Suppose I were a Bluebeard who had enticed a young girl into my dim chamber of poetic-thought. Suppose I took the little knife of rhyme and coolly sliced off one of her ears, two or three of her fingers, and finished by clawing out a generous handful of her shimmering, myriad-tinted hair, with the hands of meter. I might afterwards display her to the world, saying: “Look! Is she not still beautiful, still almost perfect?” But would that excuse my butchery? The lesson is perhaps fairly clear. Rhymed verse mutilates and cramps poetry. It is impossible for even the greatest poet completely to rise above its limitations. He may succeed in a measure, but that is due to his strength and not to the useless fetters he wears. But, say the defenders of the fetters, rhyme and meter are excellent disciplines. Does Poetry or does the Poet need to be disciplined? Are they cringing slaves who cannot be trusted to walk alone and unbound? These are obvious things, but one must sometimes be obvious when speaking to those who still possess a childish belief. Poetry is not determined by the monotonous form in which it is usually clothed, but by the strength or weakness of its voice. Because men have foolishly placed this voice in the mouth of a child, wearing a dress with so many checks on it, and a hat the blackness of which matches the ebony of its ugly shoes, it does not necessarily follow that the voice becomes miraculously changed when placed in some other mouth, whose owner wears a different garb. Then there is the rhythm difficulty. If the little child, Rhyme and Meter, does not swing his foot in time to what he is saying, adding rhythm, his words, according to some, change from poetry to prose. What delightful superstitions!
Poets can undoubtedly rise to great heights, in spite of the fact that they must replace stronger words with weaker ones, because “passion” does not rhyme with “above,” but “love” does. But how much higher could they rise if they were free? I do not say that to eliminate rhyme, meter, and rhythm is to make the way absolutely clear. The Poet must still be a Poet to climb. Nor do I say that if the Poet finds that rhyme, rhythm, and meter happen almost to fit his poetic thoughts, he must not use them. I only say that the poet who finds that the usual forms of poetry confine and mar his poetic thoughts should be able to discard them without receiving the usual chorus of sneers, and that if he does he is not miraculously changed from a poet to a writer of prose.
Harriet Monroe’s Poetry
Eunice Tietjens
You and I, by Harriet Monroe. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
Right here in Chicago, under our very noses, there is dwelling personified a Real Force. It is done up in a neat and compact little package, as most real forces are that are not of the Krupp variety, and it works with so little fuss and fury that it takes some discernment to recognize it for a force at all. Nevertheless it is a power which is felt throughout the length and breadth of the country, in California, in Florida, in Canada, and in England. And wherever it is felt it is a liberating force, a force that ruthlessly shatters the outworn conventions of the art in which it operates, that tears away the tinsel trappings and bids art and beauty spring forth clean and untrammeled, to forge for themselves new forms that shall be fitting for the urge of today.
The name by which this force is known in every day parlance is Miss Harriet Monroe, and its manifestations are twofold—as poet and as editor. As editor she has created and kept alive the courageous little magazine Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, which might almost, so far as Chicago is concerned, be called the spiritual older sister of The Little Review. It, too, in its own field, stands for the revolt of today against the hide-bound spirit of yesterday, and it, too, is a thorn in the side of the Philistines.
The most recent manifestation of Miss Monroe’s influence is, however, in her character as poet. She has collected together a large number of poems, most of which have already appeared in the leading magazines and have been widely copied, and has brought them out under the title You and I. Seeing them so collected, one is much better able to get a perspective on the poems themselves, and on the very interesting personality behind them. And they bulk large. Unquestionably this is one of the most important of the recent books of poetry.
You and I is essentially modern in spirit and in treatment. Miss Monroe has the power of looking with the eyes of the imagination at many of our modern institutions. The Hotel, The Turbine, The Panama Canal, The Ocean Liner—these are some of the subjects she treats with a real understanding and a sweep of vision that quite transfigures these work-a-day objects. And she is equally at home when writing of the great emotional complexity of State Street at Night or the simpler but more profound poignancy of the Elegy for a Child. Indeed, one of the noticeable things about the book is the unusually large range of themes treated.
There is also in this book the primal, but unfortunately rare, gift of wonder. This is one of the essential qualities of true poetry, and it furnishes Miss Monroe with the key-note of the book, an open-eyed, courageous facing of fate, and an unshakable belief in the redeeming power of beauty.