2

4. A Baltimore poet, Sidney Lanier, Professor of English at Johns Hopkins, wrote in 1868 a treatise on prosody. The Science of English Poetry. A few years ago, at a reading in Brown University, I came to know a charming professor 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 disappointed, but it gave an opportunity 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 speech - but just as the various Greek dialects of the ancient world it shows enough similarity to the established forms to be taken, for a beginning, in its turn as a certain sort of English, a base from which to vary.

6. The Variable Foot carries this thesis to its logical conclusion - or it develops 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

4

1.

Champion

From the concern implicit in the writing of many scholars,
see E. Tn in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Campion's 16th Century
intention, and accomplishment, as to write rhymless lyrical poems.
It is to be noted that he was a song writer before he was a poet,
a musician first and last. He was a great controversialist even
belliferant about his theories of musical composition so con-
vinced in his mind as to take his practice in the art carelessly
off hand on occasion fortunately for students of what he did with
his texts.

"Of course I will write lyrics without rhymes. Didn't
the Greeks, the greatest song writer that ever existed, write
rhymelessly." He was popularly successful everywhere - though
he did not stick to his rule, or preference, but on the contrary
is best known for his rhymed "airs". At the end of the Eliza-
bethan period when he flourished, the Commonwealth put an end
to all that. The event of the Protestant Revolution, just when
the musical mode he practiced was at its height and had become,
in fact, briefly the fashion, the greatest period in British
literary history, he found himself among a galaxy of famous
names whence his reputation was to be cut off, a generation of
hymn singerism. The influence of the Greeks ended really just
when his practice of musical innovations was beginning.

5

When Milton, a younger contemporary among Campion's successors, had written his Masque, _Comus_, shortly after his _Lycidus_, it was much after the mode of the Greek experimenters - with abundant distortions in the order within the sentences, inversions of the phrase which make them difficult to read. Sometimes these in feat, as indeed in the _Paradise Lost_ are horrible to behold. Campion knew better than that, to deform the language for his private, proposes a pomposity which was entirely foreign to him. He was a singer and loved his lyting 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 elapsed time rather than our crude stresses possessed 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 when the pinch came was no longer tenable - without alter the grammatical 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 medicine in London for many years. To be a rhymer was vulgar in his ears: he detested all quacks. He was a gentleman poet, like Bridges, in fact more or less Left Bank:

6

an unconformist - like many of the prominent figures of his age and it is said nearly lost his head because of it. No rhyme. There was a more valuable element. 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 lived. The poets were prominent among them. They had not yet come to an agreement as to how the classics were to be pronounced when they were spoken aloud much less when they were translated and rendered into an equivalent English. The popular measure for dramatic poetry was the iambic pentametar - 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 the popular "airs" among his fellows. He never questioned what came into 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 detesting 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.

7

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 rhyme is shown in the follow-
ing air from Book 4:

Rose-cheeked Laura, come
Sing thou smoothly with thy beauties,
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, and also from the direct
musical necessities as they presented themselves of the songs

8

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 century bibliographer, Percival Vivian, and also the comments he made later, an article from the Encyclopedia Brittanica to the same effect: "A curious metrist is the name applied to him by the late 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 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 skillfull reader would make much of this poem if set to read

9

it at first glance. (Note, contrast - 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 iambic. It
is just possible to struggle along with a measure consonant with
that as far as the fourth line:

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

What the day doth forbid
is clearly either dactilic or anapastic. 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.

10

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 century later when, after Campion's instinctive adjustments to accommodate himself to a new measure more in accord with the quantitative values 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 violently opposed. 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 his whole Cavalier world (after the Tudors).

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 world relating to the writing of the poetic foot became fixed as to 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 to be the measure under which we are to achieve today's triumphs.

11

2.

Chapman

Chapman lived in the same London which nourished Campion
and must have been affected by much the same moods and ideas
which influenced him in his generation toward the completion of
his verse ideas. They all knew the Greek as one of their more
unschooled 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 translate the Iliad into English.
He did the first seven 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.

12

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 iambic pentameter, to our everlasting loss.

For it has been found that Chapman, writing out of his
ignorance of Greek and quantitative verse had done more than he
bargained for or well knew. At least he did not know its signifi-
cance in 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 satre by his verse at all, but tossed it off care-
lessly in the course of putting it 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,
Campion more consciously (before he gave up trying) did the
modern measure a great service.

13

Dear Bill:

Sorry to have let you down. Your card asking about the
fourteener said "no hurry" so I deferred the matter till I'd
brought my college poetry textbook to completion against a dead-
line, which deadline was today. Shipped it off to Rinehart this
p.m. with vast relief. We'll see if they take it as is or ship
it back for more work. They may well think the opening third
over-difficult, always underestimating the acumen of the student
as they and their advisors do (by "they" I mean the textbook
ring, not just Rinehart in particular.)

Now first your two-installment letter which came today.
Yes, I should be honored to have you use "Words in the Dark" as
a tailpiece or appendix to "Measure." (I take it you're plan-
ning to issue "Measure" as a small book? It sounds too big for
a magazine.)

Just a legal angle or two. "Words in the Dark" is copy-
righted by me, so I gather that I am free to turn it over to
you. But I'd like to hold onto the copyright, that is, not let
it get included in the general copyright of the book in which
you include it. No real complication-- a note from you to the
publisher involved at the time you deliver your completed ms.
I ask this because I shall eventually want to include pieces of
the essay in a book called THE NIGHT WORLD which I have about
one-fifth written. Lord knows when it will be done-maybe 3
years. Other stuff to do first. But so long as you leave the
copyright to that piece standing in my name it's yours to repro-
duce or quarry as you like. I'd never have formulated it in the
first place without your help.

Now about the fourteener. First, the official definition:
it's a line with fourteen syllables, normally iambic, which
means 7 stresses. Much used in England in the 16th century,
then abandoned as the pentameter got the attention and the develop-
ment. Chief examples. Golding's Ovid and Chapman's Iliad. Sample
quoted from memory (Golding)

The god now having put aside his borrowed shape of bull

Had in his likeness shown himself, and with his pretty trull

Gone straightway to the isle of Crete; da da, da da, da da...

memory falters. If you have Ezra's *ABC of Reading* you'll find
examples there, in the shape of excerpts from Golding's Ovid.

Next thing to note, it is always (yes, I think always) rhymed in
couplets. Seems to need the rhyme; so long a line tends to lack
prosodic identity when written unrhymed. The men who developed

14

English unrhymed verse (Surrey, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton) instinctively chose the pentameter, 10 syllables, 5 stresses, because the pentameter line is a handier size for moving the caesura to and fro.

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 see that we have the ballad stanza, as in Sir Patrick Spens:

The King sits in Dumferline 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

15

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
structure they take on when read iambically. 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 in quatrains of 8 & 6 syllables. One up for the iambic
pentameter. And while fourteeners swing from side to side of the
page to an even greater extent than iambic pentameters, and swell
the folio sheet with even greater dignity, the trick of reading
them easily has been lost unless they are broken, 8 & 6, into
quatrains.

Golding's fourteeners don't have that mechanical swing &
that consequent tendency to break 8 & 6. Ezra emphasizes this
in the samples he prints in the ABC of Reading by putting wide
spaces where he hears the caesurae, sometimes 3 per line. I
wish I had that book handy, I'd transcribe a few examples. But
you can lay hands on it I'm sure.

And you yourself noted in that POETRY review that Chapman
seems to have licked the inherent monotony of the form in his
Homer. Or rather, he didn't sense any inherent monotony, not
having our conditioning to tick-tock iambic stress-reading. After
Milton had shown what could be done with accent alone nobody's
ear could ever be the same.

Forgive me, this may be far more than you want or can
absorb in a rush. If you can tell me what aspects you're particu-
larly interested in I'll try to find out more, or boil it down.

It'll have to wait, though, till I get back to California.
I leave here Wednesday, August 20, and shall be back there the
27th. So address your next letter to 1415 Bluff Drive, Santa
Barbara, California. I'll try not to be so long answering.

yours ever,

Hugh

16

In all iambics in worthy hands their lurks a tripled beat that transfers them into anapests when they are read with a subtle understanding of their true nature. The understanding 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 acknowledgement 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 acknowledge that rule and go on with that hidden measure, no more than could the later Shakespeare in the beat of his more subtle blank verse, where it breaks with heroic declamatory mode of his earlier plays and seeks relief in a more conversational tone.

Chapman had a model on the page before him, he was doing a translation which to handle according 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.

17

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

Chapman's Homer:

That Shakespeare's poetic brilliance has obscured Chapman's
genius through the years had become more and more apparent as
time advances. Consider what the man accomplished. He estab-
lished 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.

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 in-
stead 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.

18

Between this clumbsiness 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 uncertainty 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 anapests, marked by spondees,
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

19

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 appealed. 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

20

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. I am sure that as he wrote Chapman was hearing *both* his version of the original Greek and the language into which he was making his translation. 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. It was a success which he perhaps had not anticipated but which revealed certain characteristics 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.

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 wholeheartedly to the task. All commentators, from the past to the present, are joined in

21

agreeing that this work is unrivaled, a vigor that Homer him-
self 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, so
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 something 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."

22

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. Onething 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 interest 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 achievement 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 measure which was to bring him fame, covertly abounding, in effect, the feeling of blank verse for a measure more in keeping with the hexameters of the Greek originals.

23

He in this work showed himself to be an inspired and skillful poet, moved by an enterprise on which more or less accidentally 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 unknown heretofore. It consisted, typically, of a line and a half variously divided--the necessity for rhyming came into it but that was unimportant. 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 his readers:

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

The feeling, even in this brief fragment, is far from iambic to our ears as have been taught to hear it.

> 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

24

new measure and for some unknown reason never returned 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 (not 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 the 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 tumb'l'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.

25

3.

Anthony and Cleopatra

All Englishman of the Elizabethan period, the beginning of the Eighteenth 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 choirs 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 conserve 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 where I was addressing the student body I was speaking of the Bard of Avon, I happened to speak of the form in which his superb

26

plays were written as not, I hoped, the last word in dramatic
poetry one of the more commanding students rose in his place
literally foaming at the mouth 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 language which Englishmen use officially became
fixed 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 Gailic 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 question of seeking to find a way
to unseat Shakespeare as the young man implied, but to preserve
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 "airs" should take

27

adopted a not so dedicated mold as his friend. Shakespeare was a conservative, he never could have existed in the Queens entourage if he had not been. He wrote after the same pattern over and over for a lifetime, never parting 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 and wherever he went to do his writing - his own bedroom perhaps what with the excitement of his own thoughts and more practical matters associated with the production of the plays.

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 disciplinarians detest it. It is necessary, at times, to free ourselves from a tyrannical process of thought - such as the triumphant dictates of the Sixteenth Century - to free ourselves as in this small and unobtrusive instance the poet does from its dominance. It is no more than a straw in the wind, but in view

28

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 loosed mode. In vino veritas. The master of his craft, who made his cash at 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 also stuttered, they 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 woodwild". 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.

29

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 Johns
Hopkins University Press brought out the complete works of
Lanier 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 of 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 line, too. It is a marked breakdown of the blank
verse pattern. But this same sort of breakdown has been
observed rather generally in the later 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.

Cordially yours,

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 to

30

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.

The internal tensions had gone beyond all measure, a new was imperative, but the forms had been irrevocably closed 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 Shakespeare's own plays exists the hints which followed will lead to our delivery.

Misled by a too literal interpretation of a scene from Anthony and Cleopatra in which the lovers appear couched on a barge on the Nile - I turned the pages to find it but failed completely. There is no such scene. There is a scene on a barge on the river Nile, but the lovers do not appear together in it, only Anthony, Pompey, and Menander.

- I studied this scene to find some variation of the standard iambic beat as my professor told me I should in which passion modulated by the flow of the river had taken possession of the verses breaking them apart after a new mode.

31

I haven't yet found but somewhere in the plays I am confident that I will find it. In the middle of Act II, Scene VII, when Anthony, drinking, began his speech about the crocodile: It is shaped, sir, like itself; . . . I thought I was coming to it. The patyer of the verse had been finally broken. It could not be said to be under a spell of high passion, it was not more than the conversation between two soldiers - but it looked more as if it modern free verse, I was full of high hopes, but it didn't go on that way but soon lapsed into the same sing song. *The Song*, which soon ensued did not alter the pace. I was disappointed. I wanted to look further.

I have found it! The spot referred to by the professor in Anthony and Cleopatra where passion overcomes the accepted measure of the language occurs in the first act - if I can find it: the report of the first celebration by the lovers as described in the report of the poet himself. This is not a scene from the play, I was mistaken in searching for it there: The barge, the flowing Nile, the music and the amorous music were therein the report direct from the poet's mind were for a

32

freedom of the language lay on the couch with the lovers. Let's
see if the professor was a good observer - otherwise we shall
have to look further for our hints:

Anthony & Cleopatra II. ii.

<u>Agri.</u> There she appeared indeed; or my
reporter devised well for her.

<u>Eno.</u> I will tell you.
The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars
were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and
made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own
person,
It beggar'd all description: she did lie
In her pavilion - cloth-of-gold of tissue-
O'er picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimoled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers color'd fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did
cool,
And what they undid did.

<u>Agri.</u> O, rare for Anthony!

<u>Eno.</u> Her gentlewomen, like the Nerieids,
So many mermaids, tended her! the eyes,
And made their bends adorings: at the helm
A seeming mermaid steers: the silken tackle
Swell with the touch of those flower-soft hands,
That yarly framed the office. From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sence
Of the adjacent whatfs, The city cast

34

4.

"The Science of English Poetry"

(Sidney Lanier)

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 or woman wants to write a
poem it has to be as plain as two and two are four how he is
to do it.

The modern is too complex a measure for Lanier to have
so much as guessed. Unless we say that the concatenation of
his theories following the classic development of the art was
the closed cul de sack in which he was seeking the way. It is
too complex an understanding of measure for us to spend much
effort upon today, but historically it brings us abreast of the
times.

35

There were many attempts in British scholars from the very beginning to discover something to build on relating to the science or even the art 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 verse or ryme in English, written at the request of Master Eduardo Donati*. Of course we gather from Gascoigne'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 literature is called for if the chaos surrounding *The Science of English Verse* is to be appreciated. The total ignorance of valid theories on the construction, how rhythmical it should be made even before throwing the whole thing out must come before anything else in it if we are to convince ourselves that it is necessary.

- We have all the poems from the Greek and Latin constantly before us in our schools of the pronouncement of which we know nothing at all. So that we won't get any help there. We'll have to start fresh with our English and since the pronouncement leads direct to the construction, we'll have to start our investigations there.

36

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 elicits and 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 variable thing as what they call this genius, he'd be eternally happy. He knows it's unlikely that he will catch his mouse by the tail, other men have for the most part failed. But there's the inspiration 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 a wholly mistaken theory, of our (English) rhythm - do little more than repeat, or increase, existing errors or confusions.

Early in the last century (Mitford, 1804) summarized what was to be said on the subject of poetic rhythm which is governed by our conceptions of the poetic foot, the known meters practiced by our poets, in short the measures of our

37

lines, - he is accurate and unequivocal enough. "When . . . 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 follow as well as the pen, and 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 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 Colridge's "grave assertion in the face 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 are no data to hedge us in, becomes apparent. The Laws of (English) Verse are nonexistent, there are none.

38

Not to say that in writing his verse it has been every
man for himself, the times he lived on has governed the poets
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 Laniers attempts
to build a new book of redivisions in this categories no
matter how he builds them up. It is the same thing, over and
over, with a personal choice and not of the poet himself inter-
vening. 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 counting of the measure. And of it and what we must
agree on is 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
lines with capitals or lower case letters is entirely beside

39

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 our own
E.E. Cummings to insure against the "wrong" people reading 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 something unguessed by all poets present
and of the past which 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 may
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 precedence of us, the powerful
masters of our speech, and theirs, especially Shakespeare,
command our allegiance because they are superb artists, but
let us not surrender our intelligence along with our love.

40

- when it came to his fifth and sixth 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.

After all, he codes his and categorized, imposing a whole
system of his own choosing to tabulate what a friend of mine
asked for a regular system, including all English poetry so
that you could recognize the title of a rhythm - if you accept
him. He named his divisions, Rhythm 1, Rhythm 2 etc on to 6
- giving examples of each so that you can recognize them each
in its turn, wrongheadedly or not - trivial or not as you may
decide. But, as to one statement as to measure itself and
its significance - nothing.

All he does, and those who follow is to clear the turbid
atmosphere. This is valuable therefore I notice it here. No
one, and this I am convinced, will ever reduce the art of poetry

41

to a system. It is impossible so long as the poets themselves
retain 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 be harnessed 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. Freau never dis-
covered 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 makes for intelligent interest.
The mind must be relieved as we get higher in the scale of
intelligent interests. You may say that Shakespeare never
bores and in moments of greatest intensity of his inspiration
such as the passage about the multitudinous deed it may be so
- but when to listen to lines that became merely monotonous,
it cannot be true.

42

Dear Bill:

Thank you for your prompt and generous response. Let's
hope MacGregor is helpful. I'll let you know.

That's good news about Ezra's textbook. "Beyond the
college freshman level," you say, paraphrasing him. "they have
been already corrupted." Yes, thirty years ago; but Ezra
hasn't taught in an American college in the past decade. I
have. My experience--on the west coast anyhow, and it may be
different in the east--is that the come to college virgo intacta,
intellectually speaking; and that's the college teacher's prime
opportunity. Time was when they were filled full of Shelley
& c in high school; but the college freshman on the west coast
today has not been corrupted by his reading because he has read
nothing. He has nothing to unlearn, and you can hit him with
devastating impact if you shove the right things in fron of him.

It's homeopathic. All the forces that tend toward
illiteracy, in producing illiteracy produce innocence. Sure,
the learning process starts late, but it can be made to start.
I would rather students of 17 who had read nothing than the
kind who had to be laboriously reoriented, because they had
been told what to approve of before I got hold of them. Eliot
said, before he started producing cocktail drama, that for plays
he would prefer an illiterate audience to a half-educated one,
and I know exactly what he meant. (He later made his terms with
the commercial theatre, but that doesn't concern us here).

2

43

Glad you like Charlie's book. I've had the poems around, in ms. and in proof, for 6 months, and still they grow on me. In case you haven't written him, I shall quote to him what you wrote me. One of the surest tokens of his soundness is that he is, as anyone can see, intensely English in idiom and sensibility, yet in England they don't know WHAT to make of him. Total bewilderment. You should see some of the letters he had from British publishers, rejecting the book in honest puzzlement. But in America a college girl named Martha Murphy working in Dave's office can get farther than the most cultured British reviewers and write in half an hour a perfectly adequate jacket blurb (front flap of cover). Not that Martha is any critical genius, but she inhabits a milieu in which perception of what Charlie is up to comes more easily.

I am, again, very grateful for your response concerning the use of poems in my textbook. I've also scattered a number of your aphorisms through it, such as the one about the poet refining his work till it's nothing but useful knowledge. I'll send you a copy when it's out, if I ever get all the permissions. What a headache. But I really expect it may do the young some good. Not to mention their better mentors, who (I hope) have been wanting such a book.

Cordially,

Hugh Kenner.

44

Dear Bull:

Many thanks for your generous letter. I'm only sorry
the review was so late, though I suppose there's some value
in reminding folk a year later that the book still exists.

We badly need some terminology in precisely the metrical
area. After the names of the various kinds of Greek "feet"
(iamb, trochee, etc.) the English language gives out. Hence
the difficulty you have had explaining the 3-ply line to various
correspondents. And there needs to be a term for the quality
(?cadence or whatever) that differentiates "all thy beauty gay"
from "down upon the bay", which are identical lines in the
official scansion systems.

Re variable foot: 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 you 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."

2

45

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
hand, consists in making them both come out right together
from the start. Otherwise, the analogy between the variable
foot and the mensuration of the psalms seems to me rather close,
unless I wholly misunderstand the v.f.

I retain hopes of getting down to your part of the
country next month. We return to California in mid-August.

And again, thanks for your thanks.

Cordially,

46

Dear Bill:

If my note of this morning re a review of Tomlinson for
SPECTRUM sounded stilted, it was because I was playing with an
electric typewriter in our dept. office and most of my mind
was on the machine. I declare, I don't know how you write
*poetry* on one of the things. Every time I lock two typebars
together, a thing I frequently do, it sets up a clattering &
a chattering as though preparing to disgorge at the very least
an instalment of the Delphic oracle, and simultaneously starts
pumping ribbon very briskly from one side to the other, like
a constipated bureaucrat examining his red tape.

I don't know if you saw my review of your LETTERS in
National Review about last November. I'll transcribe a passage
which may be of use to you re MEASURE- take it or ignore it:

"Dr. Williams presents (the necessity for metrical
invention) as an urgent civic need. That the arts feed
civilizations, and not only triumphant arts or ideal
civilizations, is a truth never half grasped. By corol-
lary, that a genuine technical innovation in an art--
not a "new style," which may as well be by Dior, but an
invention in the procedures of poetry or painting as
definable as the Yale lock--that such an act may trans-
mute the vital tissues of several generations is a truth
concealed from people who have known since school-days
that Arkwright transformed England by inventing the
spinning-jenny. The mutations of the steam age and the
electronic age are commonplace; it is equally pertinent
to understand that Anglo-Saxonry is just emerging from an
iambic pentameter civilization."

I kind of like that last phrase. Maybe you can find
a use for it.

How go things?

yours ever,

47

September 16, 1958

Dear Bill:

Whew! You're a speed artist. Wish I could
shoot back reviews by return mail like that. I like it
very much and I'm sure Charlie will be pleased.

How--do you by any chance have Part I of
*Measure* in a form in which you'd be willing to release
it? There turns out to be much less good stuff on hand
for the fall *Spectrum* than we'd like. No, I'm not
holding a club over your head. If you want to sit on
the piece a while longer, do so. But if we could have
it by October 1, we could get it in the next issue and
make the issue look less undernourished. Do as you
think best.

And thanks again for the excellent Tomlinson
piece.

Very cordially,

48

October 14, 1958.

Dear Bill:

You should have a copy of DELTA No. 5 (Oct. 1958), since your and Wang's SPRING SONG is included. This is to draw your attention to Dudek's NOTE ON METRICS, pages 15-17. Bottom para on page 16, excellent statement of a notion I had fumbled at previously (vide my letter to you on Four-teeners), the notion that metric has become visual as well as auditory since print took over. Dudek notes that in Milton the run-on of the blank verse becomes a subtle *observed* as well as heard effect. And of course your own 3-decker line says things to the eye that aren't evident to a hearer with no page in front of him.

Also note his quotes from Gilbert Murray: "Greek lyric strophe consists not of a row of identical lines, but of a more or less elaborate construction of lines that are similar but not identical....."

If you haven't the magazine I'll send it to you.

Don't let me crowd you. If I get over-importunate just ignore it.

How goes it?

yours ever,

49

October 30, 1958.

Dear Bill:

You can be assured of my compassion; it's impertinent to say more, except to express pleasure that you seem not to have been poleaxed away from that typewriter--where you belong.

Dammit, I have spent an hour hunting for that DELTA with the Dudek piece. If it doesn't turn up in a day or so I'll write Dudek and ask him to send you one. I'm convinced he's on to something. The more I think of it, the more important seems to be the fact that poetry from about Milton's time on was intended to be looked at on a printed page. You don't get it all by hearing it read (nor, for that matter, by just looking at it). Chaucer wrote for the ear; manuscripts were circulated, and people read them aloud to others.

Shakespeare, of course, to be bawled in theatres. Did you know that Gray's *Elegy* is the first poem I have discovered in which the author is being VERY fussy about how it goes onto the page? Every noun capitalized without exception, all spellings regularized, nothing left (as Pope still left many details) to the printer's vagaries. And this care for neatness of appearance gets into his measure, those even rectangular stanzas, that equable cadence. Varnish.

Again, your 3-ply line: one can't convey *all* of it with the voice. Can't pause to indicate all those line-endings. At least you didn't when I heard you read. Had to be *seen*

50

2

also. So one of the elusive components we're both trying to pin down may well be the underpattern that comes to the eye and alternately reinforces and counterposes the stress-pattern, phrase-pattern, or ear-pattern. And one reason why it's elusive is that naturally we've been trying to define it in terms of traditional metrical components, syllables, feet, stresses.

And I'm haunted by the feeling that I failed to write and thank you for inscribing and sending me a copy of PATERSON V. If I did fail, please disregard my tardiness. I am deeply honored. It is a wonderful poem, Bill. You haven't slipped. You have increased. I shouldn't have thought you could handle a section without the historical and corporeal city, the documentation, no ideas but in things. And by golly, it turns out that "to measure is all we know," and that you can keep that dance going for--for how many pages is it? Jimmy didn't number them--anyway the perfect finale.

I have a book deadline crowding me. When it's past, and let us hope met, I'll whip up a suitable encomium on Pat V for the public prints; for POETRY, specifically. Then at last I'll get at the next book, delayed, entitled Williams, Wm. Carlos; and of that I undertake to send you an inscribed copy, suitably bound; and see that you stay around to receive it.

Our best to both of you,

51

July 21, 1958.

Dear Bill:

That's wonderful news, that you're about to gather
things together in a major pronouncement on MEASURE. No
one else can do it. The situation is indeed urgent. Every-
thing related to measure is wholly passed over in classrooms.
Speaking as a teacher, I find that phase of poetic activity
almost unteachable, partly because of my own defective
understanding of what is involved, partly because students
can absorb ideas far more easily than they can perceive facts.

Do not overlook this in weighing the prevalence of
traditional measures: through long practice they have been
codified and can be learned about in the abstract. Any one
can memorize the facts about trochees, spondees, iambic
tetrameters, etc. And a teaching process which transmits
these codified data perpetuates their status. When someone
comes along with the capacity for actually seeing things
happening in the verse line, what he has been taught gets in
his way and he finds it easiest to perceive what he has
already been taught about. That's my own situation. In
discussing your metric or Zukofsky's I'm way out on a limb;
I can perceive something organic & urgent going on but lack
terminology to identify it & discuss it.

But what I started out to say was, by all means feel
free to assume that the piece is going into SPECTRUM: either
part one or, if you want, the whole thing when it's done.
I'll have to write and find out about deadlines for the next
(fall) issue. But don't worry, we'll put it in when it's
ready. It's wonderful to have you turn to us.

In about 10 days I hope to visit the library at Buffalo.
If I can possibly do it I'll look in at Rutherford. Are you
planning to be home around August 77?

Evergreen's coolness doesn't surprise me. Barney has
passed up opportunities to be useful before. I'm afraid he's
merely gaga about Paris. Not that I underrate Paris, but the
date is 1958, not 1925.

2

52

Suave, cordial letter from Bob MacGregor re permissions for you and EP. Nothing definite till the chap who handles his permissions returns from vacation. Bob is sure that I don't want to do my good friends out of their just payments. Nor do I. I merely want to put into the book what ought to go into it, despite Rinehart's unimaginatively low ceiling for permissions. Don't you worry about it any longer, though. I'll have it out with Bob.

I'm sending separately a copy of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, containing the paper I read to them in November 1956. It was meant to define what you, among others, are doing in America, to make it clear to an English audience that they can no longer regard the U.S. poet as an English poet who doesn't know how. As you will note from the editor's general introduction to the volume, what I had thought to be my dispassionate examination of facts was received as a wild attack on everything sacred. But he was enough struck by it to put it into the volume, so it will get some circulation. It's weak in lacking exemplification, but I didn't see much point in reading slices of *Paterson* to them: if they hadn't liked what I read by way of example they would have supposed that their dislike disposed of my whole case; whereas by sticking to principles only I've got some of them worried.

The big joke, or the saving irony, whatever you like to call it, is that in order to include my essay in their volume they had to elect me to a Fellowship in the society, so I now have the letters F.R.S.L. after my name! The same thing happened to Eliot when he read them a paper in 1930 or so. As soon as the volume with his paper was printed he formally resigned his fellowship; I hope that brightens him a little in your eyes.

But I shall hang onto mine; if I am to reach an English public at all I need every bit of respectability I can clothe myself in. Also it would be a dangerous thing to be a fellow of if one lived in London, but living 6,000 miles away I don't see how I can get sucked into their social vortex where we are all scholars & gentlemen together and nothing intelligent really matters.

But I run on. I look forward keenly to MEASURE.

Cordially,

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5.
The American Idiom

The fixed measure, regularly counted, has dominated 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 synonymous with the term "poetry." Furthermore rhyme and a sequence of stanziac 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 stage as the same thing. It must never be forgotten 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 subtities of thought, of and composition from the sonnets of Shakespeare and Dante to those of Mallarme or relied 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 superlative choice of words, an unsurpassed vocabulary and the ready wit to call on it in the eestacies of composition toughed off a response in the reader to a top rank applause.

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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. Michaelangelo may have been unsurpassed in his time and Sicily the colorit in his when along comes a new talent ... it - 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 there 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

55

of certain of Mr. Pound's cantos or some of the poems of E.B. Cummings are potentially of the same sort. Murder could quickly follow them; Pound's confinement to an insane asylum stems from nothing else.

The "moral" issue is never far 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 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.B. Cummings the *measure* is unaffected and it is the measure which is the objective, a change in the measure, which most affect our lives.

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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 where 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 fertile soil. But after all we are poets, men and women with the antenae 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 understand we should know that it is a moral risk we are taking when we use the word.

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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, 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 language, linked to the current thought
of the time which it has its part in moulding. It is taking
its place beside other languages of the world, its verse forma-
tion is not to be traditional as in Europe or 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 sonorous voice, his success with the ladies
makes me distrustful of such women, but that is no new
phenomenon.

The American idiom offered the poet an opportunity to
rid himself of the necessity to be herded with other poets
around him and also of the past. But the use of words had

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

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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 hand, consists in making them both come out right together from the start. Otherwise, the analogy between the variable foot and the mensuration of the psalms seems to me rather, . . .

We are all taught the King's English in our schools from Kindergarten to the university, but we speak another 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 develops; it can be nothing if not partisan of the new.

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6

(the variable 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. Quantitative verse differs from accentative verse only in being more sensitive, divided according to what a poet's meaning varies as the environment of Athens differs from sixteenth century and us today, with post Einstein-iam knowledge at our disposal, search to understand more of life's less confound implications.

- On a continent recently discovered, speaking a language marked by an idiom shaken free from ancient restrictions it is at least understandable that we approach a measure in our verses approaching in unrestrictedness the ancient Greek, a verse, culture by an age of great subtlety, to which the more 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 in

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which the mediaeval Christian church was governed by it, the
church which condemned the poems of Sappho and saw to their
destruction. A moral gesture.

The England of the protestant revolution, the England
of Milton was shocked by the Greek influence dominant even in
the free thinking Will barely escaped the poets who scraped
the edges of its influence, the foot had to be stable to be
English! The same today as always.

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

The chief blemish which mars the composition of even
the Shakespearean sonnet and all English poetry to the present
day is the persistent 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 sentence by inversion of
the sentence is Milton, the Latinist.

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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 its 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 its 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 there is another difficulty; the almost complete restriction of the matter dealt with to a

63

type of statement completely limited to literary reference
which in this age is completely 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 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 thing have done the
work of genius in each case. It is impossible for us to equal
them if it 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 did 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 using
to express themselves in. Invention, the relating of opportuni-
ties the age offers, but they close their eyes or lock them-
selves imposed closet, to copy, to copy! the past and the active
men of the past. Looking at their own belly buttons they go

64

into a trance, sweat over a few verbal relationships and come
out with a composition, after some dead president 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 of a
new measure. The literary world has been closed 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 hope for and that
we are determined to possess.

In this country we have from the beginning all wanted
to be aristocrats: 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 the Indians,
stealing it from them, all but the Quakers, has been falsely
tooted as our dearest possession until we have believed it a
God given attribute. Cortez, that thief and murderer, should

65

be our national hero. Whittman took it from his creole sweetie,
whom he wanted to make his wife until his friends and relatives
prevented him from marrying a "nigger", prevented his happiness,
took it over into the field of letters. Freedom, was what he
understood. That alone.

The French Revolution infecting Thomas Jefferson to whom
it dictated our glorious Declaration for Independence. But
Freedom cannot be the end of it. We are free to do what, as
our juvenile delinquents, and are we not all juvenile delin-
quents, 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 shall we find the measure?

The past is the measure that alone can give us any
security. Our schools have been built on nothing else. But
the world of letters no more than the world of Gallileo does
not stand still. The world of our relationships is changing
every day about our ears - affecting even our social relation-
ships: 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.

66

Defiance is a worn out symbol fitted more to wop from
Sicily 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 missel is going. Not approximately
where it is going, but exactly where it is going. When your
wife 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 possibilities.
When she returns at the end of the day you have only to look
at her for an answer. That's what makes life interesting.
That is 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 our 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.

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Some well disposed critic should be assigned to observe
to inspect 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 Polick; 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 and opening the window to look
up and down the street," what shall we put down on the paper?

I don't pretend that I know all the answers - but that
the poetic measure must be to take its part among other measures
in the assembly of the age broken away from its ankilsed
conditions 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

68

identicle discipline to which science has to be submitted.
And at once it must be added that by no stretch of the imagina-
tion 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 is possible to
make the sense come through without tautology, balancing the
words against that. Using a full vocabulary, the fullest
vocabulary of speech terms to maintain a sensible effect.
Concentrating what I have to say so that alert mind is encouraged
to take the leaps necessary to bridge the gaps in the sense left
to save time. That's where the test comes. What is and what
is not permitted. More eccentricity is not permitted. It must
be possible to reconstruct the sense from the scheme, the grid
of the words supplied, but the reader must be empowered by the
interest of the subject, its way its topography (not repelled
by it) to follow.

69

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 eqigram to a climax.

The construction cannot be allowed in the idiom to rely on a habitual turn of phrase or of thought. Imagin if you will Ezra Pound, of E.E. Cummings of even Ben Shahn facing a piece of paper dominated by some idea which he has proposed to himself and I do not say that at times, facing the paper, he may not have an 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 is 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.

70

It doesn't matter how the speech is employed. The same
with Mr. Cummings except for his cleverness is in employing
anapests to relieve his iambics it goes invariably after the
same dog trot. Miss Moore the same. The ideas all these poets
employ, the same for Ben Shahn, making them make the words
dance come back to a constant repetititiousness 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
are finished with the aberration of free verse, but we have to
learn to recount, taking our idiom as a constant (and for what
we have to know 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 appre0
hend. But the incentive it gives to a choice of words not out
of a book leads to surprising assemblys and turns of phrase
which are sometimes rewarding in succinctness and vivid inter-
plays when the poet does not feel constrained by the habitual.

11

2.

Chapman

12

13

Dear Bill:

Sorry to have let you down. Your card asking about the fourteener said "no hurry" so I deferred the matter till I'd brought my college poetry textbook to completion against a dead-line, which deadline was today. Shipped it off to Rinehart this p.m. with vast relief. We'll see if they take it as is or ship it back for more work. They may well think the opening third over-difficult, always underestimating the acumen of the student as they and their advisors do (by "they" I mean the textbook ring, not just Rinehart in particular.)

Now first your two-installment letter which came today. Yes, I should be honored to have you use "Words in the Dark" as a tailpiece or appendix to "Measure." (I take it you're planning to issue "Measure" as a small book? It sounds too big for a magazine.)

Just a legal angle or two. "Words in the Dark" is copyrighted by me, so I gather that I am free to turn it over to you. But I'd like to hold onto the copyright, that is, not let it get included in the general copyright of the book in which you include it. No real complication-- a note from you to the publisher involved at the time you deliver your completed ms. I ask this because I shall eventually want to include pieces of the essay in a book called THE NIGHT WORLD which I have about one-fifth written. Lord knows when it will be done-maybe 3 years. Other stuff to do first. But so long as you leave the copyright to that piece standing in my name it's yours to reproduce or quarry as you like. I'd never have formulated it in the first place without your help.

Now about the fourteener. First, the official definition: it's a line with fourteen syllables, normally iambic, which means 7 stresses. Much used in England in the 16th century, then abandoned as the pentameter got the attention and the development. Chief examples, Golding's Ovid and Chapman's Iliad. Sample quoted from memory (Golding)

> The god now having put aside his borrowed shape of bull

> Had in his likeness shown himself, and with his pretty trull

> Gone straightway to the isle of Crete; da da da da da...

14

Which brings us to the next fact about the fourteener,
namely that the caesura, unless it receives very special atten-
tion 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.

So the answer to the question what happened to the four-
teener, 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.

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

15

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
structure they take on when read iambically. 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 in quatrains of 8 & 6 syllables. One up for the iambic
pentameter. And while fourteeners swing from side to side of the
page to an even greater extent than iambic pentameters, and swell
the folio sheet with even greater dignity, the trick of reading
them easily has been lost unless they are broken, 8 & 6, into-
quatrains.

yours ever,

Huch

16

In all iambics in worthy hands their lurks a triple beat that transfers them into anapesents when they are read with a subtle understanding of their true nature. The understanding 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 acknowledgement 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.

17

Chapman's Homer:

18

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 uncertainty 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 anapests, marked by spondees,
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.

19

20

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. I am sure that as he wrote Chapman was hearing both his version of the original Greek and the language into which he was making his translation.

*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. It was a success which he perhaps had not anticipated but which revealed certain characteristics 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.

21

22

23

> 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

24

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 (not 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 the 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 tumb'd so to earth (his entrails stillie in hand),
Darke sorrow overcast his eyes, nor farre could he stand
A minute longer,

25

3.

Anthony and Cleopatra

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.

26

The language which Englishmen use officially became
fixed about the figure of Shakespeare and others until it has
become virtually a case of less majesty to even think of
liberalizing the form of any language that may follow it. The
Irish had to fly to ancient Gaelic 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 question of seeking to find a way
to unseat Shakespeare as the young man implied, but to preserve
our own future and those of our fellows the Englishman among
us in the forms of our intimacies.

I have mentioned how the Champion of Shakespeares day,
being somewhat regretful of the change in his religious climate,
and not completely sold on what forms his "airs" should take

27

28