NEW VERSE FOR OLD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20602, 28 June 1930, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEW VERSE FOR OLD.

JHE LATEST REVOLT*

BY ISABEL IT. CLUETT.

I have been reading the New Verse. I read quite a lot of it conscientiously, somo of it twice or oven three times in my earnestness to understand. Gertrude Stein's amorphous chunks of twisted prose did not dismay me, nor Cumming's eccentrically arranged lines, sometimes consisting of but one letter, sometimes of a dozen or more words. After reading tho " finale of seem" by Wallace Stevens, however, I flew to dear Victorian Tennyson for an antidote. I readThere ia sweet music here that sofilier falls Than petals of blown roses on the grass j Or-night dews on still waters between walls Of shadowy granite in a gleaming pass, Music that goiitlier on the spirit lies Than tired eyelids upon tired eyea.

My soul was soothed, my spirit refreshed and I felt I could still believe in poetry.

Doubtless the admirers of modern free verse would quarrel with this verse for the very quality which to mo gives it. its beauty—its melodious flow suggestive of tho music of which it tells. They would, no doubt, claim that no music could possibly sound liko rose-petals falling or dews descending upon water; and with a savagery of realism would liken tho music to the banging of tin cans or tho twanging of tautened wires. If their imaginations are so stultified and their ears so harshly attuned, God. help them, say I, but still the music of Tennyson will go on charming the cars of thousands, and the obviousness of his verse at which his detractors sneer is its chief charm to tho majority who are themselves obvious and music-loving and are repelled and bewildered by the harsh crudities of the new school, where the matter-of-fact is so insisted upon that there is no room for delicate Fancy in her own realm. The Function of Poetry.

Surely the chief function of poetry is to be poetical, and if these new poets condemn tho old forms as an artificial dressing up of the truth in fantastic phrases, and consider that the truth can only be told fn loud, harsh and violent terms, why call their efforts ate expression poetry at all ? Let them find a new name for it. Poetry has signified a certain form of expression for ages, more or less conventional, a little over-elaborate, perhaps; but that is what poetry has always meant —something polished and suave and elegant, and delicately finished. Its definition is " tho art of idealising in thought and expression . - . . 'characterised by imagination and poetic diction."- Now come the iconoclasts trying to shatter the accepted forms with their bludgeons of abuse, and having ravished the shrine of its chief jewels they appropriate the altar and set up their own false gods to worship. And yet—and yet—rather reluctantly one has to concede the new verse-makers the merit of sincerity and their verses a rough-liewn shapeliness of a kind. They are feeling their way to something real and vital, and perhaps the grotesque efforts they produce are liko tho unnatural births,' the strange abnormalities, which attend the throes of any new mqyement. .Their greateist weakness would seem to . bo the self-consciousness with which they strive to be " different." In their contempt for the old accepted forms, of expression, they, wantonly- Crta_tt! - maHOTmar;; tions of tlieir - pivir, knd so actually produce tho artificial effect and tho affectations which they' so condemn. ; - ,, • Their originality is too often a laboured thing, their crudeness a mere defiant gesture, reminding one of a wilful child who smashes a precious vase and says " There !" triumphantly, yet scared. In short, their lack-of convention pushed to extremes becomes 1 a convention, in itself. That the writers of free verso recognise the obscurity, of much of what they write is evident in the fact : that whole books are written in elaborate elucidation of tho meaning; of certain poems. • That -.in itself would indicate that the poems aro lacking in that simple directness which is their, avowed aim, in spontaneous inspiration which Should characterise tho true poem on whatever theme, terrible or gay, sweet or sublime., , Amazingly Inconsistent.

The new poets claim that they disdain tho use of nothing which will contribute to tho reality of their theme, however Ugly or material it may be. they set out to write a description of a "fog in the city they consider it quite .as important and legitimate to describe the humidity of a cab-driver's nose as to make a word-picture * of the* smokilysplendid effect of tho lights and shadows; it is all part of the fog, contributing causo and effect. There is something rather heroic in this, but poor .Poetry must feel abashed, stripped in the market ■'place of her last rag of convention. They aro amazingly inconsistent, aud yet. 1 suppose, consistent in their inconsistencies, for they aro bound by no rules except the law ot anarchy, which ordains V Smash and spare not," for though thoy disdain rhyme as 0110 of tho artificial trappings of poetry, when it them they will drag in an awkwardly-l'hymcd couplet in what is otherwiso stark prose. Rhythm is a dead letter to most of them metrical verso they regard with contempt, yet in their own way they strain after aii effect —to express by the eccentric arrangement of their lines tho movement of their theme. - ■ . , 1 Thus, if ono writes of bells ringing, the words are so placed as to suggest the swing of bells from side to side, or of falling suow, the .words are arranged perpendicularly. -The ribald critic might succest that there is nothing new in that Lewis Carroll, that Pnnce of Whimsies, employed the method m ins immortal " Alice" when ho wrote a verso in the form of a mouse's tail with all its curves complete, beginning .at the root with largo lettering and dwindling down to a diminutive tip. A Message to Deliver. ■ In spite, however, of tho upheaval of old ideals and traditions, the deliberately awkward phrasing, the indifference to rhvmo and rhythm, tho scornful rejection of "fancy, and the haphazard arrangement of lines without form or capitals, tho now poets have a message to deliver and are in earnest. One must believe that finally " somehow, something good" will evolve out of chaos, shorn of tho present crudities, the unbalanced violence and contempt ot style which makes the reading of so much of modern verse like bumping over a rough road on fiat tyres, for sometimes amid its discordances tho new verso strikes a clear noto of resonant beauty, such as in a poem doscriptive of a snowy, blowy Christmas Eve in a largo city: Blow up, clear winter; Whirl your white snows. Christ is born among the lilies, He flows beneath the, aro lights. Milky garments blowing. It is those poseurs, tho shallow imitators of any new thing, who. will delay acceptance of the now art in_ the long run, for theirs "is not ait but artifico. In the meanwhile the uninitiato can only dimly grope after tho real meaning of the .New Verso; but if it signifies anything it surely means to imply that poetry is, or should 'bo, the mirror for everything in life and tho universe, that it should reflect the harsh, tho crude, tho ugly, the bestial, the sordid, 'just as• faithfully as it reflects the beautiful and graceful; that roses and sunset clouds and shining stars tire no more natural subjects for poetry than are mud and worms and' drunken raenl Perhaps they are right, but oh! how much more joy a rose A r a ciond c»n 'give:one than a y?otxti or a drunkard.;