THE limitation of Vers Libre, which I regard as only our old friend, Prose Poetry, broken up in convenient lengths, seems to be that the poet has not the continual hold over his reader’s attention that a regulated (this does not mean altogether “regular”) scheme of verse properly used would give him. The temporary loss of control must be set off against the freedom which vers libre-ists claim from irrelevant or stereotyped images suggested by the necessity of rhyme or a difficult metre.

This is not to say that a poet shouldn’t start his race from what appears to hardened traditionalists as about ten yards behind scratch; indeed, if he feels that this is the natural place for him, he would be unwise to do otherwise. But my contention is that vers libre has a serious limitation which regulated verse has not. In vers libre there is no natural indication as to how the lines are to be stressed. There are thousands of lines of Walt Whitman’s, over the pointing of which, and the intended cadence, elocutionists would disagree; and this seems to be leaving too much to chance.

I met in a modern vers libre poem the line spoken by a fallen angel, “I am outcast of Paradise”; but how was I to say it? What clue had I to the intended rhythm, in a poem without any guiding signs? In regulated verse the reader is compelled to accentuate as the poet determines. Here is the same line introduced into three nonsensical examples of rhyming:—

or quite differently:—

or one can even make the reader accept a third alternative, impressively dragging at the last important word:—

The regulating poet must of course make sure at the beginning of the poem that there is no possible wrong turning for the reader to take. Recently, and since writing the above, an elder poet, who asks to remain anonymous, has given me an amusing account of how he mis-read Swinburne’s “Hertha,” the opening lines of which are:—

My informant read the short lines as having four beats each:—

and thought this very noble and imposing, though the “Équal Ánd whÓle” was perhaps a trifle forced. The next stanza told him that something was amiss and he discovered that it was only a two-beat line after all. “It was Swinburne’s impudence in putting the Almighty’s name in an unaccented place of the line, and accenting the name of Man, that put me on the wrong track,” he said. Swinburne’s fault here, for such as agree with the accusation, was surely in his wrong sense of material; he was making muslin do the work of camel’s hair cloth. He was imposing a metre on his emotions, whereas the emotions should determine the metre—and even then constantly modify it. Apropos of the vers libre-ists, my friend also denied that there was such a thing as vers libre possible, arguing beyond refutation that if it was vers it couldn’t be truly libre and if it was truly libre it couldn’t possibly come under the category of vers.

Perhaps the most damaging criticism (if true) of the vers libre school of today is that the standard which most of its professors set themselves is not a very high one; with rhythmic freedom so dearly bought, one expects a more intricate system of interlacing implications than in closer bound poetry. Natural rhythms need no hunting; there is some sort of rhythm in every phrase you write, if you break it up small enough and make sufficient allowances for metric resolutions. There is often a queer, wayward broken-kneed rhythm running through whole sentences of standard prose. The following news item has not had a word changed since I found it in The Daily Mirror.

One doesn’t “listen” when reading prose, but in poetry or anything offered under that heading a submerged metre is definitely expected. Very few readers of Mr. Kipling’s “Old Man Kangaroo” which is printed as prose, realize that it is written in strict verse all through and that he is, as it were, pulling a long nose at us. The canny vers librist gets help from his printer to call your attention to what he calls “cadence” and “rhythmic relations” (not easy to follow) which might have escaped you if printed as prose; this sentence, you’ll find, has its thumb to its nose.