. Bullen--as an antidote to Walt Whitman. In
fact, my acquaintance with the Poet of Camden convinced me that his use
of what is to-day called _vers libre_ resembled somewhat Carlyle's
Teutonic contortions of style. It was impossible to get from the "Good
Gray Poet" the reasons of his method. I gathered that he looked on
rhythm as sometimes a walk, a quick-step, a saunter, a hop-and-skip, a
hurried dash, or a slow march; it seemed to depend with him on the
action of the heart, the acceleration of the pulse, or the movement of
the thought.

But no one who knows the best in Walt Whitman's poems can fail to
perceive that there were times when he understood thoroughly that
poetry, expressed poetically, must be musical. It is a great pity that
some of our newer poets do not understand this. In their revolt from the
outworn academic rules, they have gone the length of the most advanced
Cubists, and do not realize that no amount of splendid visualization
compensates for a lack of knowledge of the art of making melodies. It is
unfortunate, too, that the imitators of Amy Lowell, many of whom have
neither her feeling for colour, her great power of concentration, nor
her naturally good ear, should imagine that _vers libre_ means the
throwing together of words in chaos. Even Strauss's "Electra" is founded
on carefully considered rules; his discords are not accidents.

It seems to me that the study of Sidney Lanier's "Science of English
Verse" would suppress the art of expression, even in a genius. By the
time he learned how to write verse he would be too old to write verse at
all! There are less intricate books. I learned from the theories and the
odes of Coventry Patmore and the "Observations in the Art of English
Poesy" of Thomas Campion and his practice that the best _vers libre_ has
freedom, unexpectedness, lyrical lightness, and an apparently unstudied
charm, because the poet had striven, not to sing as a bird sings,
without art, but to sing in a civilized world as a great tenor in the
opera sings, because he had acquired his method of almost perfect
expression through science and art. And, if one wants an example of the
intangible "something," expressed artistically, why not take Benet's
"Immoral Ballad"? A little thing, sir; but a poet's own and so,
incapable of being analyzed by any rules known to the pundits. But it is
not _vers libre_. If it were, its intangible appeal would not exist.

Nearly every versifier who disrega