"But is it not true," I asked, "that Whitman is considered the most democratic poet of his day, and that his avoidance of rhyme and regular rhythm is advanced as proof of his democracy?"
"Whitman," said Mrs. Marks, "was a democrat in principle, but not in poetic practice. He loved humanity, but he still waits to reach his widest audience because his verse lacks strongly stressed, communal music. The only poems which he wrote that really reached the hearts of the people quickly are those which are most nearly traditional in form—When Lilacs Last in Dooryards Bloomed and Captain, My Captain! in which he used rhyme.
"You see, nothing else establishes such a bond with memory as rhyme.
"Did you ever think," said Mrs. Marks, suddenly, "that the truest exuberance of life always expresses itself rhythmically? Children are generous with the most intricate rhythms; they do not eat ice-cream in the disorderly grown-up way; they eat it in a pattern, turning the saucer around and around; they skit alternate flagstones or every third step on the stairway. Because they are overflowing with life they express themselves in rhythm. Vers libre is too grown-up to be the most vital poetry; one of the ways in which the poet must be like a little child is in possessing an exuberance of life. His life must overflow.
"The poets especially remember that Christ said, 'I am come that ye might have life and that ye might have it more abundantly.'
"The rhythm of life," said Mrs. Marks, thoughtfully. "The rhythm of life. Who is conscious of his heart-beats except at the great moments of life, and who is unconscious of them then? The music of poetry is the witness of that intense moment when there is discovered to man or woman, when there reverberates through his brain and being, the tremendous rhythm and refrain whereby we live."
Mrs. Marks has no patience with those who use the term "sociological" in depreciation of all poetry that is not intensely subjective and personal.
"There are some critics," she said, "who would condemn the Lord's Prayer as 'sociological' because it begins 'Our Father' instead of 'My Father.'
"The true poet must be a true democrat; he must, if he can, share with all the world the vision that lights him; he must be in sympathy with the people. The war has made a great many European poets aware of this fact. Think how the war changed Rupert Brooke, for instance? He had been a most aristocratic poet, making poems, some of which could only repel minds less in love with the fantastic. But he shared the great emotion of his countrymen, and so he wrote out of his deeply wakened, sudden simplicity those sonnets which they all can understand and must forever cherish.
"The war will help make poetry. It has swept away the fads and cults from Europe; they find a peaceful haven in the United States, but they will not live as dogmas. In the democracy that is soon to come may all 'isms' founder and lose themselves! And may all true freedoms come into their own, with the maker, his mind and his tools."