352 The Future Poetry
browns, greys and silver-greys — is mostly absent; force is there
but paralysed or only half-carrying out its intention, gestures
with much effort and straining, but no successful motion. In
less excellent passages of the free verse writers this atony comes
out very evidently; all intensity of poetic rhythm disappears and
we plod through arid waste-lands. There is an insistence on
formlessness as the basis and each writer tries to shape his own
rhythm out of this arhythmic amorphousness, sometimes with
a half success, but not always or very often. This is clearly the
reason of the failure of free verse and the reason too of several
besetting general deficiencies of modernist verse; for even where
there is form or metre, it seems ashamed of itself and tries to look
as if there were none. It is the reason also of the discouraging
inequality of modernist poetry, its failure to achieve any supreme
beauty or greatness, any outstanding work which could compare
with the masterpieces of other epochs. Inspiration is the source
of poetic intensity and, while inspiration comes when it will and
not at command, yet it is more tempted to come and can be
more sustained when there is a conscious and constant form to
receive it, — not necessarily metre in the received sense, — and
although the highest breath of inspiration cannot, even so, be
continuous, for the human mind is too frail to sustain the super-
normal luminous inrush, yet the form sustains quality, keeps it
at a higher level than can any licence of caprice or freedom of
shapelessness. When the form is not there the inspiration, the
intensity that gives perfect poetic expression to idea, feeling or
vision, keeps more at a distance and has to be dragged in with an
effort; even if it comes in lines, phrases, passages, afterwards its
impulse ceases or flags and toils and through long weary pages
one feels its persistent absence or unwilling half-presence and
the mass of the work remains unsatisfying. What is done may
be strong or interesting in substance, but it lacks the immortal
shape. Mind is there, a fertile and forceful, sometimes too acute
and forceful intelligence, but not life, not a firm lasting body.
It is possible that one day the impulse which created free verse
may be justified; but, if so, it can only be done when a free
form is achieved, a free rhythmic unity. For that end the best