58

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

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

59

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

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

60

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

61

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.

62

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 missile 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.

67

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 assemblys 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 repetitiveness 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.