a new game for poets

showing why the progress of free verse happens to be progressing backwards

G. K. CHESTERTON

Everybody knows that the comic upstart in Molière was surprised and delighted to discover that he had spoken Prose all his life. The cultivated modern man will doubtless be equally surprised and delighted to discover that he has spoken Free Verse all his life. When he gives directions to a waiter or asks questions of a policeman, he invariably does it in the staccato style of the new poets. His manner of speech merits all the special praises accorded to the new poets by the new critics. It is wholly emancipated from the standards of stilted versification. It is comparatively seldom that his order to the waiter is marred by the monotonous jingle of rhyme. It is yet more rarely that his conversation with the policeman recalls the cold and classical construction of the sonnet. Any ordinary sentence that he might write in a letter, such as: "It is still raining: and a dog barking next door does not improve my temper," has obviously only to be rearranged on the page, in curt and carefully truncated lines, as:

I have

A headache: and a dog

Barking

and so on, to be admitted and admired in any magazine whose wealthy proprietors feel the deep pulse of the progress of the arts. It is true that the poet might put into the poem one or two lines which the letter-writer would probably not pause to put in the letter. There might be some such bright additions as "The water is grey and greasy," or "The blotting paper has black spots, sporadically," with "sporadically" in a line by itself. A man may not, perhaps, invariably be so careful to mention all these details when he is writing a letter; but that is only the last trace of an old-world tradition, to the effect that a man writing what another man is to have the trouble of reading should, so far as it is reasonably possible, write about something interesting. The black blots and the greasy water are, I admit, additions to the old form. They are peculiar to the new poets when they write poetry. They are too prosaic for prose.

For the phrase free verse is misleading, even as to the meaning which it is meant to convey. These people mean by free verse something that is freer than verse. From their own standpoint, they mean something that is too free to be verse. And taken in this sense, there is at least some sort of sense in it. The words mean something, at least by the superficial meaning of words. It is obviously true in one sense that rhyme and rhythm are a restraint, if only because they are generally a labour. It would be more trouble to talk to the policeman and make the second sentence rhyme with the first, or to rearrange the menu in metrical form for the benefit of the waiter.

And in this sense, even if we deny that free verse is verse, we may still admit that free verse is free. But even upon this superficial plane of verbal discussion, we shall still say that the two words, taken together, are a total falsehood.

Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms. Using the word "free" in the sense in which such people use it, it is utterly incompatible with what they are talking about. If it means detachment and a sort of indifferent universality, it is as intrinsically impossible to the artist as it obviously is to the lover. We talk about the bonds of matrimony; but it is obvious that love is as much of a bond as marriage; and we talk equally freely, for that matter, about a bond of friendship. There is a modern trick of talking about husband and wife as if they were chained .together like two Greek galleyslaves. But any ordinary phrase for spontaneous affection is really much stronger; such as the phrase "I am very much attached to Tommy." That suggests not so much Greek galley-slaves as Siamese twins. That degree of dependence and limitation is involved in the intrinsic nature of the sentiment itself; and cannot be loosened by any legal emancipations. And in the same way the necessities of material and of labour are involved in the intrinsic nature of the art itself; and cannot be abolished without abolishing the art. If these revolutionaries really knew what they were doing, and were clear-headed enough to defend what they were doing, they would say they were in favour of abolishing the art of verse. They would justify it, as more logical revolutionaries justified abolishing the art of heraldry. They did not throw about splashes of any colour on shields of any shape, and call the compromise Free Heraldry.

The actual truth is that the only free verse is formal verse. It is only in a vulgar verbal fashion that we can talk of free verse when we mean formless verse. For the object of art is to give the sensation of enfranchisement to the spirit; and this is only done by art when it really is art. It is not that which takes liberties with poetical forms; but that which gives liberty to poetical feelings. It is an act of deliverance. For every ordinary man has a poet inside him; a poet who is a prisoner. Great poetry releases the poet; that is, it gives words to our passion which are like wings to our soul. And this is always done best by words that have regularity and recurrence, like a rhyme. A clerk walking down a country road on a holiday will often feel very much like Shakespeare or Keats; his only limitation is that he cannot say what he feels—except with the assistance of Shakespeare or Keats. He cannot find any talk tall enough for his soaring spirits, unless he remembers some such line as that turn or swing in the middle of the great sonnet: "But thine eternal summer shall not fade." Then he will really feel that somewhere high above his head great gates have opened with a noise of trumpets. Or if he remembers the simple and sweeping opening of another verse, "Thou wast not made for death, immortal bird," he will feel, when he has said it, as if a bird had really gone forth from his mouth.

^ Now a real poem does this because it is something like a spell or a charm. And the essence of a spell was exactitude; it had to be a precise and particular form of words. It is useless to argue about it; as useless as for a burglar to complain of the arbitrary and artificial arrangement of letters which alone will open the safe. If you think you can produce that liberation of the soul by another arrangement, you have only to try. You are quite at liberty not to say "Thou wast not made for death, immortal bird," but to say, instead, "You were not made to die, indestructible fowl." There is no compulsion on you to say "But thine eternal summer shall not fade;" and in that sense you are quite free when you say "But your endless August will not disappear." But you are not free in the sense of having freed your spirit, with something like the wings of a bird or the flight of an arrow. That can only be done by the magic words; and the magic words are nearly always metrical words. They are, if you like, arbitrary words, in the sense that they are not in their nature subject to argument. If you stand in front of the closed cavern of Ali Baba saying anything that comes into your head (which is the meaning of most modern emancipation and realism) the rock will no more be rent for you than for the man who insisted on saying "Open barley" instead of "Open sesame." Barley is a very valuable thing in its place; indeed it is rather too solid and traditional to appeal to the reformers in question. They are more likely to tell the cavern to open in the name of mildew or toadstools or stinging-nettles or (as a yet more appropriate diet) thistles. In any case, if the liberation involved is the real liberation of the opening of caverns, the opening of prisons, the opening of minds and the opening of hearts, then certainly the old formal poets could do the trick. If it means the liberation of the poet from any obligation to write poetry, then certainly the modern anarchists can do the trick. Here, however, the point is only important as a stage in the argument. I submit that the ideal of free verse is wrong even by the test of freedom. But as a matter of fact the new poets do not appeal exclusively or even especially, to the test of freedom. They appeal even more enthusiastically to the ideal of progress. And it is particularly in relation to this progressive test that I have a polite suggestion to offer, touching what may be called a new game for poets.

Continued on page 134

Continued from page 72

Since the new poets are primarily concerned about the Progress of Poesy, passing with all its pomp of laurels and of lyres, it is relevant to point out to them that their long and splendid procession seems to be progressing backwards. What is called free verse is merely an attempt to make verse more natural by making it more conversational. That is to say, it is an attempt to improve singing by making it more like talking. But surely the ideal thing would be if all talking were like singing. If we are going to set before us the conception of a later and higher historical stage in human progress, that would really be a higher one. That would really be a Utopia; a world in which all the talkers were poets. Instead of breaking up the beautiful line about the immortal bird into fragmentary references to an indestructible fowl, we ought to do exactly the reverse. We ought to talk about the destructible fowl who lays eggs for breakfast or is eaten with bread sauce, and talk about the chicken in the same soaring and musical language in which Keats talked about the nightingale. We ought to be able, on the spur of the moment, to celebrate the hardboiled egg in a ballad as our fathers celebrated the golden egg in a fairy-tale. We ought to be able, spontaneously and on the spot, to produce a noble poem about bread sauce, like the many noble poems about bread.

It may perhaps be answered, by the craven and the faint-hearted, that it would be difficult to do. It would require a certain training, during which the new talent might or might not be matured. Under this artistic discipline the new poets would remain, for any such period or number of years as was needed before the first happy and light-hearted lyric sprang spontaneously from them. Perhaps some of the new poets would never recover the power of speech at all. After a time, the world would get reconciled even to that.

In the undergraduate stages of the course, while the student was still in a juvenile class, perhaps he would be allowed to quote poetry instead of making it up. In commenting on the weather to the booking clerk or the lift-boy, he would merely use some familiar phrase, as that the sun flattered the mountain-tops with sovran eye, or that the chimney-pots were pinnacled dim in the intense inane.

But all this use of familiar quotations is only for the young student while he is really young. From the public and recognized poet a perpetual stream of original verse will be expected, playing upon grapes, champagne-bottles, waiters, lift-boys and everything else. In early life he would be excused if he stood hesitating for some five or ten minutes, before he answered the greeting of some beautiful and fashionable hostess, with something in the Spenserian stanza that should be not unworthy of her beauty. But after some years of our new literary discipline, he could toss off a compliment in the most complicated metre. At its best the discipline might involve the literary man being a little silent at dinner; but again, who shall say that there might not be something of veiled and mysterious providence even in that? As for the main fact that anybody can write free verse—that merely means that it can become more prosaic. That is merely to chop up the simple and united language of the great poets into the chatter of the existing dinner-table. That is merely to make what might have been poetic speech as abrupt, as angular, as trivial and as inconsistent as the ordinary talk of the town. Free verse has not any tendency towards freeing any verse. It is merely chaining verse in the clanking and clattering fetters of conventional conversation.

There is only one way in which we could ever find something more civilized than civilization. And that is by turning all daily life into an art, and therefore all daily speech into an art along with it.