pulled by strings-strings which
occasionally stick and elicit only Pa, when one iswaiting for
Pa-Pa, or Ma-a-a wvhenone expects the full maternal salu
tation! Like an arrested movie of a man walking, the verse
halts, foot high in air,without any apparent rhyme or reason,
until themachine starts it going again:
Timidly
Against a backgroundof brick tenements
Some treesspread theirbranches
Skyward.
Or on another page:
A late snow beats
With cold white fistsupon the tenements,
Hurriedly drawing blinds and shutters
Like tall old slatterns
Pulling aprons about theirheads.
Is it symptomatic
of the disorganization
and disconnec
tion of modern life that so much free verse is composed of
momentaryimpressions,
stabbingsensations,themere state
ment of which is supposed to make a poem, as in the above
passage? images and sensations piled one on top of the

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POETRY: A Magazine of Verse

other,
with no continuity
of thought
or emotion,aswith no
fluidity
of rhythm-aresultmomentarilyarrestingbutwith
no power to hold beyond the moment; and, as examples
multiply,certain to prove infinitely
irritating
and weari
some? Perhaps itwill furtherillustratethepoint to quote
otherpassagesfollowingtheone just given:
Lights slanting fromMott street
Gibber out,
Or dribble throughtea-roomslits,
Where anonymous shapes
Conniving behind shutteredpanes
Caper and disappear .....

Only theBowery
Is throbbinglike a fistula
Back of her ice-scabbed fronts,
Where livid faces
Glimmer in furtivedoorways,
Or spill out of the black pockets of alleys.

Formerlywe used to thinkthatsomething

was supposed
to happen in a poem, but in' these poems, full as they are of
movement and as restless as a jumping-jack, nothing really
ever happens at all. The Jack jumps up and down on the
stick, but beyond Jack and the stick, there is nothing. Yet
it ishardlythenothingness
of themystic!
Another pleasing characteristic of free verse as it is
written today is the pompoussolemnityof its platitudes,
which, brokeninto fragments,
would seem to the author
to be less bromidically obvious than if stated in plain prose.
But it need hardly be said that the author deceives himself.
A pleasing title for a book of this kind would be Cracked
China. And thenthereis theverysimplestatement,
reiter
[961
 of Free Verse
Mannerismns

ated, upon which much free verse builds itself in what we

may call the Primer Style of Vers Libre:
I am sitting inmy room.
I am lookingout of thewindow,
At the leaves.
The brown leaves,
They fall,
They flutter,
They drop.
Do you see the leaves fall?
It is night.
The wind is blowing.
Oh, how it blows!
Do you hear it blow?
Perhaps indeed the firstreadersof thenext generation
will be completely made up of the free verse of this.
But does it not seem odd that thosewho insist that poetry
should be at least as well written as good prose, should have
descended to a second childhood in free verse, and that
themost of free verse iswritten inwhat is such incredibly
bad prose? And does it not seem odd that the question of
style has been overlooked by all the critics in a barren dis
cussion of. rhythm-rhythm which does not, for the most
part,exist?
Truly, free verse as a vehicle exhibits many varieties
which still await classification and analysis; and yet there
is such a marked similarity among free verse practitioners
today thatwithout a signature it is difficult to tell one poet
from another. Mr. Bernard Berenson thinks he can tell
Botticellis by the shape of the thumb, but unless one is

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POETRY: A Ala gazin e of Verse

expert in some such detective method, one is at a loss to

assigncorrectlytheownershipofmuch freeverse-that is,
if one plays fair and refuses to look at the signature until
one has ventured a guess.
It isdifficult,
forinstance,toknowwhether
Mliss Lowell
iswritingMr. Bynner'sverse,or whetherhe iswriting
hers. With one or two exceptions, almost any of the free
versewritersnow practicingcould havewrittenMr. Byn
ner's Songs of theUnknownLover, whose recentanony
mous publication gave one a good opportunity to guess.
But the proof of the poet is, as always, in the thing that
distinguishes him from the crowd, the thing that makes one
pick him out by "the divine sign," as Whitman would
say. And this operates no less in free verse than in rhymed.
Nor need one fear. Mediocrity in free verse, like medioc
rity in metrical verse, will pass and be forgotten. While
it lasts, however, it is if anything the more tiresome of the
two. A. C. H.

REVIEWS
CHAMBER MUSIC-OLD AND NEW

ChamberMusic, by JamesJoyce. B. W. Huebsch.

Corn fromOlde Fieldes-an Anthologyof English Poems
fromtheXI th to theXVIIth Century:with biograph
ical notes by Eleanor M. Brougham. John Lane Co.
Mir. James Joyce is better known as a novelist and play
wright than as a poet, and deservedly so. For after every

[98]