The obvious difficulty is to maintain dignity along with relaxation—a feat which Mr. Frost and Mr. E. A. Robinson have occasionally accomplished. And from this it is but a step to the extreme simplicity of Miss Lowell's To Two Unknown Ladies—
If either of you much attracted me
We could fall back upon phenomena
And make a pretty story out of psychic
Balances, but not to be too broad
In my discourtesy, nor prudish neither
(Since, really, I can hardly quite suppose
With all your ghostliness you follow me),
I feel no such attraction. Or if one
Bows to my sympathy for the briefest space,
Snap—it is gone! And, worst of all to tell,
What broke it is not in the least dislike
But utter boredom.
Now....
Thus the wheel has come nearly full circle, but with a longer radius. For just as blank verse developed from the early Elizabethan—and pre-Elizabethan—strict formality to the laxity of the Jacobean dramatists and found a true balance of freedom and restraint in Milton, so from the monotonous eighteenth-century couplet (and it should be recalled that in the beginning blank verse sprang from the couplet) it has gradually enlarged its freedom into the extreme license from a metrical point of view of its adopted cousin free-verse. Already, moreover, there have been signs of a reaction against the extreme, and the wheel is coming to an artistic balance again.
4. Free-Verse
Free-verse (or, as Miss Lowell prefers, 'unrhymed cadence') is a hydra-headed phenomenon. It can never be adequately discussed; for when one head is disposed of, two others appear in its place. Its origins are involved in obscurity and—what is worse—ignorance; and its practitioners and staunchest defenders are as variable in their points of view as it itself is in its rhythmic impulses.[73]
Behind all the utterances of friend and foe seems to lie the ultimate belief that the 'voluntary thraldom' of formal metrical patterns is a monstrous error which can only be removed by unrestricted appreciation and application of the natural rhythms of idea and of language. There is in every thought, however simple or subtle, in every feeling, however evanescent or profound, an inherent rhythm which is as a material body to the thought's or emotion's soul. This native, inevitable rhythm—one might call it the rhythme juste, the exact rhythm—is the only fit expression for an intellectual or emotional idea; all others are foreign to it, tyrannous usurpations, in a word, impossible substitutions for it. To attempt, therefore, to twist these natural and exact rhythms to the formal predetermined patterns of traditional versification is a suicidal impertinence, foredoomed to failure.
Such a position has in theory much justice. It means briefly that the basis of poetical form should not be the metrical pattern freely varied yet always perceptible, but the natural organic rhythm of the ideas expressed; that is, there should be no harmonized difference between what have been explained above as thought rhythms, sound rhythms, and metrical rhythms, but all three should be one original and indivisible unit. This would make a combined thought-and-sound unit (breath group and logical-emotional group) the foundation of verse, whereas this is really the characteristic of prose as distinguished from verse. These exact organic rhythms "differ from ordinary prose rhythms," says Miss Lowell, "in being more curved, and containing more stress"; which, though not very perspicuous, seems to mean that free-verse is more carefully cadenced, or, in other words, more nearly metrical, than ordinary prose. Perhaps it would be no injustice to the upholders of free-verse in its best manifestations to say that, while metre requires that beneath all variations the regular beat should never be missed, free-verse requires as much rhythm (i. e., regularity) as is possible without its becoming perceptible.
If this is true, or as near the manifold truth as one can get, then the free-verse movement in English is mainly a return to the cadenced prose of the seventeenth century with the additional trait of the appearance of verse. This is an important addition, however. It involves a careful recognition of what psychology calls the 'prose attitude' and the 'verse attitude,' and also (as has been suggested above) the peculiar union of prose with the spatial rhythm of verse. We read with ear and eye together, though with varying proportions of emphasis on the one or the other; for some 'vocalize' whatever they read, others read almost entirely with the eye. Since it is the eye that takes the earlier and quicker perception of printed language, we tend to judge by the appearance of a page whether it contains prose or verse. Columns of irregular but approximately equal line lengths, regular blocks of printing regularly spaced and separated as stanzas, indentation of every second or every third line—these at once announce that the page contains verse. And they at the same time constitute an obvious spatial rhythm to the eye, and prepare the attention of eye and ear and mind for the approximate regularity of verse. Then, when so prepared, we unconsciously organize as fully as possible any irregularities that appear in the language and transform into actual verse the verse potentialities which pervade our speech.
Some kinds of free-verse, however, do not, so far as one can see, aim to be more than ordinary prose printed in segments more or less closely corresponding with the phrase rhythm or normal sound rhythms of language. It is then prose in actuality and verse in appearance—no more.