Ceux qui possèdentleur vers libre y tiennent: on n’ abandonne quele vers libre.– Duhamel et Vildrac 1
A Lady, renowned in her small circle for the accuracy of her stop-press information of literature, complains to me of a growing pococurantism. “Since the Russians came in I can read nothing else. I have finished Dostoevski, and I do not know what to do.” I suggested that the great Russian was an admirer of Dickens, and that she also might that find that author readable. “But Dickens is a sentimentalist; Dostoevski is a realist.” I reflected on the amours of Sonia and Raskolnikov, but forbore to press the point, and I proposed It Is Never Too Late To Mend. 2 “But one cannot read the Victorians at all!” While I was extracting the virtues of the proposition that Dostoevski is a Christian, while Charles Reade is merely pious, she added that she could no longer read any verse but vers libre.
It is assumed that vers libreexists. It is assumed that vers libreis a school; that it consists of certain theories; that its group or groups of theorists will either revolutionise or demoralise poetry if their attack upon the iambic pentameter meets with any success. Vers libredoes not exist, and it is time that this preposterous fiction followed the élan vitaland the eighty thousand Russians into oblivion. 3
When a theory of art passes it is usually found that a groat’s worth of art has been bought with a million of advertisement. 4 The theory which sold the wares may be quite false, or it may be confused and incapable of elucidation, or it may never have existed. A mythical revolution will have taken place and produced a few works of art which perhaps would be even better if still less of the revolutionary theories clung to them. In modern society such revolutions are almost inevitable. An artist happens upon a method, perhaps quite unreflectingly, which is new in the sense that it is essentially different from that of the second-rate people about him, and different in everything but essentials from that of any of his great predecessors. The novelty meets with neglect; neglect provokes attack; and attack demands a theory. In an ideal state of society one might imagine the good New growing naturally out of the good Old, without the need for polemic and theory; this would be a society with a living tradition. In a sluggish society, as actual societies are, tradition is ever lapsing into superstition, and the violent stimulus of novelty is required. This is bad for the artist and his school, who may become circumscribed by their theory and narrowed by their polemic; but the artist can always console himself for his errors in his old age by considering that if he had not fought nothing would have been accomplished.
Vers librehas not even the excuse of a polemic; it is a battle-cry of freedom, and there is no freedom in art. And as the so-called vers librewhich is good is anything but “free,” it can better be defended under some other label. Particular types of vers libremay be supported on the choice of content, or on the method of handling the content. I am aware that many writers of vers librehave introduced such innovations, and that the novelty of their choice and manipulation of material is confused–if not in their own minds, in the minds of many of their readers–with the novelty of the form. But I am not here concerned with imagism, which is a theory about the use of material; I am only concerned with the theory of the verse-form in which imagism is cast. If vers libreis a genuine verse-form it will have a positive definition. And I can define it only in negatives: (1) absence of pattern, (2) absence of rhyme, (3) absence...
