Томас Элиот. О верлибре

"Reflections on Vers Libre"
by
T.S. Eliot
 
Introduction
 
About the work:
 
This webpage presents "Reflections on Vers Libre" an essay by T.S. Eliot first published in 1917 in the British magazine New Statesman (founded in 1913). The essay is classified as work C39 by Donald Gallup in his bibliography of Eliot's works.
 
Notes:
 
The text of Reflections on Vers Libre was republished as one of Eliot's essays in his book, To Criticize the Critic (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965). In turn, To Criticize the Critic has been republished in at least two paperback editions:
· ISBN 0-571-10874-1 (London: Faber & Faber, 1978)
· ISBN 0-8032-6721-5 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,1991)
 
The epigraph for the piece appears to be a quotation from the first edition (1910) of Notes sur la technique poйtique (Notes on poetic technique) by Georges Duhamel and Charles Vildrac. According to Richard Schumaker "they advocated a modern poetics based on a fixed number of repeated syllables." [*]
 
Eliot comments on Ezra Pound's use of vers libre in paragraph #8 of his book Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, also published in 1917.
 
References:
 
Eliot, T.S. "Reflections on Vers Libre" New Statesman, vol. VIII 204, (March 3, 1917) pp. 518-519.
Eliot, T.S. "Reflections on Vers Libre" To Criticize the Critic (London: Faber & Faber, 1978) ISBN 0-571-10874-1
Gallup, Donald. T.S. Eliot: A Bibliography, A Revised and Extended Edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World (1969) p. 198

* Schumaker, Richard. "Charles Vildrac: Nothing Is Lost from a Loving Heart" http://faculty.ed.umuc.edu/~rschumak/essay6.htm viewed October 3, 2006
(See Schumaker's note #2 for Duhamel and Vildrac information.)
 
About the copyright:
It is my understanding that this work is in the public domain in the U.S. but perhaps not in other countries (particularly in the U.K. and E.U.) Be careful about republication.

About this webpage:
URL:
 
Revision date (y/m/d h:m:s):
$Date: 2006/11/13 23:07:58 $

Publisher:

 
Rickard A. Parker (raparker@theworld.com)
 

REFLECTIONS ON VERS LIBRE

Ceux qui possedent leur vers libre y tiennent:
on n'abandonne que le vers libre.
DUHAMEL ET VILDRAC.
 
A lady, renowned in her small circle for the accuracy of her stop-press information of literature, complains to me of a growing pococurantism. 'Since the Russians came in I can read nothing else. I have finished Dostoevski, and I do not know what to do.' I suggested that the great Russian was an admirer of Dickens, and that she also might find that author readable. 'But Dickens is a sentimentalist; Dostoevski is a realist.' I reflected on the amours of Sonia and Rashkolnikov, but forbore to press the point, and I proposed It Is Never too Late to Mend. 'But one cannot read the Victorians at all!' While I was extracting the virtues of the proposition that Dostoevski is a Christian, while Charles Reade is merely pious, she added that she could not longer read any verse but vers libre.
 
It is assumed that vers libre exists. It is assumed that vers libre is a school; that it consists of certain theories; that its group or groups of theorists will either revolutionize or demoralize poetry if their attack upon the iambic pentameter meets with any success. Vers libre does not exist, and it is time that this preposterous fiction followed the йlan vital and the eighty thousand Russians into oblivion.
 
When a theory of art passes it is usually found that a groat's worth of art has been bought with a million of advertisement. The theory which sold the wares may be quite false, or it may be confused and incapable of elucidation, or it may never have existed. A mythical revolution will have taken place and produced a few works of art which perhaps would be even better if still less of revolutionary theories clung to them. In modern society such revolutions are almost inevitable. An artist, happens upon a method, perhaps quite unreflectingly, which is new in the sense that it is essentially different from that of the second-rate people about him, and different in everything but essentials from that of any of his great predecessors. The novelty meets with neglect; neglect provokes attack; and attack demands a theory. In an ideal state of society one might imagine the good New growing naturally out of the good Old, without the need for polemic and theory; this would be a society with a living tradition. In a sluggish society, as actual societies are, tradition is ever lapsing into superstition, and the violent stimulus of novelty is required. This is bad for the artist and his school, who may become circumscribed by their theory and narrowed by their polemic; but the artist can always console himself for his errors in his old age by considering that if he had not fought nothing would have been accomplished.
 
Vers libre has not even the excuse of a polemic; it is a battle-cry of freedom, and there is no freedom in art. And as the so-called vers libre, which is good is anything but 'free', it can better be defended under some other label. Particular types of vers libre may be supported on the choice of content, or on the method of handling the content. I am aware that many writers of vers libre have introduced such innovations, and that the novelty of their choice and manipulation of material is confused--if not in their own minds, in the minds of many of their readers--with the novelty of the form. But I am not here concerned with imagism, which is a theory about the use of material; I am only concerned with the theory of the verse-form in which imagism is cast. If vers libre is a genuine verse-form it will have a positive definition. And I can define it only in negatives: (1) absence of pattern, (2) absence of rhyme, (3) absence of metre.
 
The third of these qualities is easily disposed of. What sort of a line that would be which would not scan at all I cannot say. Even in the popular American magazines, whose verse columns are now largely given over to vers libre, the lines are usually explicable in terms of prosody. Any line can be divided into feet and accents. The simpler metres are a repetition of one combination, perhaps a long and a short, or a short and a long syllable, five times repeated. There is, however, no reason why, within the single line, there should be any repetition; why there should not be lines (as there are) divisible only into feet of different types. How can the grammatical exercise of scansion make a line of this sort more intelligible? Only by isolating elements which occur in other lines, and the sole purpose of doing this is the production of a similar effect elsewhere. But repetition of effect is a question of pattern.
 
Scansion tells us very little. It is probable that there is not much to be gained by an elaborate system of prosody, but the erudite complexities of Swinburnian metre. With Swinburne, once the trick is perceived and the scholarship appreciated, the effect is somewhat diminished. When the unexpectedness, due to the unfamiliarity of the metres to English ears, wears off and is understood, one ceases to look for what one does not find in Swinburne; the inexplicable line with the music which can never be recaptured in other words. Swinburne mastered his technique, which is a great deal, but he did not master it to the extent of being able to take liberties with it, which is everything. If anything promising for English poetry is hidden in the metres of Swinburne, it probably lies far beyond the point to which Swinburne has developed them. But the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very simple one. It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.
 
I have in mind two passages of contemporary verse which would be called vers libre. Both of them I quote because of their beauty:

Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth's the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

This is a complete poem. The other is part of a much longer poem:
 
There shut up in his castle, Tairiran's,
She who had nor ears nor tongue save in her hands,
Gone--ah, gone--untouched, unreachable!
She who could never live save through one person,
She who could never speak save to one person,
And all the rest of her a shifting change,
A broken bundle of mirrors . . . !

It is obvious that the charm of these lines could not be, without the constant suggestion and the skilful evasion of iambic pentameter.
 
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, and especially in the verse of John Webster, who was in some ways a more cunning technician than Shakespeare, one finds the same constant evasion and recognition of regularity. Webster is much freer than Shakespeare, and that his fault is not negligence is evidenced by the fact that it is often at moments of the highest intensity that his verse acquires this freedom. That there is also carelessness I do not deny, but the irregularity of carelessness can be at once detected from the irregularity of deliberation. (In The White Devil Brachiano dying, and Cornelia mad, deliberately rupture the bonds of pentameter.)

"I recover, like a spent taper, for a flash
and instantly go out.

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.

You have cause to love me, I did enter you in my heart
Before you would vouchsafe to call for the keys.

This is a vain poetry: but I pray you tell me
If there were proposed me, wisdom, riches, and beauty,
In three several young men, which should I choose?"
 
These are not lines of carelessness. The irregularity is further enhanced by the use of short lines and the breaking up of lines in dialogue, which alters the quantities. And there are many lines in the drama of this time which are spoilt by regular accentuation.
 
"I loved this woman in spite of my heart. (The Changeling)
I would have these herbs grow up in his grave. (The White Devil)
Whether the spirit of greatness or of woman . . . (The Duchess of Malfi)"

The general charge of decadence cannot be preferred. Tourneur and Shirley, who I think will be conceded to have touched nearly the bottom of the decline of tragedy, are much more regular than Webster or Middleton. Tourneur will polish off a fair line of iambics even at the cost of amputating a preposition from its substantive, and in the Atheist's Tragedy he has a final 'of' in two lines out of five together.
 
We may therefore formulate as follows: the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the 'freest' verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse. Or, freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation. Not to have perceived the simple truth that some artificial limitation is necessary except in moments of the first intensity is, I believe, a capital error of even so distinguished a talent as that of Mr. E.L. Masters. The Spoon River Anthology is not material of the first intensity; it is reflective, not immediate; its author is a moralist, rather than an observer. His material is so near to the material of Crabbe that one wonders why he should have used a different form. Crabbe is, on the whole, the more intense of the two; he is keen, direct, and unsparing. His material is prosaic, not in the sense that it would have been better done in prose, but in the sense of requiring a simple and rather rigid verse-form and this Crabbe has given it. Mr. Masters requires a more rigid verse-form than either of the two contemporary poets quoted above, and his epitaphs suffer from the lack of it.
       
So much for metre. There is no escape from metre; there is only mastery. But while there obviously is escape from rhyme, the vers librists are by no means the first out of the cave.

The boughs of the trees
Are twisted
By many bafflings;
Twisted are
The small-leafed boughs.
But the shadow of them
Is not the shadow of the mast head
Nor of the torn sails.

When the white dawn first
Through the rough fir-planks
Of my hut, by the chestnuts,
Up at the valley-head,
Came breaking, Goddess,
I sprang up, I threw round me
My dappled fawn-skin . . .
 
Except for the more human touch in the second of these extracts a hasty observer would hardly realize that the first is by a contemporary, and the second by Matthew Arnold.
 
I do not minimize the services of modern poets in exploiting the possibilities of rhymeless verse. They prove the strength of a Movement, the utility of a Theory. What neither Blake nor Arnold could do alone is being done in our time. 'Blank verse' is the only accepted rhymeless verse in English--the inevitable iambic pentameter. The English ear is (or was) more sensitive to the music of the verse and less dependent upon the recurrence of identical sounds in this metre than in any other. There is no campaign against rhyme. But it is possible that excessive devotion to rhyme has thickened the modern ear. The rejection of rhyme is not a leap at facility; on the contrary, it imposes a much severer strain upon the language. When the comforting echo of rhyme is removed, success or failure in the choice of words, in the sentence structure, in the order, is at once more apparent. Rhyme removed, the poet is at once held up to the standards of prose. Rhyme removed, much ethereal music leaps up from the word, music which has hitherto chirped unnoticed in the expanse of prose. Any rhyme forbidden, many Shagpats were unwigged.

And this liberation from rhyme might be as well a liberation of rhyme. Freed from its exacting task of supporting lame verse, it could be applied with greater effect where it is most needed. There are often passages in an unrhymed poem where rhyme is wanted for some special effect, for a sudden tightening-up, for a cumulative insistence, or for an abrupt change of mood. But formal rhymed verse will certainly not lose its place. We only need the coming of a Satirist--no man of genius is rarer--to prove that the heroic couplet has lost none of its edge since Dryden and Pope laid it down. As for the sonnet I am not so sure. But the decay of intricate formal patterns has nothing to do with the advent of vers libre. It had set in long before. Only in a closely-knit and homogeneous society, where many men are at work on the same problems, such a society as those which produced the Greek chorus, the Elizabethan lyric, and the Troubadour canzone, will the development of such forms ever be carried to perfection. And as for vers libre, we conclude that it is not defined by absence of pattern or absence of rhyme, for other verse is without these; that it is not defined by non-existence of metre, since even the worst verse can be scanned; and we conclude that the division between Conservative Verse and vers libre does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos.

__________________________________
Some Reflections on Eliot’s "Reflections on Vers Libre": on Verse and Free Verse
by Rachel Wetzsteon
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5901

 
When poets write manifestos about what poetry is or ought to be, they’re often writing veiled defenses or explanations of their own work. T. S. Eliot is no exception. In his 1921 essay "The Metaphysical Poets," he remarks that "it appears likely that poets in our civilization…must be difficult"— prophetic words, considering that "The Waste Land" would appear a year later. In 1923, Eliot published another essay, "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," in which he asserts that "In manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him," since it was "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." Sound familiar? Tiresias, the Grail myth, The Golden Bough—Eliot might as well have been, with a doff of the hat to Walt Whitman, writing a review of his own hot-off-the-presses poem.

Perhaps most telling of all is Eliot’s 1917 essay "Reflections on Vers Libre." Written two years after the publication of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," this essay implicitly warns us not to consider any serious poem not written in a traditional form as "free verse." For, as Eliot explains, "Vers libre does not exist….And as the so-called vers libre which is good is anything but ‘free,’ it can better be defended under some other label." What keeps memorable free verse from being free, Eliot suggests, is its constant vacillation between adherence to, and departure from, rhyme and regular meter. "It is this contrast between fixity and flux…which is the very life of verse," Eliot claims, concluding that "the division between Conservative Verse and vers libre does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos."

"Prufrock" proves him right. There’s hardly a passage in the poem that does not achieve its effects—its wit and edge and pathos—from this "contrast between fixity and flux." Consider the poem’s opening:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.

The first two lines, though they could hardly be mistaken for Alexander Pope, are formally regular: the speaker’s confidently romantic invitation finds its parallel in a strictly rhyming couplet. Granted, the second line is a foot longer than the first, but this alteration only enhances the poem’s passionate expansiveness. But what happens next? Not "And we will link our hands until we die"; not "For I forswear forever being shy!"; but rather the searingly anticlimactic third line, whose bathos, like the happier lines it follows, has a formal analogue: its failure to rhyme with the first two.

Eliot repeats this technique—this "constant evasion and recognition of regularity," as he puts it in the Vers Libre essay— many times throughout "Prufrock." Indeed, in the poem’s most psychologically and thematically raw moments— the times when Prufrock lets his guard down most—Eliot takes his biggest liberties with rhyme and meter. The "overwhelming question" of the first stanza has no answer; fittingly, the line is the only one besides the third that doesn’t rhyme with another one. When Prufrock tremulously asks, thirty or so lines later, "Do I dare/Disturb the universe?" he both uses the first-person pronoun—stripped of its accompanying "you" (line 1) and its protective quotes ("And indeed there will be time/To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and ‘Do I dare?’"(lines 37-8)— for the first time in the poem, and utters the shortest line in the entire poem. Once again, form breaks down when the poem’s protagonist also falters. Although he is capable, elsewhere in the poem, of basking in the lulling comforts of rhyme—particularly the three "And I have known them all" and the two "And would it have been worth it…" stanzas—Prufrock never finds a formal foothold sturdy enough to cling to for more than a few lines, succumbing to awkward almost-rhymes ("I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas") and sudden stark one-liners: "I do not think that they will sing to me." The result is hardly "chaos," but one of the greatest poems of the last century.

Other poets followed suit. Robert Frost’s endlessly supple blank verse; Elizabeth Bishop’s stanzas with their modulating but ever-present rhymes; E. E. Cummings’ syntactically wild poems that—look closely!—turn out to be sonnets; and so many other poets’ formal experiments give further proof of the validity and importance of Eliot’s insights.

But it’s easy to forget the bright example of Eliot and others shining past the fog of all the recent debates about the purpose and value of form in poetry. I admit a personal stake in the matter: as someone who has been labeled a "New Formalist," I can’t help being irritated at the narrow assumptions that lurk behind this term and its accompanying manifestos. Aren’t all interesting poets interested in form? Haven’t some of my most ambitious poems, miserable failures though they may have been, involved an attempt to achieve the "constant vacillation" that Eliot so powerfully describes? Fortunately, the form versus freedom debate seems to have subsided a bit during the last few years, and poets have gone back to the quieter but infinitely more gratifying business of writing poems. But even so, my own experience of being squeezed into a category I didn’t believe in, as well as the ever-inspiring reading of Eliot and so many other poets I love, prompts me to offer this advice to aspiring young poets: life may be full of painful choices, but as for whether to write in form or free verse …well, this is one you’re really much better off not making.


Have comments about this essay? Go to the Poets.org Discussion Board.