Our great poets do not owe their greatness to the use
of the stereotyped literary metrical forms. A man may have a great gift for the use of these forms and not be a great poet, just as he may be a great poet and fall flat when they encumber him. Ruskin and Dickens were great poets, but when we say that their metrical compositions were not great poetry we merely mean that they were not adept in choosing rhymes and complying with metrical rules. To do this requires a distinct gift. An amateur selects forced rhymes and has no ear. Swinburne, besides being a great poet, had a distinct gift of creating melodious verse; but many parodists have shown that they also had this gift without being able to write poetry.
Mrs. Browning was a good poet both in verse and in prose. She wrote her love poems in prose in her letters to her husband, and in verse in the Portuguese sonnets which are nothing more than some of the letters put into metre and rhyme; there are some who think that the letters are the better poetry of the two. Her sentiments did not become poetry because they were put in sonnet form.
The following letter is poetry:
I pour out my thoughts to you, dearest, dearest, as if it were right rather to think of doing myself that good and relief, than of you who have to read all. But you spoil me into an excess of liberty by your tenderness. Best in the world! Oh—you help me to live—I am better and lighter since I have drawn near to you even on this paper—already I am better and lighter. And now I am going to dream of you . . . to meet you on some mystical landing place . . . in order to be quite well to-morrow. Oh—we are so selfish on this earth, that nothing grieves us very long, let it be ever so grievous, unless we are touched in ourselves . . . in the apple of our eye . . . in the quick of our heart . . . in what you are and where you are . . . my own dearest beloved! So you need not be
afraid for me. We all look to our own, as I to you; the thunderbolts may strike the tops of the cedars, and, except in the first part, none of us be moved. True it is of me—not of you perhaps, certainly you are better than I in all things. Best in the world you are—no one is like you. Can you read what I have written? Do not love me less! Do you think that I cannot feel you love me, through all this distance? If you loved me less, I should know, without a word or sign. Because I live by your loving me! (June 24, 1846.)
It took the Greeks and Romans some time to learn that prose was the best medium for philosophy and history. Plato had the good sense to write in prose instead of following the ridiculous method of versifying of the early Greek philosophers, like Parmenides and Empedocles.
In the first century A.D. various Roman historians wrote of historical events in the form of epic poems. These are really histories with a little occasional glimmer of poetry. Thus we had Silius's Pontica, Valerius Flaccus's Argonautica, Statius's Thebais, and Lucan's Pharsalia. The last two works were especially admired in the medieval ages when rhymed or metrical historical chronicles were the fashion, and they were favorites of Dante. Very few people to-day read these metrical histories. English literature also is full of metrical and rhymed histories, geographies, criticisms, scientific works, essays, etc. But no one reads Warner's Albion's England, Drayton's Poly Olbion, or Daniel's First Four Books of the Civil War. And Darwin's versified Botanical Garden has been a standing joke.
It is remarkable how past usages in literature influence us. The examples of Lucretius versifying philosophy in his Nature of Things, and that of Horace writing literary criticism in verse in his Art of Poetry, have been fruitful of mischief. Even much of the lengthy works of Shelley,
Byron and Browning would have been better had they been written in prose, and they would have lost none of their poetic qualities. The greatness of the Ring and the Book, Don Juan and the Revolt of Islam remains when these works are translated into the prose of another language.