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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,
Cymbeline, 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

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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.

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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

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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 cars
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 Nerields,
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

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Her people out upon her; and Anthony,
Enthroned i' the market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra to
And made a gap in nature.

Agri.

Rare Egyptian!

Eno. Upon her landing, Anthony went to her,
Incited her to supper;

I'll go on reading till I finish the play.

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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 subtitles 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 touched 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

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of certain of Mr. Pound's cantos or some of the poems of
E.E. 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 per-
ceives 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.E. 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