Mary Barnard, American Imagist

Chapter Four: “A New Way of Measuring Verse

93 Chapter Four “A New Way of Measuring Verse” 4.1 Barnard and Pound: An ABC of Metrics Writing to Pound in 1937, Barnard complained of the difficulty that she had “listening with a Pacific Coast ear to lines written in an English accent”; to her, “most of the English poets in that Faber anthology [The Faber Book of Modern Verse] seemed as posed as mannikins [sic].”1 What was called for was an American metric, one that was infinitely flexible and able to accommodate the live speech rhythms of a widely distributed, rapidly growing American population, attentive to the local in all its permutations, indeed “the sound . . . that was native to me”2 —that is, “an alternative to the commonplace iambic pentameter that she felt did not reflect American speech patterns,” as Elizabeth J. Bell, Barnard’s literary executor, has explained.3 As with the free verse—or “vers libre”—that had developed in Europe, where no good verse was really ever “free,” as Eliot had said in 1917,4 American free verse needed a means of governance if it was to achieve a truly native character. As Williams was to write a few months later in The Poetry Journal: American verse of today must have a certain quality of freedom , must be “free verse” in a sense. It must be new verse, in a new conscious form. But even more than that it must be free in that it is free to include all temperaments, all phases of our environment, physical as well as spiritual, mental and moral. It must be truly democratic, truly free for all—and yet it must be governed.5 94 / Mary Barnard, American Imagist Williams had no idea, then, of course, that it would take him almost the rest of his life to come up with some workable model nor that he would be hailing a “little-known poet” on “the far, far coast” as the discoverer of “a new way of measuring verse according to the expanded requirements of the age,” as Williams congratulated Barnard in a New Year’s greeting in 1952.6 But as with most things in Barnard’s career, her “new way” of ensuring American verse would “have a certain quality of freedom” and “be governed” all began with the “Pound connection.” Like Pound and his Imagists, Barnard found the rhythms of classical Greek cadences compelling as she began her quest for a “spare but musical” style. In addition to her formal studies, as a young woman she recited Homer and Sappho into the noisy breakers off the Washington coast on her trips to Ocean Park; Greek verses had immediacy for Barnard, a wild, freeing vitality alike in feeling to the Pacific waves that swept up the beach. And yet, also like Pound, Barnard was not immediately converted to free verse. “I liked rhyme and a swinging rhythm,”7 she said of her early work, having had James Whitcomb Riley’s Child-Rhymes “humming in my head from my earliest years.”8 She wrote her first poem at the age of seven, entranced by the power of rhyme: My first piece of sheet music was a very simple tune with words—a four-line verse. . . . On the back were the first few bars of two or three similar compositions with the accompanying words, which broke off where the music broke off. One was about a robin, a line of verse that presented me with an uncompleted rhyme. I felt no urge to complete the tune, but the line of dangling verse that needed another line as well as a rhyme-word stimulated my imagination. . . . I completed the verse, supplying the rhyme, and found that I had—almost—written a poem. This was better fun than anything I had found yet. I was off to the races.9 The “urge to complete the tune” was to come and, with it, a desire for rhythmic structure. In eighth grade, she devoured Esenwein and Roberts ’s The Art of Versification, which she stumbled upon in the school library; here she found “the lovely words ‘iamb,’ ‘trochee,’ ‘dactyl’ for the first time” in a school milieu where “metric was hardly mentioned.”10 In junior high school, she read Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson’s anthology The New Poetry, which modernized Barnard’s tastes somewhat but only where a poem yielded that same kind of rhythmic intensity that she had found in Greek verse: “I read Amy Lowell, Edna Millay, the Benets...