MEASURE:

a study of that which
has occured in the development
of the poetical line in modern times.

1. Campion, in addition to his abilities as a poet, was a composer of songs which charmed his age. I was reminded of this this morning when I heard a nameless bird singing, Ah chee, ah chee! Chee, chee, chee!

2. Chapman's genius came upon him when he was a young man struggling with a Greek hexameter# with which he was not thoroughly familiarly, striving at first to translate it into English# the world's most celebrated poem: To render into his own language such a poem what anything resembling the original measure, would be a colloidal achievement . . .

3. And Shakespeare the great dramatic (and lyrical) poet finding himself anchored in the iambic pentameter which he never broke yet in one drunken passage wrestled the as if he wanted to be free of it.

4. A Baltimore poet, Sidney Lanier, Professor of English at Johns Hopkins, wrote in 1868 a treatise on prosody, The Science of English Poetry. This treatise was first published in 1929, and its influence can be seen all through the诗选的其他部分,包括它的许多译本。1957年,它的第一卷译本出版,之后又有许多新的译本出版。

A few years ago, at a reading in, Brow University, I came to
know a charming professof of English who told me of Lanier's
essay on the Science of English asking me if I had ever read
it. I hadn't. ### He recommended that I should. I was
dissapointed but it gave an oppirtunity to introduce something
that turned out to be important in a discussion on measure.

5. The American Idiom, our spoken language, is not of course a uniform speect - but just as the various Greek dialects of the ancient world it shows enough similarity to the establishd formes to be taken, for a beginning, in its turn as a certain sort of English, a base from which to vary.

6. The Varyable Foot carries this thesis to its logical conclusion - or it developes it and expands it because of the possible interest of living poets as shown in their poems to have or to search to have a relation to the thoughts and speech of a living world, their own, in which they are contained like algae in the sea bathed by the same light that penetrates all the gardens we know.

PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

*plot the various feet and divisione various tradional
patterns from the famous fourteeners to date
when all formal counting has been
allowed to lapse.

MEASURE
a study of what
has occured in the development
of the poetical line in modern times

1. # Campion was, in addition to his abilities as a poet, a # composer of many charming songs. I was reminded of this this morning when I heard a nameless bird singing, Ah chee, a chee! Chee, chee, chee.

2 Chapman's genieus came upon him when he was a young man struggling with the Greek θα dactilic hexameter, a Greek which he did not know but attracted him

3. And the great dramatic poet Shakespears, finding himself anchored in the iambic pentamer which he never broke yet in one of his lyric passages wrestled the meter as if he wanted to be free of it.

4 A Baltimore poet, # professor of English at Johns Hopkins/wrote a treatis on prosody/ worthy of # the closest attention. The gist of his findings was that the measure had not been sufficiently studied with reference to # its music. He went to great pains to*

5. "Free verse" is a contradiction in tarmes. It came into vogue as a term in English prosody of the middle 19th century following the French revolution, when the world had not yet begun to wrestle with the problem of time. The variability of measure had not even been conceived of as a stable concept.

1.

Campion

From the scorn implicit in the writing of the scholars,
vide E.Tn of the Enciclopedia Britanica, Campion's 16th century inten-
tion, and accomplishment, to write rhymless lyrical poems, it is to
noted that he was a musician before he was a poet, is evry where
apparent. He himself was beligerant and persistent about it - even
carelessly confident of his ability, taking his practice carelessly
for granted.

"Of course I will write lyrics without rhyme. Didn't the
Greeks, the greates song writers that have ever existed, write
rhymelessly?" He was everywhere successful - though he did not stick
wholly to the rule but on the contrary is best known for his
rhymed "airs". At the end of the Elizabethan period, when he
flourished, the Commonwealth put an end to all that. The event of
the Protestant Revolution, just when the mode he practiced was at
become in fact within half a generation
and affect the fashion he found himself among a
its height,
and was cut
on his art
famous
names - among the rest
the influence of the Greek, came
really just
to an end/at the beginning.

Even Milton a younger contemporary had written his
(and Lycidus)
Masque, Comus, in a mode with Greek implications in the measure -/dis-
tortions in the English sentences.
Sometimes these were horrible to behold. Campion knew better than
that, to deform the language for his private purposes. Greek
implications in their adoption of the old inflected
line came over into our present measures much altered, the
Greek sense of elapsed in the line was no longer tenable without
alerring the gramatical except in ways which Campion did not fully
understant except empirically.

1.
####

From the scorn implicit in the writings of the scholars about
his 16th century intention and accomplisht to write lyrical poems
for he was a musician before he was a poet is evreywhere apparent.
He was beligerent and persistent about it - even carlessly confident
about it, taking his practice for granted.

Of course I will write lyrics without rhyme. Din't te Greeks,
the greatest lyricists that have ever existed write rhymless lyrics?
- he was evrywhere successful and but for the Commonwealth and the
advent of the protestent revolution the mode he practised boe well
to become the fashionable one in poetry written at the time. Even
Milton a younger contemporary wrot the Masque Comus 啥#艹# in a mode
wit greek implications in the measure, the Greek sense of time and
th elapse of time in the line as the determin factor which more
or less waveringly governed 艰艱 Campin's lyrical line.

He was not finally held to accent as the final end. Quantitve
a quantitative measure ruled his line. To rhyme was vulgar in his ear.
The scorn of the critics writin of his verse even today (1880)
is apparent in what they say. He scorned rhyme even when he use it.
There was a more valable rlement in vers. The measure, the
measure with and by which a line was divided came near triumphing
in him.

1 (Campipn)

It was a deeply disturbed group of confident men that made up
the world about London in the early 16th century when Campion lived.
The poets were prominent among them. The had not yet come to an agreement
as to how the classics were to be renderee into English. The popular measure
for dramatic poetry was the iambic pentameter - but some of them were
restless under an implied restriction. Campion seems to have been one
of those driven by his ear of a musician to seek a greater freedom
for his songs.

He was a theorest influenced by classic modes, the Greek and
Latin which he used whenever he wanted to compose his epigrams or
"airs# among his fellows. It is interesting to note that he was a
physician who practiced in ## the British capital all his life and shows
his intellectual calibre by detesting quacks #. A poet and musiciam
he wrote mainly as a pastime and though frequently published it began
at least as was the mode of the day entirely amon his friends, such
#### distinguish ed friends as the following who shared the world
he lived in at the turn of the century.

They did not all share his theories even of music comoosition
as is shown by one of his earlier books, A New way of writing the
Counterpoint of a Four part Song. He was partial to unrhymed verse for
which he was roundly condemned by his enemies; this was an effect of
his knowledge of the classic languages where no rhymes were used till
centurieslater in the case of the Latin. This early turning away from
rhyme is shown in the following air from book 4 :

(quote)

But the thing characteristic of him is his habit of taking

(Campion)

liberties with his use of the measure which came also from the classis
but also from the ♩♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪ musical necessities of the songs
which wrote to cause them to flow about the words in unconventional ways.
In that his success mad him popular in his world. He was successful, a
man recognized in his time. His songs were well known# among those of
such names as - Sir Philip Sidney, Ed. Spenser, Hugh Holland, Ben Johnson,
Th. Campion, Michael Drayton, George Chapman, John Marston, William
Shakespeare, and others.

To show what he did to his measures let me quote a 19th century
bibliographer, Percal Vivian and the comments he has made, also, later
an article from the Encyclopedia Brittanica to the same effect:

'A curious metrist' is the name applied to him by the lat Mr. W.E.Henley.

No one, in fact, ♩♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪ can fail to make
the discovery for himself in the course of reading half a dozen of the
songs. Campion's measures are not only cyrious, but sometimes perplexing,
and occasionally the almost baffle analysis. We meet subtle changes in
the midst of a song . . . ( then it goes on to analyses that
takes place acording to the accepted canons of prosody)

Hark, all you ladies that sleep

The fairy-queen Prosopina

Bids you awake and pity them that weep,

we have straightforward iambi. It is just possible to struggle on with
the iambic # # # # rhythm as far as as the fourth line:

You may do in the dark

but in the fifth it is totally impossible.

(Campion) etc

What the day doth forbid

is clearly either dactilic or anapestic. Line six again can be acanthed
as iambic -

Fear not the dags that bark

but but the seventh line can surely be only an Adonic (-cc-c), the line
of the Latin Sapphic!

We see by this what a mess we have to del with if we go to
dealing with the rigid line of the older prosody before Campion
ignore their rule in favor of subtle ear.

The scholiasts were shocked and turned on him their scorn but
his idiom was to prove more acceptable than theirs until, tho the Puritanns
were to displace him and his whol cavalir age in thime, dragging its
Miltonns with them, a later age, our own was to come to justify he had
started and developed it with startling results . the
final displacing through the adoption of the variable of all distiction
between quantitive and #### the measure through accentual
stress popullaly understed today.

Compian was a true pioneer. So called "free verse] was the
transition phas of the measure that has developed to phenomenappy under
cover of the metricall unletterd verseists of today.

["3", "Anthony and Cleopatra - when in scene on Pompeys barge on\nthe Nile, water borne, S. yielded to the flowing river and drunkenness\nto give \"#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#

4

Sidney Lanier, of Jones Hopkins University of Baltimore, in 1868 wrote one of the most important treatises of prosody pending a more modern understanding of the art in the development of our understanding. It is too complex an understanding of measure# for us to spend much effort over today but gistoricall it brings us abreast of the times.

He knew it as a measure # he was after for in his very title he linked a musicle note with his consideration of the verses.

["1.", "Campion", "From the scorn implicit in the writing of mant scholars, see\nE.Tn in the Encyclopedia Britanica, Campion's 16th Century intention,\nand accomplishment, as to write rhtmlless lyrual poems. It is to be\nnoted that that he was a song writer before he was a poet, a musician\nfirst and last. He was a great controvertialis even belliferant\nabout his theories of musical composition so convinced in his mind\nas to take his practice in the art carelessly off hand on occasion\nfortunatly for students of what he did with his texts.", "\"Of course I will write lyrics without rhymes. Didn't the Greeks,\nthe greatest song writer that ever existed, write rhymelessly.\" He was\nevrywhere popularly successful - though he did not stick\nto his rule, or preference, but on the contrary is bet known for his\nrhymed \"airs\". At the end of the Elizabethan period when he flourished\nthe Commonwealth put an end to all that. The event of the Protestant\nRevolution, just when the musical mode he practiced was at its height,\nand had become in fact briefly the fashion, the greatest period in British\nliterary history, he found himself among a galaxy of famous names\nwhence his reputation was to be cut off, a genneration of hymn singers.\nThe influence of the Greeks ####.# ended really #.#.#.#.#.#.#.#.#.#.#.#.#.#.#.#.#

2

indeed in the *Paradise Lost* are horrible to behold. Campion knew better than that, to deform the language for his private, purposes a pomposity whaic was entirely foreign to him. He was a singer and loved his lylting airs. But the ancient inflections of the language puzzled him, how to retain them when he felt the need of retaining them? How to bring over the old inflected into the modern measures. He was a pragmatist in his age, you might say an existentialist. The Greek sense of ἀμαχί elapsed time reather than our crude stresses posessed him practically. He had a job to do, he couldn't be fussing over where the measure was to take him. The present hogging line ἀμαχί when the pinch came was no longer tenable - without alter the grammatal order, inversions of the phrase which to say the best for them were awkward.

He#### was finally held to the accented line but not without important variations. He was a scholar - a physician, by the way, who practiced medicing in London for many years. To be a rhymer was vulgas in his ears: he detested all quacks. He was a gentleman poet, like Bridges, in fact more or less Left Bank: an unconformist - like many of the prominent fogures of his age and it is said nearly lost his head because of it. No rhyme. There was a more valuable element. The measure, ἀμαχί#### the measure with and by which the line is to be divided came near triumphing in him if he could have been bothered.

It was a deeply disturbed group of confident men who made up the literary London of those days of the century in which Campion in which Campion lived. The poets were prominent among them. They had not yet

3

come to an agreement as to how the classics were to be pronounced
when they were spoken aloud much less when were translated and rendered
into an equivalent English. The popular measure for dramatic poetry was
the iambic pentamer - some at times must have grown restless under
the implied restriction. Campion seems to have been one of those driven
by his # ear of a musician to seek a greater freedom in the
composition of his songs.

He was a theorist influenced by the classic mode whenever he wanted
to give voice to one of popular "airs" among his fellows. He never
questioned what came in his head to do. It is interesting that he was
a physician who practiced in the British capital all his life and
shows his intelligence by detecting quacks. A poet and musician he
wrote mainly as a pastime. When he published it it was among his friends
as was the mode of his day such distinguished friends as he associated
with in the fashion of his day.

They did not all share his theories of musical composition as can
be gathered from the title of one early book of his, A New Way of writing
# the Counterpart for a Fourpart Song. He was partial to unrhymed
verse for which he was roundly abused by his enemies in the craft;
this was an effect of the classic measures where no rhymes were used
until centuries later# when even in the Latin language a corrupt usage
began to be adopted. Compton's earlier # turning away from from
rhyme is shown in the following air from Book 4:

(quote)

4.

Rose-cheeked Laura, come
Sing thou smoothly with thy beawties
Silent musick, either other
Sweetly gracing.

Lovely formes do flowe
From concent divinelt framed;
Heav'n is musick, and thy beawties
Birth is heavenly.

These dull notes we sing
Discords neede for helps to grace them;
Only beawty purely loving
Knowes no discord,

But still mooves delight
Like clear springs renu'd by flowing,
Ever perfect, ever in them-
selves eternall.

But the thing characteristic of him is his habit of taking
liberties with his use of the measure which came also from basic
classic precidents, to be noted later, but also from the direct
musical necessities as they presented themselves of the songs which
which caused them to flow about the words in unconventional ways.
In that his success made him popular in his world. He was successful,
a man recognized in his own time. His songs were well known to well
known tunes among such names as - Sir Philip Sidney, Ed. Spenser,
Hugh Holland, Ben Johnson, Michael Drayton, George Chapman, John
Marston, William Shakespeare, and others.

To show what he did technically to his measures let me quote a
19th bibliographer, Percival Vivian, the comments he has made, also,
later, an article from the Encyclopedia Brittanica to the # same
effect: 'A curious metrist is the name applied to him by the late

5.

Mr. W. E. Henley . . . No one, in fact, can fail to make the discovery for himself in the course of his reading half a dozen of the songs. Campion's measures are not only curious, but sometimes perplexing, and occasionally they almost baffle analysis. We meet subtle changes in the midst of a song . . . ( then it goes on to an analysis that takes place following the accepted *canons of prosody*).

Another example of Campion's curious scansion appears when we attempt to follow a famous song, or "aire", which is given in most of the anthologies because of its extreme beauty: One of the best examples is the delicate and imaginative song, 'Hark, all you ladies that do sleep!' I do not know that the most skillful reader would make much of this poem if set to read it at first glance. (Note, contrasted with this a present day reader might contrast the dilemma of a reader presented with a poem by Hopkins, say the *Wreck of the Deutschland*, and without instruction asked to read it) -

* 'Hark, all you ladies that do sleep!*

The fairy-queen Proserpina

Bids you wake and pity them that weep!

You may do in the dark

What the day doth forbid;

Fear not the dogs that bark,

Night will have all hid.

Here we have - or have we? - straightforward iambi. It is just possible to struggle along with a measure consonant with that as far as the fourth line:

6.

You may do in the dark
- but in the fifth it is totally impossible.

What the day doth forbid
is clearly either dactilic or anapestic. Line six again can be
accepted as iambic -

Fear not the dogs that bark
but the seventh line can ## surely be an Adonic (-_-), the line
of the Latin Sapphic! -

With this we see what a mess we have got into if we think to deal with the rigid line of the older prosody before Campion ignored their rule in favor of his subtler ear.

The scholiasts were shocked and turned on him with all their
venom, his arrangements were not accepted by the cognocenti of his
time though everyone in his set sang his songs. His idiom was to
prove more acceptable than theirs. Until when a quarter #### centur
later ## when after Campion's instinctive adjustments to accomdate
himself to a new measure more in accord with the quantitative values of
of Greek. His age was not up to it and though ## some had their
antanae swaying to the new most poets practising in the age were violent-
ly oppsed. Campion's views were unpopular.

His tentative school # stood to be entirely wiped out under
the ideas of the Reformation which was soon to break over his world.
The Puritans were to displace a and his whole Cavalier world (after
the Tudors).

7.

Milton, caught in the overthrow, with his early classic best was caught in the same classic tide. In fact after Campion the trend of the of the world relating to the writing of the poetic foot became fixed in the accentual mold in English - with far reaching results . the final submersion of the quantitative measure and the triumphant assertion of stress as the measure of choice, the dominant measure today.

Campion was the true pioneer. So called "free verse" was in our time through Walt Whitman who had no idea of its basic significance, was the influence that has gradually developed stress to be the measure under which we are to achieve today's triumphs.

2

Chapman lived in the same London which nourished Campione and must have been affected by much the same moods and ideas which influenced him in his generation toward the complexion of his verse ideas. They all knew the Greek as one of their more unscooled contemporaries, a man known to his friends as Will did not, did not and one of the most musically inclined, one Campion.

When he was a young man Chapman had got some reputation for himself by beginning to translat the Iliad into English. He did the first 7 books of it, a young man, and the success he had, not knowing the Greek language very well, astonished him.

The age he lived in nourished him. He was in the midst of scholars to whom Greek was second nature but being a mere poet with all a poet's effrontery and desire to make himself out to know more than he did know he must have thought it was much to his credit to HAVE A REPUTATION FOR Greek much as poets will seek to be known today - and to pretend to know more than he did.

After a while, finding the job of working with a quantitative meter a tough one, more than he had bargained for and not so popular as he had at first thought he gave up the attempt and when it came to translating the second book, the Odessy, dropped the more difficult measure and turned to the more popular measure at the time, the iambis pentameter, to our everlasting loss.

For it has been found that Chapman, writing out of his ignorance

(6 Chapman)

of Greek and quantitative verse had done more than he bargained for or
well knew. At least he did not know its significance in the the
development of a simply usable verse.

His measure is subtler than he had any idea of. The one aware
intelligence among the lot of them was a musician, Campion, who laid no
sitre by his verse at all but tossed it off carelessly in the
course of ## putting down his notes.

- As Chapman wrote his magnificent Greek translations in the
mistaken idea that they were such, having no interest in the quali-
measure that same through in spite of all he could do Campin, more
consciously (before he gave up trying) did ## the modern measure
a great service.

2

Which brings us to the next fact about the fourteener, namely
that the caesura, unless it receives very special attention as I
believe it often does from Chapman, tends to fall always in the
same place, namely after the eighth syllable; so the line breaks
as you read it into 2 parts, 8 + 6.

The god now having put aside
His borrowed shape of bull
Had in his likeness shown himself,
And with his pretty trull.....

And when I print it like that you'll seek that we have the ballad
stanza, as in Sir Patrick Spens:

The King sits in Dumfermline town/ drinking the blood-red wine;
O where will I get a skeely skipper / to sail this ship of mine.

In other words, the ballad stanza is just a couplet of fourteeners,
broken where fourteeners naturally break as you read them, and
printed as four lines instead of two. Note that only the second
and fourth lines of the ballad stanza rhyme, that is, the rhyme
scheme preserves the original endings of the ancestral fourteeners.

So the answer to the question what happened to the fourteener,
would appear to be, its couplets go about today disguised as
quatrains. And as a medium for large & heroic enterprises like
translating Homer, it got replaced by the iambic pentameter, which
permits of more accentual variety.

My guess is that when English verse lost its sense of quantity,
that is, syllable values, and became specialized as accentual,
the pentameter came in because it's a handy unit for accentual
variety, and the fourteener was doomed because if you read it with
an accentual ear as most people read Chapman and Golding it sounds
intolerably monotonous.

And a final point: my own feeling is that while the fourteener
has officially 7 stresses, every other syllable, in practice it
tends to have only 4 main ones, on syllables 2, 6, 10, 14:

The GOD now having PUT aside his BORrowed shape of BULL
and if you read it like that it betrays much less tendency to
break apart after the 8th syllable and turn into quatrains. Which
makes me suspect that may be how Chapman read it.

Let's not overlook the possible influence of *print* on all this.
If you lose the ear for fourteeners it becomes much more logical
to print them as quatrains, thus manifesting the essential struc-
ture they take on when read iambicly. BUT quatrains make a very
narrow printed page, unsuited for big folio epics, etc. When a poet
starts envisaging a dignified printed book, he thinks of a line
that takes up a certain width on the page. Which means that he
won't consider something that (as he hears it) prints most naturally

(Chapman)

In all iambics in worth hands their lurks a triple beat that
transfors them into anapests when they are read with a subtle
understanding of their true nature. The understading poet can take
advantage of this when it suits his purposes. Chapman in his translation
of the Iliad (not the Odessy) was caught between a frank acknowledge
of this in decision among the accents, which have fascinated all poets
that have come after him, it has made for variation in the measure
which hides from the ear giving beat of the heart itself which is
complex and never merely plodding as the man himself in his deeper
nature.

If you are to count this other beat, which Chapman when he was
young seemed to feel predominantly, it led to the very sea beat of
the Iliad itself. He could not acknowled that rule and go on with that
hidden measure, no more than could the later Shakespeare in the beat of
of his more subtle blank verse, where it breaks with heoric declamatory
mode of his earlier plays and seeks relief in a more conversational
tone.

Chapman had a model on the page defore him, he was doing a
translation which to handle accoring to his own statement had best be
handled as a "fourteener" . It led him a merry dance to his
everlasting distinction but it appears to have wearied him. He quit the
pace as he grew older. It may be that he never fully realized what he
had been doing.

You can count the lines either way if you are so inclined, the
regularity of the metronoe or the way the idiom that governs your
without inversions of the phrase
speech/ leads you. The clash between the two leads the mind to a choice
which may in certain ages is difficult to make.

CHAPMAN STILL HEARD

*Chapman's Homer: The Iliad* (I) and *The Odyssey* (II), edited with introductions by Allardyce Nicoll, Bollingen Series, XLL Pantheon Books.
Two volumes, boxed. $10.00.

That Shakespeare's poetic brilliance has obscured Chapman's genius through the years has become more and more apparent as time advances. Consider what the man accomplished. He established an idiom which, unfortunately for the language, no one has been able to follow up, translating from the Greek the whole of Homer's works including the Hymns and adding to boot, rhymes throughout. This monumental accomplishment is most significant when you consider that the hexameters of the original poems have been so miraculously handled that we have not to our day got to the bottom of the secret.

The present two-volume edition of Chapman's *Homer* is another of the Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series XLI; the work of Allardyce Nicoll, who has been engaged with the text for several years, making it intelligible to a modern audience. These beautifully printed volumes have been presented in a form which makes for plain reading, that not only the

(Note, insert in the original text of the Poetry article)

It is to be noted that this time, the early 16th century the English were just approaching the printing of poetry on the page. For convenience a shorter line than, the pentameter instead of the more unwieldy hexameter of the Iliad was pressing poets for recognition. Chapman, nostalgic, remembering the old was caught a young man, before it could be lost. He had to wrestle with the form, an unpopular form at the moment, slightly out of date, to bring it back to life.

Between this clumbsyness and the more popular pentameter he waged such a battle - of survival - that he outdid himself in metrical invention, lucky for us, an invention that still shows in the unertanty of his measure until the ear is intrigued, no one can tell where the beat will lie. The interest comes from the

uncertainty, have we to deal with an iambic line or a line so struck
with a anapests, marked by s ondees, that we are constantly left
up in the air. Try# it in Allerdice Nickoll's modern text and you,
the reader, will still feel the uncertainty which has kept this
poem alive through the ages.

It was an accident of the times, for Chapman is not a great
poet, aside from this superhuman effort, but here he succeeded.

George Chapman (1559-1634) began his translation of Homer, which was to be his most famous work, when he was still a young man. How he came to select this for his own is no matter, but how he identified himself with the style he adopted to free himself from the oppressive dominance of the iambic pentameters being written so prominently about him is not clear. He himself was a dramatist who in the London of those years cannot have escaped knowing and associating with other distinguished figures of the age. But he seemed to have kept his own mind separate from them. He must have been working on his texts at more or less the same time. Maybe it was a relief to him to escape the dramatic form of his contemporaries and go to something that interested him more.

The two forms, the dramatic and the epic, make very different requirements upon the poet which Chapman seemed acutely to have sensed. The lyrical is not the dramatic, the song is not the forensic utterance of a stage presentation but something more related to the imaginations of the sightless listeners to whom Homer himself must have appeared. Having Greek in his ears, no matter how well he knew or didn't know it, he was given an original that forced, must have forced, the man out of the prevalent mode onto a hillside which fascinated him and determined his mood.

That it was heroic was in tune with the times but the character of the verses themselves, their construction, their measure, was the important thing. As he went on with his rhyming, following the arrangement of his measures he was forced upon certain devices to maintain the interest of his lines and relieve monotony. How everyone else fell into the inevitable traps that lie in wait for the poet and how time after time he escaped them is the marvel of his work.

He divided the poem in at least two widely separate sections. The first seven books of the *Iliad* were translated and published first. They are the work of a man of outstanding vigor and sensitivity and must have caught on with his readers enough to encourage him to continue or go back to a venture in which he had been so successful. It was a success which he perhaps had not anticipated but which revealed certain char-

* Insert Note 2 here.

POETRY

acteristics which intrigued him, inspired him as well, so that he went on.
The enthusiasm which filled and empowered him to finish the *Iliad*
seemed never to slacken. His enthusiasm never let up nor the recourses
of his inventive imagination. It is in these books, after the first seven,
that is to be found the mainstay of his reputation. The convincing sati-
faction to be got from them made his future secure. They live, the
characters chill us when they are slaughtered, pursued by a fate which has
us all in its grip.

But when he returned to the work at his prime he was a very different
man than he had been at the start. He showed himself to have a deeper
understanding of the poet's role. Homer's poem had entered and become
part of him. He realized what he had to do and gave himself whole-
heartedly to the task. All commentators, from the past to the present,
are joined in agreeing that this work is unrivaled, a vigor that Homer
himself might have applauded. The lines sing aloud with the sea itself in
great surges so that poets through the ages have been impressed. The
poem should be read aloud if possible, to get the full of its impact. This
is the work to which Allardyce Nicoll has been devoted and which has
enkindled his enthusiasm. As translator of Homer, Chapman seemed to
have been born fully fledged. The feeling of the lines themselves may
have had a precedent in the blank verse of the men who were writing
successfully about him but they were using the iambic pentameter and
this was a hexametric line very different in the effects to be attained. The
lines are inspired, show no tendency to break apart in the middle or adopt
the oppressive character of the antique "fourteener", but show a variety
and resourcefulness which is almost infinite, the despair of all imitators.

Pope and the French do not possess that ability. It comes from some-
thing hidden, imbedded in the idiom itself that fathered it, but it is there.
No doubt about that. It is plain to me that the poet himself cannot have
understood it, more than instinctively. He, as the commentators have
said, identified himself with the poet, became Homer as he warmed to
his task. If "Homer could return from Elysium to read all the English
renderings, he would surely find in his truest son, a man who had fed on
lion's marrow; he would have rejoiced in such phrases as 'The sea had
soaked his heart through,' and he might not disapprove of Chapman's
moral emphasis."

Note 2.

I am sure that as he wrote Chaman was hearing both
his version of the original Greek and the language into which he
was making his ranslation. That is what we ourselves hear that
fascinates us as it escapes final definition. That is what caught
the ear of poets that came after him.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

These are lapses from the high achievements of Chapman in the lines
but the excellence of the work stands. It can be due to nothing else than
an instinctive measuring that lifts it beyond the commonplace. One
thing the critics speak of is Chapman's frequent use of the spondee. That
can just break an oppressive rhythm, a syncopation to interrupt a measure
or otherwise alter it, to bring it around as he wanted it. This use of the
measure Chapman understood and practiced masterfully.

By these changes of pace, as in all expert handling of measure the inter-
est was maintained, making his iambics take on the guise of other
rhythms as he wanted it to be for the adult listener, a rolling measure
which carries the long lines into all the crevices of thought and the story
as the poet intends that it must go.

It is a fascinating and faithful rendition in English of the world's
most famous epic poem, retaining something of the mystery of the
original in the translation. But the wonder of the thing lies in the achieve-
ment of the translation itself, how its inspired renderer surmounted the
difficulties that beset him to give us such a bewilderingly beautiful piece
of work.

Influenced by the Greek, of which he is reputed to have known little,
or not too much, Chapman unconsciously I think happened on a meas-
ure which was to bring him fame, covertly abounding, in effect, the feel-
ing of blank verse for a measure more in keeping with the hexameters of
the Greek originals. He in this work showed himself to be an inspired
and skillful poet, moved by an enterprise on which more or less acci-
dentally he found himself to be engaged. He was forced to employ a new
measure with which he was unfamiliar. That turned out to be, not the
line of the customary pentameter but, in practice, a strange thing un-
known heretofore. It consisted, typically, of a line and a half variously
divided—the necessity for rhyming came into it but that was unim-
portant. Chapman gave up the pentameter, as far as he had the guts for
it, and struggled into the new measure. That it was a struggle is marked
in everything he had to do. The effect was electric! on himself as well as
as his readers:

The lance betwixt his ear and cheek ran in, and drove the mind
Of both those bitter fortunes out.

63

POETRY

verse to our ears as have been
taught to hear it.

The feeling, even in this brief fragment, is far from that of ordinary blank verse:

This said, the chamber-maid that held the Ewre and Basin by,
He had power water on his hands, when, looking to the sky,
He took the bowle, did sacrifice, and thus implor'd:

But to get the full of his achievement we have to take a longer passage.
It is a new measure which must have carried him exhilarated, blindly,
in its arms through the *Iliad*, as all discoveries carry a man into a new
world, for in the *Odyssey* which he undertook next he had lost it. He
went back on the new measure and for some unknown reason never re-
turned to it. The vigor of statement he had fallen upon coming as if by
the intervention of a god, he was never to recapture.

Then rushed he on, and in his eye had heavenly Polydore
Old Priam's sonne, whom last of all his fruitful Princess bore,
And for his youth (being dear to him) the king forbade to fight.
Yet (hot by inexperienc'd blood, to show how exquisite
He was of foote, for which of all the fiftie sonnes he held,
The special name) he flew befor the first heate of the field,
Even till he flew out of breath and soul—which, through the back, the
lance

Of swift Achilles put in ayre, and did his head advance
Out at his navill. On his knees the poore Prince fell,
And gathered with his tender hands his entrails, and did swell
Quite through the wide wound, till a cloud as blacke as death concealed
Their sight and all the world for him. When Hector had beheld
His brother tumbl'd so to earth (his entrails stille in hand),
Darke sorrow overcast his eyes, nor farre could he stand
A minute longer,

That's straight talking, with a compelling vigor of phrase that has
brought Chapman the attention and admiration of the ages. The secret
of his success lies under the surface, under the measure he instinctively
unearthed and employed—and later abandoned.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

64

3.

Anthony & Cleopatra

All Englishman of the Elizabethan perion, the beginning
of the 18th Century had just been put through an experience that had
shaken them to their shoes at least and beyond them to their very
bones, the writers among them. , a change in their religious loyalties.
From Rome to the ## King, Henry VIII, was a violent wrench for
some - sweet coirs from which of late the sweet birds sang. Many lost
their heads in the transition.

The consolidation of the crown, the threat of the Armada left
no room for dallying with the political situation. Either you were
loyal to England, which meant the crown, or you were an enemy of the
state. An insular people continuously threatened by the sea had this
new incentive to coserve its institutions. Englishmen were born and bred
in this mold, should we be surprised that their literary forms should
be other than conservative and have remained so continuously to this
day and promise to remain so into perpetuity.

I'm amused that when at a middle western college wher I was addressing
the student body I was speaking of the Bard of Avon I happed to speak
of the form in which his superb plays were written as not, I hoped,
the last word in dramatic poetry one of the more commanding students
rose in his place literatly foaming at the mout and accused me of
disloyalty to the genius of our conjoined languages. I was somewhat
taken aback. I protested that although we are taught English in
our schools,we do not as long since pointed out by Mr. Mencken, speak
that language among ourselves.

The languag which Englishmen use officially became fixed about

about the figure of Shakespeare and others until it has become
virtually a case of lese majesty to even think of liberalizing the
form of any # language that may follow it. The Irish had to
fly to ancient Gallic to retain their own selfric but Americans had
to dig deeper. In fact the prosodic structure of blank verse itself
has to be restudied to get at the root of the stasis. It's not a questin
of seeking to find a way to unseat Shakespeare as the young man
implied but to preseve our own future and those of our fellows the
Englishman among us in the forms of our intimacies.

I have mentioned how the Campion of Shakespeares day, being
somewhat regretful of the change in his religious climate, and not
completely sold on what forms his his "airs" should take adopted a
not so dedicated mold as his friend. Shakespeare was a conservative,
he never could have existed in the Queens entouraged if he had not
been. He wrote after the same pattern over and over for a lifetime,
never varting from the successes he had schooled himself in after such
a sweating schooling. He was a successful playright, he had to have a
play ready for production every season. No doubt he did not have an
easy time making a go of it between his wife [illegible] and
wherever he went to do his writing - his own bedroom perhaps [illegible]
what with the excitement of his own thoughts and more practical matters
assiciated with the production of the plays.

Anthony & Cleopatra (Scene VII. On board Pompey's galley)
the
the scene is water-borne, /river Nile (as in the first scene of The
Tempest contributing its quotient to the water mood) contributing
more than the mood alone enters the very measure of the poet's
composition. He yields to the very flowing of the river and to the

drunkenness of the characters as it mounts and give over a cramping
measure and for once (having a plausible excuse) let his mood follow
a more undisciplined #### pattern.

And we who follow the good Will, so that we can't do anything
which is not #### in his image are ourselves left all at sea. A man,
master of #### a supreme power of the imagination, has become our
captor forcing us to stop the process of #### our thought and confine
it to the formal limits of the 16th Century, limiting to that what we
shall think and say. Under the stress of drunkenness the measurelessness
which he otherwise would not have dared to brace has presented a
pattern which a professor of English #### at one of our great
universities has covertly brought to my attention! Thank you - I hope I
have selected the right passage.

The good Will was in his measures the child of his own
epoch, bound to this pattern and limited to it, as were the rest
of them, in the practice of his art. He was bound hand and foot, brain and
instinct, nose and ear, #### to it to the whole pattern of the age and
could not do otherwise than follow it - #### except under extreme
provocation. Drunkenness and the appearance has always been a great
releaser, therefore all disciplnarias detest it. It is necessary,
at times, to freee ourselves from a tyrannical process of thought -
such as the triumphant dictates of the 16th Century - to free ourselves
as in this small and unobtrusive instane the potet does from its
dominence. It is no more than a straw in the wind but in view of what
is to come later it points the way. We answer the commands of the age
by aping his minor gestures, patterning our own verse after the
structures that were adopted in his day.

Campion was made restless by these same restrictions. Now,
I have pointed out how the supreme versifier among us when he got the
chance to show what he could do and dared do followed the same thought.
Pompey and Anthony when they got a binge on were shown to measure
their measure their idiom after a loosened mode. In vino veritas. The
mast/ of his craft, who made his cash the trade of playwriting,
kept himself continually busy at work on his plays, day and night.
No wonder he got writer's cramp as shown by his later signatures. He
he also stuttherd the say. He was a hard worker by the evidence of the
plays themselves, not written on the machine! A persistent worker as
would be any Englishman devoted to his job.

"Sweetest Shakespeare, # fancy's child, warbled his native wood-wild". Ben Johnson in his eulogy of the poet immediately following his death speaks principally of his modesty, the unassuming quality of his genius - his unassuming intelligence.

(Anthony & Cleopatra)

Surprisingly or at least to my surprise I have heard from
my professor of English friend! Here is his letter:

Dept. of English

Dear Dr. Williams:

It is pleasant to have your letter. Yes, I do indeed
remember your visit to B. some years ago, and our conversation
after dinner, and before your public reading, which was received
most enthusiastically by a large audience of faculty and students.
As to the particular points you speak of, I am not quite so clear.

I suppose I must have been the one who referred to Sidney
Lanier's Science of English Verse. Of course the original edition
is long since out of print. But the Hohns Hopkins Univrtsity Press
brought out the complete works of Lanir some years ago, and one
of the volumes must be the one. Whether they would sell a single
volume, I don't know, but I imagine they would,
and I think they ought, at least to you. The general editor or that
handsome set of books is Professor Charles R. Anderson, Dept of
English, Johns Hopkins. If you have any difficulty, I suggest that
you write him. Of course, any good library would have the Hopkins
set, if not the 1880 original: Princeton, Rutgers etc, to name
institutions near at hand.

As to the Shakespeare point, I seem a bit dim. The barge
passage of course is in Anthony & Cleopatra, Act II, Scene ii.
The verse is undoubtedly irregular but Shakespeare's normal blank
verse standards. There are extra syllables both within the lines
and at the end. Sentences begin within the lines, and speeches
begin within the line, too. It is a marked break in the blank verse
pattern. But this same sort of break-down has been observed rather
generally in the lat plays-- Lear,
Macbeth, Cymbaline, Winter's Tale, Tempest etc. So I am not prepared
to say that the phenomena in this particular passage are very
different from what was going on very generally in Shakespeare's
later work. But I am very definitely not a Shakespeare
"scholar", and suggest that you put your query to someone who is.
Professor Gerald Bently at Princeton would be a good man to ask.
etc. etc.

To sum up, as S. progressed with his writing he abandoned
a strict adherence to the academic forms governing his verses and
allowed them more and more to follow speech pattern. The forensic

manner which permitted an actor to take the center of the stage
and declaim was made more than resemble the conversation pattern
of people talking together.

The inevitable result was that the measure was broken. The
formal measure had been more and more brought under a strain as
the moods and thoughts they were called on to depict were more and
more subtletized also until the lines could no longer bear it.
England could no longer bear bear it.

The internal tensions had gone beyond all measure, a new
was imperative but the forms had been irrecocably ceded by the
genius of a master's mind and spirit.

An age had come to an end. But until this time no one has
known where to turn in the language for relief.

I insist that within Shakespeares own plays exists the hints
which followed will lead to our delivery.

["PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED", "Misled by a too literal interpretation of a scene from Anthony\nand Cleopatra in which the lovers appear couched on a barge on the\nNile - I turned the pages to find it but failed completely. There\nis no such scene. There is a scene on a barge on the river Nile but the\nlovers do not appear together in it, only Anthony, Pompey and Menander.", "- I studied this scene to find some variation of the standard iambic\nbeat as my professor told me I should in which passion modulated by the\nflow of the river had taken possession of the verses breaking them\napart after a new mode.", "I haven't yet found but somewhat in the plays I am confident that\nI will find it. In the middle of Act.II, Scene VII, when #*#*#*#*#*\nAnthony, drinking, began his speech# about the crocodile: It is shaped,\nsir, like *#*#*#* itself; . . I thought I was coming to it. *#*#*#* The\npatyer of the verse had been finally broken. It could not be said to be\nunder a spell of high passion, it was not more than the conversation\nbetween two soldiers - but it looked more as if it modern free verse,\n*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#

"The Science of English Poetry"

#####

(Sidney Lanier)

Sidney Lanier, of Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, a professor of English at the university there, in 1880 published a treatise disclosing all that had been learned of prosody in the modern academic world. It is the most comprehensive review of the subject attempted by American scholarship to date - unknown to the theorists of the period and still difficult to find in our libraries; it is still well worth our most careful study - but not that all that Walt Whitman has postulated had not had an opportunity firse to be thoroughly to be absorbed.

Sidney Lanier comes at the end of an older period during which such a talent as Edgar Allen Poe was prominent as one of our practitioners of the art of poetry. Lanier was thoroughly schooled in the art as practiced in the better schools of England and the continent of Europe and knew in some detail the development from Bedlwolf through middle-English what he was talking about.

It is then of great importance to us Americans to pay attention to what he has to say to us for the continuation of our thought touching what has developed in moder times cannot be understood without what he demonstrated. His theories can be said somewhat to have gone astray but not without reason. They do not follow the teaching of the poetics we are used to coming from Oxford and Cambridge from the usual British anthologies but they are logical and he ably defends them. Music, the music of the line, forms to basis of his measure.

Measure, the measure, led him by the nose. but he was a true
American in being dissatisfied with what he had been taught, unwilling
to accept the old dictates. He was restless. He didn't know where to
turn but he knew that the old would not do - so he invented a
whole category, a whole inadequate and untenable division of the
measure into musical pauses which he attempted to apply to the written
poetic phrase. The result was an artificial, forced approximation
which was untenable # for any practicing poet.
If a man wants to write a poem it has to be as plain as two and
two are four how he is to do it.

A complex procedure, say as complex as the sonnet or some as
the measures that Lanier forwarded would be tolerable in a limited
and disciplined society in which a Mallarme# existed but there is a
basic limitation to it that makes it inapplicable in our day.
Lanier was seeking release, not further confinement. The terza rima of
Dante's day with it's closed world would not do no matter how the
religionists wanted to close the doors of heaven and hell upon it. In
a republic like the world he inhabited especially in the world where
relative theory of values was the rule.

It was a pre-dawn area of the new world which was to be broached,
when an (apparently) an apparent undisciplined freedom was to
rule in the arts: impressionism, surrealism, cubism and other daubing
dictated by the psychologists following the brain's vagaries. But
they forgot that art is the great corrective: there is no art without
measure. Whom was a contemporary.

The modern is # too complex a measure for Lanier to have so
much as guessed. Unless we say that the concatenation of his theories

["PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED", "(Sidney Lanier)", "There were many attempts in British scholarsh from the very beginning to discover something to build on relating to the science or even the at of English poetry. Nothing has ever come of it. It might as well, for the sake of beginning on a positive note, be said to have started in 1575 when George Gascoigne enters upon his *Crertayn Nots of Instruction concerning the making of cerse oryme in English, written at the request of Master Eduardo Donati*. Of course we gathere from Gascoign's \"pithy Latin that if there were as many opinions as men in poetry the science of it had still to be begun.\"", "A certain amount of review of the literaure is called for if the chaos surrounding The Science of English Verse is to be appreciated. The total ignorace of valid thoories on the construction, how rythmicall it should be made even before throwing the whole thing out *must* be anything else in if we are to convince ourselves that it is necessary.", "What we have to do is to recognize that we are dealing with a mass of heterogeneous material, and that our task is to sort it out into distinct units. This is not an easy matter, as there are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. 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The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made more difficult by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *unified* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made easier by the fact that the material is not uniformly homogeneous. There are many examples of *homogeneous* material, where the whole consists of a series of interrelated units. The task of sorting out the distinct units is made

2

Poets have always been concerned with what they have found before
as the material with which they have to work the words they have most to
do with. How to use them and for what, what purpose and the order
they shall occupy in speech and later on the written page. The order they
occupy elivates and satisfyes him and gives him the only satisfies him
and gives him the only final he is likely to get on earth. If he could
only feel secure in this lacking such a varyable thig as whet they call
this genius he'd be eternally happy. He gnows it's unlikely that he will
catch his mouse by the tail, other men have for the most part failed.
But there's the inspiratin to whip him into a new effort and he's off.

The scholars are no less concerned than the poet himself. It's gone
on since the first poem. The mechanism that makes it tick. In English
verse - that is not "wholl mistaken theory, of our (English) ryythm
as the books show. The scholarl concern with "a wholly mistaken theory,
of our (English) rhythm - do little more than repeat, or imcrease,
existing errors or confusions.

Early in the last century (Mitford, 1804) sumarized what was to be
said on the subject of poetic rhythm which is gouverned by our conceptions
of the poetic foot, the known metres praciced by our poets, in short
the measures of our lines, - # he is accurate and unequivocal
enlugh. "When I... I found that to follow the Greek and Latin rules
for the mechanism of the Greek and Latin verse in writing was easy, but to
comprehend the ground, to use reason ... so that the voice might folow
as well as the pen, and the ear might acknowledge its performance, not
only beyond me, but, as far as I could discover, beyond all teachers;
when further I observed that for the very different harmony

3

of English verse, no rule could be obtained . . . these contradictions
engaged my thought."

Mitford's researches had evidently been exclusive; and his assertion
that "no rule" could be found for English verse up to his time (or since)
was to be found. But a few years afterward we come upon ## Coleridge's
"grave assertion in the preface to Christabel that he had discovered a
new principle of English versification, that of accents. This "principle"
had been employed, as far as Lanier was concerned#, in English poetry
for more than a thousand years; and the very nursery-rhymes and folk songs
of our tongue present us everywhere with applications of it far
more daring and complex than any line of Christabel.

In this incomplete note on the state of English prosody up to
his time, the hopelessness of the attempts at any codification, since there
no datata to hedge us in, becomes apparent. The Laws of (English) Verse
are nonexistent, there are none.

Not to say that in writing his verse it has been every man for
himself, the times he lived on has governed the poet's choice of his
words and his methods and styles of composing them unless he has been
overborne by some principle of the moment that took possession of him.

That ## that makes absurd the whole book of Lanier's attempts
to build a new book of redivisors into his categories no matter how
builds them up. It is the same thing, over and over, with a personal
choice and not of the poet himself intervening. We will not have it.

One thing and that a very simple one is choice, if it is necessary
to make a choice, between quantity ## or accent in our

4

counting of the measure. And of it and what we must agree on is that the
that the divisions of the rhythm are to be counted at all for without
such at least # tacit counting there is no verse - we go into prose.
which is a horse of an entirely different color.

The divisions of verse on the page, whether to begin our liesne
with capitals or lower case letters is entirely beside the point - except
to the follower of precedent, the ritual of obedience, ## the divine
# right of our rulers to command. Enigmas in the line, to have the wit
to solve them, has always been a # measure adopted by priests and
kings to hide their meaning from the vulgar prominent in such a poet as
or own E.E.Cummings to insure agains the "wr0ng" poeple readin # what he
has to say to his readers. The poems of Villa , beautiful as they are
when correctly deciphered, and rewarding, are of the same order.

But there is somehigg unguess by all poets present and of
the pastewhich could not be envisioned until we had reached an age when
the measure itself had been brought into question, the measure of the
line itself, regular as it way be .

The language we have always spoken in the past, by which we have
been consolled, strengthened and protected is being modified under our
very feet, the American idiom, comes slowly into this orbit and because
of its origin as an outgrowth of English (in our schools) has been
brought ## inevitably into conflict with it - to the distress of
both camps. The British have the precidence of us, the powerful masters
of our speech, and theirs, especiall Shakespeare command our allegiance
because they are superb artists but let us not surrender our intelligence
along with our love.

(No. 4)

The science of poetry
(Tanier)

- when it came to his 5th and 6th orders # of rhythm, it was
too much - just another personal choice for private reasons doubtless
to do with teaching.

Today as reported by Dudeck from Toronto in a recent magazine
article we have a new refinement and definition of measure - showing
that the poets will not or cannot let the subject rest. Nor should
they as long as there are new poems to engage their attention; invention
goes on

A
n
h
i
k
y
o
n
y
o
n

Lanier

After all, he codefitd and catrgorized, imposing a whole system
of his own choosing to tabulate what a friend of mine asked for a regular
system, including all English poetr so that you could recognise the
tilt of a rhythm - if you accept him. He named his divisions, Rhythm 1,
Rhythm 2 etc uo to 6 six - giving examples of each so that you can recog-
nise them each in its turn, wrongheadedly or not - trivial ir not# as
you may decide. But, as to one statement as to measure itself and its
significane - nothing.

It must be put down, in effect, as a bubble bee persistently going
into a clump of Bee Balm. The preface "about the science of English
verse" is the sole adult interest - and principally because he rejets
every otther system of making a science of the art making from for the
English (and for all other reaces) frm the first, including the very first
attempts, about the year 1550 to Coleridge in his famous introduction
to _Crystabel_.

All he does, for me, and those wh follow is to clear the turgid
atmosphere. This is va;uabe therefor I notice it here. No one, and this
I am convinced, will ever reduce the art of poetry to a sysem. It is
it is impossibe so long as the poets themselves retainn a fleck of
invention and the ability to invent a single line. It is in fact a very
definition of poetry itself that it cannot harnassed to a dray . It may
break its neck but it cannot be broken.

When poetry, even the best of poetry, is written after a certain
mode too long it becomes a bore. That Freau never discovered. The so called
"free verse" of Whitman and others later among the rest - especially if
they attempted to ignore necessary variations in the line that make

for intelligent interest. The mind must be relieved as we get higher in
the scale of intelligent interests. Youu may say that Shakespear never
bores and in moments of greates intensity of his inspiration such as
the passage about the multitudinous deed ot may be so - but when to
listen to lines that became merely monotonous it cannot be true.

Lesser poets frequently become boring. We grow sick of them. And
merely to change the order of the words in any sentence without changing
the structur of the whole poem.

The American Idiom

The fixed measure, regularly counted, has dominted all
prosody in all languages, except the Hebrew, certainly all the classic
languages taught in our academies in recent times. Our young have come
to think of a fixed foot of whatever sort, dactilic, amphybraic or
iambic as synomous with the term "poetry." Furthemore rhyme and a se-
quence of stanzaic groopings of the lines as in Villon's Grand
Testament or Rimbaud's well known ballads, in Pope, Chaucer, ## Keats,
Goethe, Lope de Vega or the Russians poetry and rhyme have largely
accepted, save for the blank verse of the Elizabethan stoge as the same
thing. It must never be forgetten however that the Greeks and after
them the Roman poets never bothered with rhyme though Sappho may have
used it occasionally. But the fixed foot had been the invariable rule
through the ages throughout the ages.

All subtlties of thought, of and composition from the sonnets
of Shakespeare and Dante to those of Mallarme or
relid on
the fixed foot to give them the stability, to give them a norm from which
to vary. The art, the "art" of poetry meant very little else, a super-
lative choice of words, an unsurpassed vocabulary and the ready wit to
call on it in the extasies of composition touched off a response in
the reader to a top rank applause.

The critic is a restless# man, never satisfied. No sooner he
recognizes a genius in literature or painting that he will go beyond
him if he can. Michelangelo may have been unsurpassed in his time
and Sisly the colorit in his when along comes a new talent .... it

(5)

- it is no different in the natural sciences, and worse, we hail Copernicus and Gollileo after which we are not satisfied till we launch ourselves at the moon. The art of writing is no different until we come to Dada and the nihilists and the destruction of all art along with everything else.

There is nothing to do but to begin again. But let us never forget the lesson of the spiral, the Vorticists in England discovered that though we do over and over the same things it is never in the same plant but elsewhere in space. There is always something new to be experienced if we have the wit for it.

At the same time the traditionalists, those who want things to remain forever in the same groove must set themselves to find a way to dominate our lives. In every generation the struggle is renewed with bloodshed if the issues are too hard pressed, not that the is often pressed that far over the composition of a line of verse but the # violence implied of such a painting such as Nude Descending a Staircase of certain of Mr. Pound's cantos or some of the poems of e.e.cummins are potentially of the same sort. Murder could quickly follow them; Pound's confinement to an unsane asylum stem from nothing else.

The "moral" issue is neverfar in the rear, as I will show in the course of these remarks. The exact point of pressure for an American writer, or at best, poet, is his own # language, how it will be put on the page to represent what his mind perceives directly about him.

That is a complex phenomenon, simplified by the singleness of the

(5)

observing eye. That is eternally one. Start with that. There is no other choice, to measure even if you begin at a periphery as in some modern painting you must make that at least your beginning. But that at least as in the "verse librists" constituted in spite of the poets themselves, Walt Whitman and the poets down to René Char, that broke the deadly sequence of the measure as it tended to perpetuate itself in the structure of the poem. Unfortunately the realignment did not go far enough, in many poets witness our own e.e.cummings the *measure* is unaffected and it is the measure which is the objective, a change in the measure, which most affects our lives.

To measure our lines after the accepted style of English prosody which we are still taught in our universities and to which our moral codes are still made, unacknowledged, made to fit explains how deep the fissure, or fission, goes. It is an unthinkable breech of etiquett # and manners to vary an expected poetic stress, make a plus come down wher a minus is expected.

It is an important matter to be a school man. To have the discipline of the language under your control is vitally important to the race: the suicide of Socrates is tightly linked to this matter and he knew it as did his judges. Poets, the image breakers, are the enemies, the mortal enemies of school men - even when they are backward at their "lessons" as today. Therefore I have labelled a section of this thesis "after the event". But in a new country as this must still be thought of our compulsions must go to the new.

Our native idiom, the way we speak in this democracy is the image our poetry must dig in as a fertil soil. But after all we are

(5)

poets, men and women with the antanae raised to ever intellectual
vantage of our world. If we are alert to the vagaries of language we
at the same time are moralists awake to the significance of what the
language implies, when we say "dig" instead of understan we should know
that it is a moral risk we are taking when we use the word.

But deeper than that, the measure of our lines, the way they
are deployed on the page goes for us deepest of all.

The late Mr. Mencken was not a poet but he loved the ordering
of words, he knew at least enough not to make the mistake of Mr. Eliot
when he said, The American language! there is no American language, B**
Eliot being a poet should have known better. But Mencken missed the point
by not speaking of the American idiom, the spoken language, when he
came to go so exhaustively into his subject, his book on the subject, The
American Language, nowhere speaks † of the pronunciation of the
language, a living lanbuage, linked to the current thought of the time
which it has its part in moulding. It is taking its place beside outher
languages of the world, its verse formation is not to be traditional as
in Europe of even Asia or Africa or the Orient but, if we are able,
at the forward fringes of our thought. When a Dillon Thomas comes
against us with his poems with whom are we going to compare him? His
measures are nothing with which we are familiar. We know nothing of
the influence of bardic chants. I personally am made uneasy by his
his sonorous voice, his success with the ladies makes me distrustful
of such wimen, but that is no new phenomenon.

The American idiom offerd the poet an opportunity to rid

(5)

himself of the necessity to be herded with other poets around him and
also of the past. But the use of words had nothing to do with this. To
make such a statement seems absurd. What else is verse made of but
"words, words, words?" Quite literally, the spaces between the words ,
in our modern understand, which takes with them an equal part in the
measure.

A musician understands this, as should a poet also. Campion
did, but the dictates of his time forced a different interpretation
of the necessity upon him - or attempted to do so, to follow the
popular trend. A whole nation has no choice but to join with the rest if
it is not to be unseated in its fancy.

(To anticipate a bit. Re variable foot: (from a letter)
in the back of the hymn book you will find the psalms marked off--I
suppose for chanting to music--into measures like this:

Praise / ye the / Lord.// Praise ye the Lord from the heavens /
Praise him / in the / heights.

Praise ye him, / all his / angels: // praise ye / him, / all his /
hosts.

Praise ye him, / sun and / moon: // praise him, / all ye /
stars of / light.

3 measures before the caesura, four after. The music (organ)
gives the time-structure of the line, and the words vary in
pace so that from one to six go into a "foot."

Of course the words and music are entities conceived
on separate occasions, and the words are being stretched and
compressed to fit them into the music. Your job, on the other

(5)

hand, consists in making them both come out right tofether
from the start. Otherwise, the anology vetween the varyable foot
and the mensuration of the psalms seems to me rather, . .

We are all taught the King's English in our schools from Kinder-
garten to the university but we speak anther language using the same
written words. But the idiom, what we speak, is animated by a different
spirit. Thus our world, in the United States, is divided, one part
servant to a world of the past, those who accept its domination and
the other a world of the future. An inter nacine struggle goes on that
keeps the vigor of the language alive. We hate each other, as only
brothers can, being bred to it, but the language itself can have only
one conceivable loyalty, as the mind developes; it can be nothing if
not partisan of the new.

6 (the variavle foot)

Measure is divided into feet. The meaning holds no matter how
complex it may be. The elements of it are always regular governed
by the ear. Quqitative verse differs from accentative verse only
in being more snnsitivel dived according to what a poets meaning
varies as the environment of Athens differs from 16th century and
we today, with post Einstinian gnowled at iur disposal, search to to
understand more of life's less confund implications.

- On a continent recently discovered, speaking a language marked
by an idiom shaken free from ancient retrictions it is at least
understandable that we approach a measure in our versee approaching
in unsettrictiveness the ancient Greek, a vers e, culture by an age of
great subtly, to which the mor rigid conventions of the schools
is violently opposed.

It is a conservative gesture in the first sense, moral in its
characteristics in which I speak - the same sense tn which the
mediaeval christian church was governed by it, the churh whticg
condemned the poems of Sa pho and saw to theire destruction. A moral
geture.

The England of the protestan revolutin, the England of Milton
was shocked by the Greek influence dominent even in the free thinking
Will barely escaped the poets who scraped the edges of #its influence,
thefoot had to be stable to be English! The same today as always.

Time. The measure gas to be stable to be accepted or acceptable.
For otherwise it is immoral. As the French are today except in
their academie!

The chief blemish which mars the composition of even the
Shakespearean sonnet and all English poetry to the present day is the
persistant inversion of the phrase. This has been enforced on even the
greatest writers by a blind adherence to custom. The writers have been
insensitive to a slavish fixed measure.

But the worst deformer of the senrence by inversion of the sentence
is Milton, the Latinist.

Insensitive to the language they heard spoken about them, by
evidence of the recorded prose, the poets had an itch to conform as they
do today and have done from the beginning to something which they believed
was above their heads. They completely missed the significance of the
essential make up of what the poem is: measure. They all of them from
Homer, from Aristotle down, took it to be something involving social
prestige. They associated it with the gods, at least from the recent
middle ages to our times, with the aristocracy. A princely thing, to
we'll say in the case of a Milton, an appurtenance of God.

We can think of ages when - led by Dante - the Church dominated
the verse of the ages and not only the verse of the ages but it's most
intimate forms. To deviate from the forms of the accepted poem was
sacrilege, punishable by the accusation of immorality, tacit but none
the less effective.

The sonnet has presented itself throughout the ages, either
in one or another of its forms, as the most desirable and completely
desirable form of the love lyric in spite of the fact that it's
composition because of the language difficulties, makes it almost
impossible to write - even for the greatest poets among us without the

deformities of inversion of which I have already spoken. But the is
another difficulty; the almost complete restriction of the matter
# dealt with to a type of statement completely limited to literary
reference which in this age is complete false.

Men and women who are in love do not any longer feel this way,
the way adopted by the sonnet, toward each other. To me me it is a
revolting exhibition which if it cannot be suppressed, should be ignored.
It makes my guts turn over. Have they, these sonneteers, nothing else
to write about? Do they forget that Dante or at least Shakespeare
with languages more adapted to the restrictive form and with a genius
and in an age more conducive to the mood of the time have done the
work of genius in each case. It is impossible for us to equal them if
were possible. They want to copy them, to prove what? That they are
also great poets?

And if they succeed in writing a passable sonnet, such as Milton
fied to his blindness or Wordsworth on London bridge, which is unlikely,
does not the whole of poetry fairly shriek in their ears to go elsewhere?
They are neglecting the present and the possible forms, not the sonnet,
they should be usint to express themselves in. Invention, the relating
of opportunities the age offers, But they close their eyes or loch
themselves imposed closet, to copy, to copy! the past and the active men
of the past. Looking at their own belly buttons they go into a trance,
sweat over a few verbal relationships and come out with a compulsion,
after some dead precedent that has had its day, a sonnet. And that is an
active age with every incentive to literary invention if we knew only
where to turn.

Where are we to turn? to measure, a reassurance as a new measur.
The literary world has been cloed to us from our birth by the past. The

discovery of a new continent has the connotation of a new continent in
world of literature also. Measure is the only solidity we are permitted
to know in our sensible world, to measure. A discovery in the provind
of measure to supercede the past is all we can ope for and that we are
determined to posess.

In this country we have from the beginnig all wanted to be aris-
to crats: immitating the English who use to be our masters - and have,
failing honors wanted power that is to say, money. The history of the
country is nothing other from the Torys down. The "freedom" which we
acquire from theIndians, stealing it from them, all but the Quakers,
has been falsely tooted as our dearest poesession until we have believed
it a god given attribute. Cortez, that th ef an murderer, shoul be our
national hero. Whittman took it from his creole sweetie ,
whome he wanted to make his wife until his friends an relatives
prevented him from marrying a "niger", prevented his happiness, took it
over into the field of letters. Freedom, was what he understood. That
alone.

The French Revolution, infwcting Thomas Jefferson, to whom
it dictated our glurious Declaration of Independence. But Freedom
cannot be the end of it. We are free to do what, as our juvenile
delinquentts , and are we not all juvenile delinquents, find out to our
sorrow? No verse can be free. That is solely a confusion in terms
All verse must be measured. The sole problem where shal we find the
measure?

The past is the measure that alone can give us any security.
Our schoolshave been built on nothing else.But the world of letters no
more thn to forld of Gallileo does not stand still. The world of our

relationships is changing every day about our ears ♃ - affecting even our social relationships: marriages are not understood in the same light as formally when a man had absolute power over his wife's body - if he could get it.

Comparable changes have taken place in the body poeticus ever since the days of Sappho, who had powers over the measures she employed that we salute even today a loving master.

Defiance is a worn out symbol fitted more to wop from Sisilly for making us all pay for our vegetables if we live in the Chicago market are. But to rule our poetic measures we have to look for something more powerful than that.

Measure, to be universally applicable has to go into the provinces of abstract thought. To be practical that is we have to know where a ballistic missile is going. Not approximately where it is going but exactly where it is going. When your waif goes out the back door you can't take a chance on it you have to know where she is heading. Not approximately where but exactly where she is heading in all its passibilities. When she returns at the end of the day you have only to look at her for an answee. That's what makes life interesting. That why we are alive - love conquers all. That is the measure that dictates the structure of the lines of our poems.

A variable foot governs the lines of your poems. When we start a poetic sequence we have no idea where we are going. We are not fooled by that. The measure holds if we know what we're doing. Only the measure holds. But IT holds. The *measure* holds if we are not a child. We have special categories for children known as Kindergartens.

Some well disposed critic should be assigned to observet to *imspec*

and pull out all that is usable.

Now, getting down to brass tacks, as my father used to say (
Shawn: . . . A friend of mine once divided the whole thing
into three broad categories: The Maze - as represented by Pollock; The
Order- as represented by Mondrian; and The Monster- as represented by
Picasso-as of the Guernica period. It's oversimplification, of course,
but I think you could almost divide our art today into those three
broad categories.) Sitting down to the typewriter - having got over
"the stage of pencil sharpening anopenening the window to look up and
down the stree," what shall we put down on the paper?

I don't pretend that I know all the answers - but that the measure
must be
* to take its part among other measures in the
assemblys of the age
broken away from its ankilosed condition* I venture to dedicate
myself. completely. We cannot escape it as intelligent me.

We know now that there is no such thing as free verse. That is
no more than a contradiction in terms. to resort to measures, in short
to verse, is to submit to a discipline, the identicle discipline to
which science has to be submitted. and at one it must be added that by
no stretch of the imagination are art and science to be assumed to be
an identity or even to resemble each other. They simply are measured
similarly. The choice is infinite.

To use cadences dictated by the American idiom. All that
I have learned in prose composition to get as much said in the fewest
possible words, trimming where ever it's possible to make the sense
come through without tautology, balancing the words against that. Using
a full vocabulary, the fullest vocabulay of speech terms to maintan
a sensible effect. Concentrating what I have to say so that alert mind
is encouraged to take the laps necesay to bridge the gaps in the
sence left to save time. That's where the test comes. What is and what
is not permitted. Mere eccentricity is not permitted. It must be
be passible to reonnstruct the sence from the schemat, the grid of the
words supplied But the reader must be empowere by the interest of
the subject, its way its topography (not repelled by it) to follow.

And when he or she has followed he must be rewarded by achieving
a satisfaction which awakens him to a maximum followed by a complete
rest in which to enjoy his sensations. The passage must come instantly
in an epigram to a climax.

The construction cannot be allowed in the idiom to rely on a
hanitual tutn of phrase or of thought: Imagin if you will
Ezra Pound, of e.e,cummings of even Ben Shahn facin a piece of paoer
dominated by some idea which he has propsed to himself and I do not say
that at times, facing the paper, he may not have no idea all in his head
save the impetus to write, to discover in himself what puts him on
edge and to discover what will come of it.

The so called "divine" discontent of the artist - may very well
have no other objective. It is there that an idiom takes the lead.
Words begin to occur to his ear. If Chines idograms occur to him it

with the Oxford trained intonation of a Mr. Whaley - we hope. But be that
as it may a variable meter should take the initiative.

Pound said to me years ago it was his conviction that we are all
born with a pattern of speech to which we are native. We can take a
Pound canto and plot it by the speeches it employs to a fairly constant
design.

It doesn't matter how the speech is employed. The sam with
Mr. Cummings except for his cleverness is in employinf anapests to
relieve his iambics it goos invariably after the sam dog trot.
Miss Moore the same. The ideas all these poets employs, the same for Ben
Shahn, making them make the words dance come back to a constant
repetitiousness that delights or repels their respective audiences.

What I in my American world am proposing is that they divide their
lines differently and see what comes of it. We zre finished with the
aberration of free verse but we have tò learn to recount, taking our
idion as a constant (and for yhat we have to khow what we are talking)
and make units of it which we compose into our effects.

It is not easy to teach. It is not even easy to apprehend.
But the incentive it gives to a choice of words not out of a book leads
to curprisings assemblys and turns of phrase which are sometimes
rewarding in succinctness and vivid interplays when the poet does not
feel constrained by the hacitual

MEASURE:

1. Campion, in addition to his abilities as a poet, was a composer of songs which charmed his age. I was reminded of this this morning when I heard a nameless bird singing. Ah chee, ah chee! Chee, chee, chee!

2. Chapman's genius came upon him when he was a young man struggling with a Greek hexameter, with which he was not thoroughly familiar, striving at first to translate into English the world's most celebrated poem: To render into his own language such a poem to be anything resembling the original measure, would be a collasal achievement. . .

3. And Shakespeare the dramatic (and lyrical) poet finding himself anchored in the iambic pentameter which he never broke yet in one drunken passage wrestled the as if he wanted to be free of it.