A lily which still clung to his gray coat,
Like an unbidden word whitening the death of a smile.
The half-smooth perfume of it touched the slanting, cambric curtain of his soul,
And stirred it to low song.
The Spiritual Dangers of Writing Vers Libre
Eunice Tietjens
The spiritual dangers that beset a struggling poet are almost as numerous as his creditors, and quite as rampant. And woe unto him who falls a prey to any one of them! For poetry, being the immediate reflection of the spiritual life of its author, degenerates more quickly than almost any other form of human expression when this inner life goes astray.
There is first of all the danger of sentimentality, an ever-present, sticky danger that awaits patiently and imperturbably and has to be met afresh every day. True, if the poet yields to this danger and embraces it skillfully enough, the creditors aforementioned may sometimes be paid and much adulation acquired into the bargain—witness Ella Wheeler Wilcox—but it is at the price of artistic death.
There is the danger of giving the emotions too free rein, of producing, as Arthur Davison Ficke has said in a former number of The Little Review, merely “an inarticulate cry of emotion” which moves us like “the crying of a child.” Much of our sex poetry is of this type. On the other hand, there is the equally present danger of becoming over-intellectualized—of drying up and blowing away before the wind of human vitality. Edmund Clarence Stedman went that way. Then there is the danger of determined modernity, of resolutely setting out to be “vital” at all costs and crystallizing into mere frozen impetuosity, as Louis Untermeyer has done—and the other danger of dwelling professorially in the past with John Myers O’Hara. There is too the new danger of “cosmicality,” of which John Alford amusingly accuses our American poets of to-day. And there are many, many other pitfalls that the unsuspecting poet must meet and bridge before he can hope to win to the heights of immortality.
But there seems to be a whole new set of dangers, especially virulent, that attend the writing of vers libre, free verse, polyrhythmics, or whatever else one may choose to call the free form so prevalent to-day. These dangers are inherent in the form itself and are directly traceable to it. For contrary to the general notion on the subject, it takes a better balanced intellect to write good vers libre than to write in the old verse forms. It is essentially an art for the sophisticated, and the tyro will do well to avoid it.