Recent English Poetry – 1 163sympathetically, vast and flowing movements or on the contrary
brief, sudden and abrupt paces or the alternation of these and
intermediate and variant lengths and turns: there is something
at the same time densely full and singularly and minutely subtle
in the modern thinking mind which is with difficulty accom-
modable by the restricted range of subtleties, variations and
fullnesses of any given poetic measure. Why not then break away
from all the old hampering restrictions and find a new principle
of harmony in accordance with the freedom, the breadth and
largeness of view, the fineness of feeling and sensation of the
modern spirit, some form which shall have the liberty of prose
and yet command the intensified heights and fluctuations and
falls of the cadence of poetry? There is no reason why not, if
the thing can be done, — the proof of these things lies in the
execution; but it may be doubted whether the method used is
the right method. At any rate it has not been fully justified
even in the hands of its greatest or most skilful exponents. It is
used, as in Whitman, to give the roll of the sea of life or the
broad and varying movements of the spirit of humanity in its
vigorous experience and aspiration, or, as in Carpenter, to arrive
at the free and harmonious accession of the human intelligence
to profound, large and powerful truths of the spirit, or, as in
certain French writers, to mould into accurate rhythm the very
substance and soul and characteristic movement of soul-states,
ideas or objects described and seen. These are things that need to
be done, but it remains to be seen whether they cannot be done
in the recognised and characteristic movement of poetry, rather
than in a compromise with prose cadences. The genius of poetic
measure walking in the path opened by the ancient discovery of
cadenced beat and concentrated rhythm has not yet exhausted
itself, nor is there any proof that it cannot accommodate its
power to new needs or any sign that it can only survive in an
arrested senility or fall into a refined decadence.
The most considerable representatives of this new and free
form of poetic rhythm are English and American, Carpenter
and Whitman. Tagore’s translations of his lyrics have come in
as a powerful adventitious aid, but are not really to the point