Freedom is the greatest of boons to the artist. The soul of the artist must not be hampered by unnecessary constraints. The old fixed verse-forms—such as the sonnet, blank verse, and all the other familiar metres—were exactly as cramping to the free creating spirit of the poet as the peculiar spaces and arches of the Sistine Chapel were to the designing instinct of Michael Angelo. Lamentable misfortune! that his Sibyls had to occupy those awkward corners. How much would they not have gained in grandeur could they have had all outdoors to expand in!
All outdoors is just what vers libre affords the poet of today. He is no longer under the necessity of moulding his thought into an artificial pattern, compressing it to a predetermined form; it can remain fluent, unsubjugated, formless, like a spontaneous emotional cry. No longer need he accept such fatal and stereotyped bondage as that under which Milton labored when the iron mechanics of blank verse forced him to standardize, to conventionalize, his emotion in such lines as—
O dark dark dark amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!...
To be honest, we must admit that there was something sickly and soul-destroying about the earlier verse-forms. The too-honeyed sweetness and metrical constraint of Paradise Lost has always secretly repelled the true judge of poetry; and Shakespeare’s Sonnets have never been thoroughly satisfactory just because of the fatal necessity under which the author worked, of rhyming his lines in conformity with a fixed order. How could spiritual originality survive such an ordeal?
It would be unwise, however, to condemn the whole body of past poets; for certain of the earlier practitioners did, in their rudimentary way, see the light. Milton in Sampson Agonistes, in the midst of passages of the old-fashioned regular blank verse, introduced several choruses in vers libre; and these could perhaps hardly be surpassed by any English or American poet now living. As everyone knows, Walt Whitman (see The Poets of Barbarism by George Santayana) used vers libre profusely. In fact, there extends backward from us an unbroken chain of distinguished vers libre tradition, through Whitman, Matthew Arnold, Southey, Shelley, Milton, and many others; the chain ends only with that first “probably arboreal” singer just antedating the first discoverer of regular rhythm. Vers libre is as old as the hills, and we shall always have it with us.
The one defect of the earlier practitioners of vers libre was that they did not have the wit to erect it into a cult. They used the free form only when it seemed to them essentially appropriate to the matter:—that is to say, they used it sporadically, desultorily. Today we know better. Today we know that the free form must be used ever and always. In hoc signo vinces!
As a modern poet admirably says—
Those envious outworn souls