2

It is harder than that. It may indeed be impossible. There's no pursuit more engrossing: to discover how the measures may be altered so that they in turn by the contagion of their melody may infect the world and we melt to that music. We are today lost in a confusion of stresses. what else can we hear? The lines cross,

We are caught, it is no longer a question of will, a fixation compels us into the #painters# into #doin# #doin# #ourselves# from us to give up the pursuit or else to fall back upon it, if we insist on verse, on the familiar 14th century modes or chaos. An alternative is prose that masquerades as the poem and indeed what other music is there? We turn anywhere to escape.

Recently I came across THE SCIENCE OF ENGLISH VERSE by Sidney Lanier. I have been reading it. Lanier was a professor of English at Johns Hopkins University during the lifetime of Walt Whitman and neither one of them seems to have heard of the other. That is a pity because they were both concerned with the same problem: the structure of our verse.

Lanier, from his theoretical approach is extremely interesting and well worth study. He himself appears to have got nothing from it. Whitman simply plunged in and went swimming. But both show their resetlessness and the fundamental

3

which they share in their search to get away from a slavish, an
overwhelming dissatisfaction with the fixed pattern after the great English lines - very much reduced in effectiveness as time advanced.

Poor Lanier started at the beginning: that misconception as to the teaching of English meters had first to be cleared up away from the dwelt upon the comparable quality between music and verse, the result of which was to show that quality was as with music that determining factor in government of the poetic line. In this I agree with him - though to a pitifully ineffective degree. He misses the final arguments but at least recognizes that it is the question of time in the making up of the mDocern line that has to be wrestled with.

He speaks of the change which took place after the Anglo-Saxon, the fundamental changes Chaucer made after which he speaks of a change in the counting to a fixed *typic* line, the iambic, usually the iambic pentameter, which has dominated us since after Shakespeare. At least he shows an awareness with this domination, an awareness in Shakespeare himself, as his art advances, that he wishes to loner to be so dominated but a desire to break away from the fixed rule. until all he does becomes atypical and *#*

Lanier concludes:

"It has already been explained how, in Shakespeare's later dramatic dialogues especially, the line-group is often obliterated for the ear, either by run-on lines # which carry over the separating line pause into the body of the next line, or by phrase groups which insert pauses within the body of the line. A great prevalence of run-on lines renders this obliteration

4

ion so complete that, as remarked in the general outline,
verse so treated is practically without meter, or line-grouping.
I am strongly inclined to believe that English poetry might be
a great gainer if we would at once frankly recognize this
rhythmic but unmetric verse as strictly-rythmized prose, and
and print it as such without the deceptive line-division.

Particularly in using the rythm 3/8 ^ F C / F C / in English
verse a certain finicalness attaches to # that a regularity # of
line grouping: while if it be employed without lines, but
merely in great masses of unlined prose, the effect is noble in
the highest degree. A development of English rythm lies, I feel
sure, in that way. - "

A development of English rythm:

But )
Something has begun to crack. / in the chapter immediately
preceding this # # # # # # # # " of 4-rhythm, generally;
and especially of its two forms", we find " . it is interesting
to note that # the prevalence in English poetry of the
iambus - which is the basis of blank verse - had already
attracted attention as early as the third quarter of the 16th
century. I find Webb speaking of it, in his *Discourse*: 'The
natural course of most English verses seemeth to run upon the
the old iambic stroke,' he says. Gascoyne, in his 'Certaine
Notes of Instruction, also, writes of it; 'Commonly now a days
in English rimes we use none other order but a foot of two
syllables, whereof the first is depressed or made short, and
the second is elevated or made long, 'i.e. ^ F /, or the dambus
' And surely I aan lament ' -he adds- 'that wee are fallen
into such a playne and simple of wryting, that there is

11

And I am making the assertion that it is here, in our newspapers, discoverable, and that I am trying to discover it, if it can be discovered, for the uses of making a verse that will be a revelation to our ears.

Well, if there is nothing to be discovered by the scrutiny of particulars should we not take a longer view of the matter? If we take the front page as a whole or even the sometimes all but undecipherable headlines from which all but the barest idea of what has gone on can be formed. In the case of headlines, the punch words have been cut out. It's an expedient which may very well be used in a lyric and might go if the interest could be maintained. But headlines die in less than twenty four hours and become meaningless. It's too short lived a mode for serious interest, thought.

The page as a whole is where I think the secret lies, in its divisions.

To me it seems that the movement of the words on the page is the thing to watch, their timing - and when you come down to it it is bound to end up with the same problems faced by the later Shakespeare, if in a new dialect. We have to discover how to write in a new dialect with the cultured divisions of the sounds we hear. We must by listening to the language around us teach ourselves to divorce ourselves from what he said and all too well, learned.

Lanier discovered the bar - at least for himself, and wanted to use it and did to an elementary degree. But he never got to the inclusion in the bar of the pure time element, the

12

lag and the rush of words, of measured pauses which are the
essentials of our speech. The formal elements of both the Greek
and the florentine verse are not formed that way. The Elizabethan
or even the verse Whitman wrote have not in that way been
divided.

Certainly we have forgotten almost about time. The ear has
been wilful to a magnificnet degree. It has, wherever it can,
refuse anything but an antiquarian interest in the only verse
that is available to us on the stage. We are insane to insist on
anything, although it but as an antiquity. Our poems are repetitious,
taken, Or they are nearer and nearer to prose. The ear won't take
them, which is tremendously enouuraging. But time and how to
note it down must be rediscovered if we are to write poems worth
listenijg to, we must have time that we can follow.

We must also have readers skilled in the new notation.

We are a new age, speaking a new (in spund) language but
we have no clear way of dealing with it except as to think what
represent the sound of what we want to make a locomotive sound approach on the
track we have to imitate a locomotive approaching. We cannot
break our old habits.

THE PRESENT RELATIONSHIP OF PROSE TO VERSE

The man who can conquer the dominance of the iambic pentameter,
in our verse, or find a way to subordinate it, can conquer our world. I
do not say he will overnight grow famous or overwhelmingly successful; he
will not, but if he can find a way to make the words go at a different
pace from the accepted pattern of the prevailing mode we may give him our
confidence.

This is a mode that fixed itself in the language with Chaucer,
achieved official recognition with Surrey and an apotheosis in Shakespeare's
sonnets and later plays at the beginning of the 17th Century. Since then,
so far as any basic change in the accepted structure of the poetic line is
concerned, nothing new has occurred. It is generally accepted even that no
further change is possible, we have rung all the changes. Every man
believes that by dint of industry, once he has caught on, he will at last
win to himself for his nimbleness an audience, following such rote, to
call him by that surpassing name, poet.

And nothing changed! The rocks shall be melted. Men shall cast
themselves by the sheer magic of numbers at brother and fall to weeping --
as at that break which comes on the psychiatrist's couch after years of
patient unveiling -- and we see the truth so long hidden from us. And we
are cured.

What poem today reveals ANYTHING? They are all alike. It is
harder than that. It may indeed be impossible. There is no pursuit more
engrossing: to discover how the measures may be altered so that they in
turn by the contagion of their melody may infect the world and we melt to
that music. We are today lost in a confusion of stresses . what can
we hear? The lines cross, .

-2-

We are caught, it is no longer a question of the will, a fixation
compels us to give up the pursuit or else to fall back, if we insist on
verse, on the familiar 114th Century modes or chaos. An alternative is
prose that masquerades as the poem and indeed what other music is there?
We turn <u>anywhere</u> to escape.

Recently I came across THE SCIENCE OF ENGLISH VERSE by Sidney Lanier. I have been reading it. Lanier was a professor of English at Johns Hopkins during the lifetime of Walt Whitman and neither of them seems to have heard of the other. That is a pity because they were both concerned with the same problem: the structure of our verse.

Lanier, from his theoretical approach is extremely interesting and
well worth study. He himself appears to have got nothing from it. Whitman
simply plunged in and went swimming. But both show their restlessness and
the fundamental interests which they share in their search for a way to
get away from a slavish imitation of the old way of counting an over-
whelming dissatisfaction with the fixed patter after the great English
lines of the past -- very much reduced in effectiveness as time advanced.

Poor Lanier started at the beginning: that misconceptions as
to the teaching of English meters had first to be cleared away. He dwelt
upon comparable time quality between music and verse, the result of which
was to show that quantity was as with music the determining factor in the
government of the poetic line. In this I agree with him -- though he
developed his findings only to a pitifully ineffective degree. He misses
the final arguments but at least recognizes that it is the question of
time in the make up of the modern line that has to be wrestled with.

-3-

He speaks of the change which took place after the Anglo-Saxon
lines disappeared, the fundamental changes Chaucer made, a fixed *typic*
line, the iambic, usually the iambic pentameter, which has dominated. At
least he shows an awareness with this domination, an awareness in
Shakespeare himself, as his art advances, that he wishes no longer to be
so dominated but a desire to break away from the fixed rule. Lanier
concludes:

"It has already been explained how, in Shakespeare's later dramatic dialogues especially, the line-group is often obliterated for the ear, either by run-on lines which carry over the separating pause into the body of the next line, or by phrase groups which insert pauses within the body of the line. A great prevalence of run-on lines renders this obliteration so complete that, as remarked in the general outline, verse so treated is practically without meter, or line-grouping. I am strongly inclined to believe that English poetry might be a great gainer if we would at once frankly recognize this rhythmic but unmetric verse as strictly-rhythmized prose and print it as such without the deceptive line-division. Particularly in using the rhythm 3/8 c c / c c in English verse a certain finicalness attaches to a regularity of line grouping: while if it be employed without lines, but merely in great masses of unlined prose, the effect is noble in the highest degree. A development of English rhythm lies, I feel sure, in that way. -"

A development of English rhythm!

Something of the structure has begun to crack. But in the
chapter immediately preceding this of "4-rhythm, generally; and especially

-4-

of its two forms", we find it is interesting to note that the pre-
valence in English poetry of the iambus -- which is the basis of blank
verse -- had already attracted attention as early as the third quarter of
the 16th Century. I find Webb speaking of it, in his *Discourse*: 'The
natural course of most English verses seemeth to run upon the old iambic
stroke,' he says. Gascoyne, in his 'Certayne Notes of Instruction, also,
writes of it; 'Commonly now a days in english rimes we use none other
order but a foot of two syllables, whereof the first is depressed or made
short, and the second is elevated or made long, i.e. پ پ/, or the iambus.'
'And surely I can lament' -he adds- 'that wee are fallen into such a playne
and simple way of wryting, that there is none other foote to use.' "

Of an understanding of the classic foot Lanier makes short shift,
Greek or Latin, saying merely that we obviously do not understand their
system of notation, the only practical conclusion. Let them go, our concern
is for some possible modification of the English imposition, some possible
way to modify the present impasse and let a new music hitherto unknown to us
into our stalled sentences.

Our poems are hopeless of physical change, we have nothing left
but cerebrations to relieve us. There is no animal spring to our verses,
there is none, none. Shakespeare's Sonnets are a flaming example to our
minds. But what of our bodies? We must begin with our bodies, our legs
and our arms must first move if we are to be moved, if we are to be
startled into action.

It sounds mad, impossible. There can no longer be a simple song.
But be patient. We must first break the oppressive monotony that has
forced us all into its service until we don't believe that it is possible
to do anything but repeat the stereotype of fixed structure. We shall

-5-

have to begin to plan anew. Where shall we begin?

We can't build using the past any longer as our basis.

Lanier has a few practical things to say -- when he speaks of
"The Tunes in Speech"./ preceding chapters have been devoted to discussing
all those various co-ordinations of duration in verse sounds which we are
in the habit of assembling under the general term rhythm . at once
more and more fruitful than is apt to be thought by those whose attention
has not been called to the subject."

English speech-tunes enters into this, negro sermons in recitative --
but most of all and most important of all in the ultimate break through which
must occur is that to which all verse heretofore has remained stubbornly
aloof and that is the medium which we commonly use to address each other:
the prose of the present day. If we do not and cannot find our escape
and our relief in that then I am afraid it is not to be found anywhere.

I do not mean the prose our novels which must be recognized in
their full blown rhythm of the plain and unashamed iambic pentameter
overwhelming their readers under a flood of familiar rhetoric. Unknown to
the reader or writer it is a device that has accounted for several modern
best sellers. Perhaps Hemingway's first success was in the rhythm (taken
from Gertrude Stein?) of his style. But he was not well grounded enough to
know what further to turn to but must keep repeating the old rhythms with
which he first succeeded.

But prose as a source for our poems is nothing of that, a
repetition of the same quantity found in all good sonorous English prose,
but its very opposite. We are looking for the barest hint for a new

-6-

start -- if the hooks are not already too worn down to give us a beginning
for our melodies. We have even forgotten that it is the melody, the melody
of our times that we have lost and, poets we call, ourselves, are seeking
to recapture.

Verse has died long since. Our ears are so dull that we do not
even attempt to disturb its sleeping bones but go on repeating, in a
lethargic mood, its well known stops. We do not even dream, and have not
for 500 years, the dangerous alternative.. The prosists have taken over the
old lilt and repeat and repeat it again, "Five fathom deep my father lies"
and have not the sensitivity to be shocked by its truth that in fact, five
fathoms deep do actually lie their father's bones. They sleepily acknowledge
it -- and fall deeper and deeper into their lethargy.

The language of the day probably always does contain the hints for
the verse of the times. Undoubtedly it was true in Shakespeare's and -- the
times, let us say, of the Greek and Roman orators, of Dante's *Convivio*; the
essence of the contemporary verse was there. But if we, in seeking an outlet,
turn to our language, to make use of our common rhythms of speech to revive
our poetry, to find a way, if possible, in which to attack the problems
involved, we shall gain little credence for our common sense.

At least our newspaper prose is not iambic and at least that is
something. And at least it is not measured to any length of line. It may
not be at the pace of daily talk but one way or another it begins to approach
a speech or what is recognizable as a direct means of communication. It does
contain cadences or rhythms (never mind the words themselves) or other hint,
of whatever sort, toward the making of a poem that will not be -- that will
show SOMETHING serious and fresh to the ear, a way of manipulating the sounds

-7-

that they will come out in some degree malleable and at the same time capable
of taking measure. For we must find a measure somehow we must find a measure
or a new way of measuring our lines and there is no other place in which to
look for it but in the common usage of our prose.

I would rather a thousand times in looking at a book of "poems",
see a page of what you may call (as they are) prose segments so long as they
say what the man intends passionately to SAY in words he's used to, tumbled
out any way they come, I'd rather a thousand times see that than to witness
his gyrations to ape some model if it be Surrey himself. The birds in the
trees have better sense but not we. Has no one listened to the birds at
five o'clock mornings, not to imitate them onomatopoietically but to catch
a hint toward laying bare the mere difficulties that are lodged in our EARS?
No one has been able to hear anything for 500 years. We've got to teach our
ears to hear anew. The birds can be a beginning. Ulysses plugged the crew's
ears so that they should not hear the Sirens but we keep the radio on full
we are so stupified, so frightened to face the hygienic prospect of a
positive change.

-8-

Here, as a minimum requirement, are three pieces of prose selected at random, which I elect to observe formally. It is not for what is said in them -- that I set them down but for any sort of hint they may afford as to how a poem may be made, using what formally we may discover there.

And let me say at once that unlike what might be the case in
painting and music, I limit myself to the articulate quality of the written
word. I am interested only, though well acquainted with Gertrude Stein, at
the present in that.

How may common prose usage aid us in breaking the grip of the
vulgar (cultured) poetic line so that it may be refreshed in its physical
contours.

"This work in the department of psychiatry etc"

"It may be used directly, to kill off the faithful, who have suddenly begun to doubt; etc"

"Markey came through brilliantly on the next hole etc"

Not much help there that I can see. In fact the only thing that I
discover after a cursory look at my exhibits is of the prose, having been
written in all probability by professionals. But it falls into certain
rhetorical periods or breathings which are unlike the divisions of verse, in
fact which any slip into a verse like period would destroy, at once. The
writer must not allow the slightest slip on that count to occur or the value
of his writing would be gone.

So we have at least discovered one thing: the ear is extremely
sensitive to what it wants and what it does not want and it does not want
the sense of what it is at the moment attuned to be interfered with by trite

-9-

rhythmic effects. It wants, and it may be completely fooled by this as we have shown, to be lulled in fiction by popular writers falling into a (disguised) nostalgic Elizabethan sleep. But in its daily news accounts it does not want that sort of guff, it wants the straight goods, economically spoken to the point, and will tolerate nothing else.

That then at a minimum is where we must look.

We are told that in the press we shall get something sharply edged. Short sentences. Clear distinctions, vivid contrasts. We get, for the most part nothing of the sort but only the jolts of unusual (and not very apt) words pulled out of some recondite corner at a whim to quicken our appetites -- and unfortunately to make us wary. As may be expected from the haste of newspaper work nothing well formed, as writing, usually escapes.

We are looking for something the common reader will accept (and does accept every day) upon which to draw for its shattering, earth moving, its slow, undulant and uniquely colloquial, fiercely resistant nature. I want a practice that has a mark on it as plainly to be seen as the Anglo-Saxon would feel it in his own day.

And I am making the assertion that it is here, in our newspapers, discoverable. I am trying to discover it, if it can be discovered, for the uses of making a verse that will be a revelation to our ears.

Well, if there is nothing to be discovered by the scrutiny of particulars should we not take a broader view? If we take the front page as a whole or even the sometimes all but undecipherable headlines from which all but the barest punch words have been cut, what have we then? In the case of headlines it's an expedient which may very well be used in a lyric and

-10-

might go, if the interest could be maintained. But headlines die in less than
twenty-four hours and become meaningless. It's too short lived a mode for serious
thought.

The page as a whole in its divisions is where I think the secret lies.

To me it seems that the movement of the words on the page is the thing
to watch, their timing -- and when you come down to it it is bound to end up
with the same problems faced by the later Shakespeare. A new dialect. We have
to discover how to write in a new dialect with the cultured divisions of the
sounds we hear. We must by listening to the language around us teach ourselves
to divorce ourselves from what we have all too well learned.

Lanier discovered the bar -- at least for himself, and wanted to use
it and did to an elementary degree. But he never got to the inclusion in the
bar of the pure time element, the lag and the rush of words, of measured
pauses which are the essentials of our speech. The formal elements of both
the Greek and Florentine verses are not formed that way. The Elizabethan or
even the verse Whitman wrote have not in that way been divided.

Certainly we have forgotten all about time. The ear has been wilful
to a magnificent degree. It has, wherever it can, refused anything but an
antiquarian interest in the only verse that is available to us on the stage.
We are insane to insist on it as anything but as an antiquity. Our poems are
repetitious, temporally taken. Or they are nearer and nearer to prose. The
ear won't take them in their "cultured" forms, which is tremendously encouraging.
But time and how to note it down must be rediscovered if we are to write poems
worth listening to today. We must have a time that we can follow afresh.

-11-

We are a new age, speaking a new (in sound) language but we have
no clear way of dealing with it in an exact manner, except to think what
when we want to represent the sound of a locomotive approaching on the
track we have to imitate a locomotive approaching. We cannot break our
old habits.