metre. If, indeed, as the
_vers libre_ practitioners insist, each idea comes clothed in its own
inevitable rhythm, there can be very little trouble about the matter.
The poem composes itself, and your chief task will be with the
printer! I don't say the rhythmic irregularity is not, perhaps, more
suitable for certain effects, or at any rate that it cannot achieve
effects of its own; I certainly don't say that it isn't poetry because
it does not trip to formal measure. Poetry resides in deeper matters
than this. I recall Ibsen's remark when told that the reviewers
declared _Peer Gynt_ wasn't poetry. "Very well," said he, "it will
be." Since it now indubitably is, one is cautious about questioning
the work of the present, such work as Miss Lowell's, for instance. Of
course the mere chopping up of unrhythmic prose into capitalized lines
without glow, without emotion, is not poetry, any more than the blank
verse of the second-rate nineteenth-century "poetic drama," which old
Joe Crowell, comedian, described as "good, honest prose set up
hind-side foremost." We may eliminate that from the discussion once
and for all. But the genuine new poets, who know what they are about,
and doubtless why they are about it, I regard with all deference,
hailing especially their good fight to free poetry of its ancient
inversions, its mincing vocabulary, its thous and thees, its bosky
dells and purling streams, its affectations and unrealities, both of
speech and subject. But I do say they miss a certain triumphant
craftsman's joy at packing precisely what you mean, hard enough to
express in unlimited prose, into a fettered, singing line; and I do
say that I can't remember what they write.

At least, nobody can dispute this latter statement. He may declare it
the fault of my memory, which has been habituated to retain only such
lines as have rhyme and metre to help it out. But I hardly think his
retort adequate, because, in the first place, the memory is much less
amenable to training and much more a matter of fixed capacity and
action than certain advertisements in the popular magazines would have
the "twenty-dollar-a-week man" believe, and in the second place,
because my case, I find, is the case of almost everybody with whom I
have talked on the subject. The solution, I believe, is perfectly
simple. Nearly anyone can remember a tune; even I can, within limits.
At least, I can do better than Tennyson, who could recognize, he said,
two tu