The free verse of modern times, the revival of which is due to Walt Whitman, is really the oldest form in which poetry was expressed. It existed along with parallelism among the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Hebrews, among the Hindoos and the Anglo-Saxons. It is rhythmical prose, arranged so as to call attention to the rhythm. It is not a third medium for expression, next to prose and the regular verse-forms. The lines do not return upon themselves, that is, there is no repeat any more than in rhythmical prose.
In its present form in English it dates from Aelfric's Lives of the Saints, about 1000 A.D.
Free verse has come to stay, and numbers many able poets among its devotees. It is more natural than rhymed or metrical verse, which, however, it will not wholly displace. The manuscripts of many poets who used conventional metres show that the original form of composition was free verse. The detractors of free verse need not think they bring a valid argument against it when they arrange free verse in prose form, and, vice versa, chop up prose sentences into brief lines beginning with a capital, and ask what is the difference between the two. It is admitted there is none. It matters not if the poet wishes to arrange his composition in free verse forms to call attention to the rhythm, or to print it as prose. It is immaterial if you call vers libre rhythmical prose or a distinct verse form. The poetry is independent of any ordering of the lines. Neither of the resulting products loses or gains in poetical attributes by the objector's turning prose into free verse, or free verse into prose. The question is, how much
ecstasy or emotion, what impassioned ideas there are in the work.
Free verse may or may not have a cadence all its own, but one feels that those who advocate free verse need not try to prove that it does and must possess a cadence peculiar to itself. Free verse may have great poetic value even though it lacks a unique cadence. Free verse rose into prominence lately because poets wanted to be freed from the bonds of metre. They should not encumber themselves with the shackles of a new prosody.
Let us illustrate our point: we shall take a few lines from a great prose poem by Lafcadio Hearn and arrange them in free verse. It is from the essay called "The Eternal Haunter" in the volume Exotics and Retrospectives. The haunter is evidently ancestral memory or the spirit of life in the past.
Ancient her beauty
As the heart of man,
Yet ever waxing fairer,
Forever remaining young.
Mortals wither in time
As leaves in the frost of autumn;
But time only brightens the glow
And the bloom of her endless youth.
All men have loved her
But none shall touch with his lips
Even the hem of her garment.
It is seen that this prose passage in the free verse transformance has the cadences which were present before. It is still poetical, as it was in the original version as well. It really matters little if Hearn had written it as it now stands. It is a question of personal preference with the poet, in what form he wishes to write.
Walter P. Eaton, in an article in the Atlantic Monthly for October, 1919, considers the free verse form different from prose. He took a passage from Pater's Renaissance and arranged it in free verse form, and then a passage from Sandburg's free verse and arranged it in prose, and tried unsuccessfully to show that the Pater passage did not become free verse, and that the Sandburg passage did not become good prose. His mistake was in trying to take a passage from Sandburg that had a patterned form, and in arranging the Pater passage into lines that were too brief. But Professor Lowes has taken passages from Pater, Hewlett, Fiona Macleod, Conrad and George Meredith and printed them as free verse, and they truly read like free verse poems.
The votaries of free verse demand a special cadence, but there is hardly any of it in Masters's poems in the Spoon River Anthology which could have been printed as prose passages. They would have been just as good and poetical as they are in free verse, but Masters has the right to make any arrangement he wanted. Ecstasy is more important than cadence, and he has ecstasy.