EAKING through cracked and splintered clouds. But we have said
"daybreak" so often that we do not see the picture any more, it has
become only another word for dawn. The poet must be constantly seeking
new pictures to make his readers feel the vitality of his thought.

Many of the poems in this volume are written in what the French call
"Vers Libre", a nomenclature more suited to French use and to French
versification than to ours. I prefer to call them poems in "unrhymed
cadence", for that conveys their exact meaning to an English ear. They
are built upon "organic rhythm", or the rhythm of the speaking voice
with its necessity for breathing, rather than upon a strict metrical
system. They differ from ordinary prose rhythms by being more curved,
and containing more stress. The stress, and exceedingly marked curve, of
any regular metre is easily perceived. These poems, built upon cadence,
are more subtle, but the laws they follow are not less fixed. Merely
chopping prose lines into lengths does not produce cadence, it is
constructed upon mathematical and absolute laws of balance and time. In
the preface to his "Poems", Henley speaks of "those unrhyming rhythms in
which I had tried to quintessentialize, as (I believe) one scarce can do
in rhyme." The desire to "quintessentialize", to head-up an emotion
until it burns white-hot, seems to be an integral part of the modern
temper, and certainly "unrhymed cadence" is unique in its power of
expressing this.

Three of these poems are written in a form which, so far as I know, has
never before been attempted in English. M. Paul Fort is its inventor,
and the results it has yielded to him are most beautiful and
satisfactory. Perhaps it is more suited to the French language than to
English. But I found it the only medium in which these particular poems
could be written. It is a fluid and changing form, now prose, now
verse, and permitting a great variety of treatment.

But the reader will see that I have not entirely abandoned the more
classic English metres. I cannot see why, because certain manners suit
certain emotions and subjects, it should be considered imperative for an
author to employ no others. Schools are for those who can confine
themselves within them. Perhaps it is a weakness in me that I cannot.

In conclusion, I would say that these remarks are in answer to many
questions asked me by people who have happened to read some of these
poems in periodicals