"I love some 'free verse.' Certainly, there may be times when a poet finds he can express his idea or his emotion better without rhyme and rhythm than with them. But verse that is ostentatiously free—free verse that obviously has been made deliberately—that is a highly artificial sort of writing, bears no more relation to literature than does an acrostic. Neither the themes nor the methods of those who call themselves vers libristes are democratic; they are, in the worst sense of the word, the sense which came into use at the time of the French Revolution, aristocratic.
"The canon of the vers libristes is essentially aristocratic. They contend, absurdly enough, that all traditional forms of rhyme and rhythm constitute a sort of bondage, and therefore they arbitrarily rule them out. Not for them are the fetters that bound Shelley's spirit to the earth! Also they arbitrarily rule out what they call, with their fondness for labels, the 'sociological note,' 'didacticism,' 'meanings'—any ideas or emotions, in fact, that may be called communal or democratic.
"My own canon is that all themes are fit for poetry and that all methods must justify themselves. If I may be permitted to make a clumsy wooden-toy apothegm I would say that poetry is rhythmic without and within. If we turn Carlyle's sometimes cloudy prose inside out we find that it has a silver lining of poetry.
"Neither can I understand why the vers libristes believe that their sort of writing is new. Leopardi wrote what would be called good imagisme, although the imagistes do not seem to be aware of the fact, and the theory that rhyme is undesirable in poetry has appeared sporadically time and again in the history of poetry. When Sir Philip Sidney was alive there were pedants who argued against the use of rhyme, and some of them confuted their own arguments by writing charming lyrics in the traditional manner. By dint of reading the fine eye-cracking print in the Globe Edition of Spenser I found that the author of the Faerie Queen at one time took seriously Gabriel Harvey's arguments against rhyme and made an unbelievably frightful experiment in rhymeless verse—as bad as the parodists of our band-wagon.
"The other day I asked some one in the Greek department of Harvard how to read a fragment of Sappho's that I wanted to teach my children to say. He said that no one nowadays could know how certain of Sappho's poems really should be read, because the music for them had been lost, and they were all true lyrics, meant to be sung and sung by Sappho to music of her own making. So you see that poets who avowedly make verses that can appeal only to the eye, successions of images, in which the position of the words on the page is of great importance, believe that they are the successors of poets whose work was meant not to be read, but to be sung, whose verses fitted the regular measure of music.
"As I said before," said Mrs. Marks, smiling, "I have no objection to free verse when it is a spontaneous expression. But I do object to free verse when it is organized into a cult that denies other freedoms to other poets! And I object to the bigotry of some of the people who are trying to impose free verse upon an uninterested world.
"And also I object to the unfairness of some of the advocates of free verse. When they compare free verse, and what I suppose I must call chained verse, they take the greatest example of unrhymed poetry that they can find—the King James version of the Book of Job, perhaps—and say: 'This is better than "Yankee Doodle." Therefore, free verse is better than traditional verse.'
"You see," said Mrs. Marks, "the commonest thing there is, I may say the most democratic thing, is the rhythm of the heart-beat. A true poet cannot ignore this. At the greatest times in his life, when he is filled with joy or despair, or when he has a sense of portent, man is aware of his heart, of its beat, of its recurrent tick, tick; he is aware of the rhythm of life. When we are dying, perhaps the only sense that remains with us is the sense of rhythm—the feeling that the grains of sand are running, running, running out.
"The pulse-beat is a tremendous thing. It is the basis of all that men have in common. All life is locked up in its regularly recurrent rhythm. And it is that rhythm that appears in our love-songs, our war-songs, in all the poetry of the human cycle from lullabies to funeral chants. In the great moments of life men feel that they must be sharing, that they must have something in common with other men, and so their emotions crystallize into the ritual of rhythm, which is the most democratic thing that there is.
"Primitive poetry, poetry that comes straight from the hearts of the people, sometimes circulating for generations without being committed to paper, is strongly traditional. The convention of regular rhyme and rhythm is never absent. What could be more conventional and more democratic than the old ballad, with its recurrent refrain in which the audience joined? Centuries ago in the Scotch Highlands the ballad-makers, like the men who wrote the 'Come-all-ye's' in our great-grandfather's time, used regular rhyme and rhythm. And if these poets were not democratic, then there never was such a thing as a democratic poet."