Thanks are due to the Editors of Poetry (Chicago) and The Egoist(London) for permission to reprint here matter that originally appearedin the pages of their respective publications.
The art of poetry as practised in the English-speaking countries to-day,is in a greatly backward state. Among the reading public there areexactly three opinions generally held about it. The first, and by farthe most popular, view is that all poets are fools and that poetry isabsurd. The second is that poetry is an agreeable after-dinnerentertainment, and that a poet is great because he has written quotablelines. The last and worst is that which strives to press the poet intothe service of some philosophical dogma, ism, or fad.
For these views the poets themselves, and no others, are largelyresponsible. With their exaggerated vanity, they have attempted to makeof their craft a Masonic secret, iterating that a poet composes by earalone; that rhythm is not to be analyzed, that rhyme is sacrosanct; thatpoets, by some special dispensation of Providence, write by inspiration,being born with more insight than other men; and so forth. Is it anywonder that the public is indifferent, hostile, or befooled when poetsthemselves disdain to explain clearly what they are trying to do, andrefuse to admit the public into the privacy of their carefully guardedworkrooms?
It was Theophile Gautier, I think, who offered to teach any one how towrite poetry in twenty-five lessons. Now this view has in it someexaggeration, but, at the same time, much truth. No amount of lessoningwill turn an idiot into a wise man, or enable a man to say somethingwhen he is naturally one who has nothing to say. Nevertheless, I believethat there would have been fewer mute inglorious Miltons, greaterrespect paid to poetry, and many better poets, if the poets themselveshad stopped working through sheer instinct and set themselves the taskof considering some elementary principles in their craft. In thisbelief, and in the hope of enlightening some one as to the aim andpurpose of my work, I am writing this preface.
To begin with, the basis of English poetry is rhythm, or, as some wouldprefer to call it, cadence. This rhythm is obtained by mingling stressedand unstressed syllables. Stress may be produced by accent. It may—andoften is—produced by what is known as quantity, the breath required topronounce certain syllables being more than is required on certainothers. However it be produced, it is precisely this insistence uponcadence, upon the rhythm of the line when spoken, which sets poetryapart from prose, and not —be it said at the outset—a certain way ofprinting, with a capital letter at the beginning of each line, or aninsistence upon end-rhymes.
Now this rhythm can be made the same in every line of the poem. This wasthe aim of Alexander Pope, for instance. My objection to this method isthat it is both artificial and unmusical. In the case of the eighteenthcentury men, it gave the effect of a perfectly balanced pattern, like aminuet or fugue. In the case of the modern imitator of Kipling orMasefield, it gives the effect of monotonous rag-time. In neither casedoes it offer full scope for emotional development.
I maintain that poetry is capable of as many gradations in cadence asmusic is in time. We can have a rapid group of syllables—what is calleda line—succeeded by a slow heavy one; like the swift, scurrying-up ofthe wave and the sullen dragging of itself away. Or we ca