The Project Gutenberg EBook of Men, Women and Ghosts, by Amy Lowell

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Title: Men, Women and Ghosts

Author: Amy Lowell

Posting Date: July 21, 2008 [EBook #841]
Release Date: March, 1997

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEN, WOMEN AND GHOSTS ***

Produced by Alan Light

MEN, WOMEN AND GHOSTS

by Amy Lowell

by Amy Lowell [American (Massachusetts) poet and critic--1874-1925.]

[Note on text: Lines longer than 78 characters are broken
and the continuation is indented two spaces. Some obvious errors
have been corrected.]

"'... See small portions of the Eternal World that ever groweth':...
So sang a Fairy, mocking, as he sat on a streak'd tulip,
Thinking none saw him: when he ceas'd I started from the trees,
And caught him in my hat, as boys knock down a butterfly."
William Blake. "Europe. A Prophecy."

'Thou hast a lap full of seed,
And this is a fine country.'
William Blake.

Preface

This is a book of stories. For that reason I have excluded all purely
lyrical poems. But the word "stories" has been stretched to its fullest
application. It includes both narrative poems, properly so called;
tales divided into scenes; and a few pieces of less obvious
story-telling import in which one might say that the dramatis personae
are air, clouds, trees, houses, streets, and such like things.

It has long been a favourite idea of mine that the rhythms of 'vers
libre' have not been sufficiently plumbed, that there is in them a power
of variation which has never yet been brought to the light of
experiment. I think it was the piano pieces of Debussy, with their
strange likeness to short vers libre poems, which first showed me the
close kinship of music and poetry, and there flashed into my mind the
idea of using the movement of poetry in somewhat the same way that the
musician uses the movement of music.

It was quite evident that this could never be done in the strict pattern
of a metrical form, but the flowing, fluctuating rhythm of vers libre
seemed to open the doo