348 The Future Poetry
its own metrical stanza form most in consonance with its own
thought and feeling. The fixed metre unchanging from line to
line needs greater skill; modulation is here of great importance.
A semi-free quantitative verse also gives considerable scope; it
can be planned in a form resembling that of the Greek chorus
but without the fixed balance of strophe and antistrophe, or a
still looser use can be made of it escaping towards the freedom of
modernistic verse. There are in this collection of poems examples
of the first two methods, the fixed metre and the set stanza or the
strophe and antistrophe arrangement;^9 a few more, illustrative
of these and other forms, are added at the end of this appendix.
There is one illustration of semi-free and one of free quantitative
verse.
An unconsciously quantitative free verse may be said to exist
already in the writings of Whitman and contemporary modernist
poets. In modern free verse the underlying impulse is to get away
from the fixed limitations of accentual metre, its set forms and
its traditional “poetic” language, and to create forms and a
diction more kin to the natural rhythm and turns of language
which we find in common speech and in prose. To throw away
the bonds of metre altogether, to approximate not only in the
language but in the rhythmic movement to normal speech and to
prose tone and prose expression was the method first preferred;
a great deal of free verse is nothing but prose cut up into lines
to make it look like verse. But in the more skilful treatment by
the greater writers there is a labour to arrive at a certain power
of rhythm and a sufficient unity of movement. Free verse cannot
justify itself unless it makes a thing of beauty of every line and
achieves at the same time an underlying rhythmic oneness; this is
imperative when the power for form and the uplifting intensity
of metrical verse is absent, if this kind of writing is not to be,
as it too often is, a failure. In the best poetry of the kind the
attempt to achieve this end arrives precisely at a form of free
(^9) “On Quantitative Metre” first appeared as an appendix to Sri Aurobindo’sCollected
Poems and Plays(1942). The examples mentioned as occurring “in this collection of
poems” are now published inCollected Poems.They include “Ahana” and some of the
poems in “Six Poems” and “Poems [1941]”. — Ed.