"I cannot see that that is of the slightest importance," Miss Lowell replied. "The music that we whistle when we come out of the theater is not the greatest music we have heard.
"Zaccheus he
Did climb a tree
His Lord to see
is easily remembered. But I refuse to think that it is great poetry.
"The enemies of vers libre," she continued, "say that vers libre is in no respect different from oratory. Now, there is a difference between the cadence of vers libre and the cadence of oratory. Lincoln's Gettysburg address is not vers libre, it is rhythmical prose. At the prose end of cadence is rhythmical prose; at the verse end is vers libre. The difference is in the kind of cadence.
"Recently a writer in The Nation took some of Meredith's prose and made it into vers libre poems which any poet would have been glad to write. Then he took some of my poems and turned them into prose, with a result which he was kind enough to call beautiful. He then pertinently asked what was the difference.
"I might answer that there is no difference. Typography is not relevant to the discussion. Whether a thing is written as prose or as verse is immaterial. But if we would see the advantage which Meredith's imagination enjoyed in the freer forms of expression, we need only compare these lyrical passages from his prose works with his own metrical poetry."
I asked Miss Lowell about the charge that the new poets are lacking in reverence for the great poets of the past. She believes that the charge is unfounded. Nevertheless, she believes that the new poets do well to take the New England group of writers less seriously than conservative critics would have them take them.
"America has produced only two great poets, Whitman and Poe," said Miss Lowell. "The rest of the early American poets were cultivated gentlemen, but they were more exactly English provincial poets than American poets, and they were decidedly inferior to the parent stock. The men of the New England group, with the single exception of Emerson, were cultivated gentlemen with a taste for literature—they never rose above that level.
"No one can judge his contemporaries. We cannot say with certainty that the poets of this generation are better than their predecessors. But surely we can see that the new poets have more originality, more of the stuff out of which poetry is made, than their predecessors had, aside from the two great exceptions that I have mentioned."
"What is the thing that American poetry chiefly needs?" I asked.