any sense, solely by the
rhyme. With the Symbolists 'free verse' was an attempt to capture finer
modulations of music than the rigid frame of metre allowed. With their
successors it had rather the value of a plastic medium in which every
variety of matter and of mood could be faithfully expressed. But whether
called verse or not, the vast rushing modulations of rhythmic music in
the great pieces of Claudel and others have a magnificence not to be
denied. And the less explicitly poetic form permits matter which would
jar on the poetic instinct if conveyed through a metrical form to be
taken up as it were in this larger and looser stride.

In Germany, on the other hand, the rhythmic emancipation of Whitman was
carried out, in the school of Arno Holz, with a revolutionary audacity
beyond the example even of Claudel. Holz states with great clearness and
trenchancy what he calls his 'new principle of lyric'; one which
'abandons all verbal music as an aim, and is borne solely by a rhythm
made vital by the thought struggling through it to expression'. Rhyme
and strophe are given up, only rhythm remains.

Of our Georgian poetry, it must suffice to note that here, too, the
temper of adventure in form is rife. But it shows itself,
characteristically, less in revolutionary innovation than in attempts to
elicit new and strange effects from traditional measures by deploying to
the utmost, and in bold and extreme combinations, their traditional
resources and variations, as in the blank verse of Mr. Abercrombie and
Mr. Bottomley. This, and much beside in Georgian verse, has moods and
moments of rare beauty. But, on the whole, verse-form is the region of
poetic art in which Georgian poetry as a whole is least secure.

3. _The New Realism_

We see then how deeply rooted this new freedom is in the passion for
actuality; not the dream but the waking and alert experience throbs and
pulses in it. We have now to look more closely into this other aspect of
it. Realism is a hard-worked term, but it may be taken to imply that the
overflowing vitality of which poetry is one expression fastens with
peculiar eagerness upon the visible and tangible world about us and
seeks to convey that zest in words. Our poets not only do not scorn the
earth to lose themselves in the sky; they are positive friends of the
matter-of-fact, and that not in spite of poetry, but for poetry's sake;
and Pegasus flies more freely because 'things' are 'in the saddle'