20 The Future Poetry
traditional, but also surely the right physical basis for the poetic
movement. A recent modern tendency — that which has given us
the poetry of Whitman and Carpenter and the experimentalists
invers librein France and Italy, — denies this tradition and sets
aside metre as a limiting bondage, perhaps even a frivolous arti-
ficiality or a falsification of true, free and natural poetic rhythm.
That is, it seems to me, a point of view which cannot eventu-
ally prevail, because it does not deserve to prevail. It certainly
cannot triumph, unless it justifies itself by supreme rhythmical
achievements beside which the highest work of the great masters
of poetic harmony in the past shall sink into a clear inferiority.
That has not yet been done. On the contrary,vers librehas done
its best when it has either limited its aim in rhythm to a kind of
chanting poetical prose or else based itself on a sort of irregular
and complex metrical movement which in its inner law, though
not in its form, recalls the idea of Greek choric poetry.
Milton disparaging rhyme, which he had himself used with
so much skill in his earlier, less sublime, but more beautiful
poetry, forgot or ignored the spiritual value of rhyme, its power
to enforce and clinch the appeal of melodic or harmonic recur-
rence which is a principal element in the measured movement of
poetry, its habit of opening sealed doors to the inspiration, its
capacity to suggest and reveal beauty to that supra-intellectual
something in us which music is missioned to awake. The Whit-
manic technique falls into a similar, but wider error. When
mankind found out the power of thought and feeling thrown
into fixed and recurring measures of sound to move and take
possession of the mind and soul, they were not discovering a
mere artistic device, but a subtle truth of psychology, of which
the conscious theory is preserved in the Vedic tradition. And
when the ancient Indians chose more often than not to throw
whatever they wished to endure, even philosophy, science and
law, into metrical form, it was not merely to aid the memory,
— they were able to memorise huge prose Brahmanas quite as
accurately as the Vedic hymnal or the metrical Upanishads, —
but because they perceived that metrical speech has in itself
not only an easier durability, but a greater natural power than