nator's
method.

There is little resemblance between the most striking modern
experiments in what is called "free verse" and the manner in which
Verlaine himself broke with the old tradition; but the spirit
animating these more recent adventures is the spirit which Verlaine
called up from the "vasty deep," and with all their divergence from
his original manner these modern rebels have a perfect right to use
the authority of his great name, "car son nom," as Coppee says, in
his tenderly written preface to his "Choix de Poesies," "eveillera
toujours le souvenir d'une poesie absolument nouvelle et qui a pris
dans les lettres franchises l'importance d'une decouverte."

The pleasure with which one returns to Verlaine from wandering
here and there among our daring contemporaries is really nothing
less than a tribute to the essential nature of all great poetry; I mean
to the soul of music in the thing. Some of the most powerful and
original of modern poets have been led so far away from this
essential soul of their own great art as to treat the music of their
works as quite subordinate to its intellectual or visual import.

As far as I am able to understand the theories of the so-called
"imagists," the idea is to lay the chief stress upon the evocation of
clearly outlined shapes--images clean-cut and sharply defined, and,
while personal in their choice, essentially objective in their
rendering--and upon the absence of any traditional "beautiful words"
which might blur this direct unvarnished impact of the poet's
immediate vision.

It might be maintained with some plausibility that Verlaine's poetry
takes its place in the "impressionistic" period, side by side with
"impressionistic" work in the plastic arts, and that for this reason it
is quite natural that the more modern poets, whose artistic
contemporaries belong to the "post-impressionistic" school, should
deviate from him in many essential ways. Personally I am extremely
unwilling to permit Verlaine to be taken possession of by any
modern tendency or made the war-cry of any modern camp.

Though by reason of his original genius he has become a potent
creative spirit influencing all intelligent people who care about
poetry at all, yet, while thus inspiring a whole generation--perhaps,
considering the youth of many of our poetic contemporaries, we
might say _two_ generations--he belongs almost as deeply to certain
great eras of the past. In several aspects of his tempe