The alarming prevalence in contemporary periodicals of “poetry” without shape, wit, or artistic beauty, has caused no little alarm amongst the true friends of verse, and has given rise to the apprehension that the Aonian art has entered upon a definite phase of decadence. It is the belief of The Conservative, however, that the situation is more complex and less basically menacing than it appears from superficial indications.

It must be remembered that despite the kinship between human fancy and its mode of expression, there is a sharp distinction betwixt radicalism of thought and ideals, and mere radicalism of form; and that while the most notorious specimens of free verse represent complete chaos both of sense and of structure, the majority of that which gains admission to reputable magazines is decadent only in technique. The poetical fraternity have a new plaything, and all must needs have their hour of sport with it; but the better sort of bards possess too much inherent good taste and sanity to wander too far afield. They will soon be writing real verse by accident, in spite of themselves, for they cannot defeat the natural laws of rhythm in poetical expression. Even now, the work of these poets is replete with occasional reactions to normal rhyme and rational metre. Our fellow-amateur Mrs. Renshaw, a superlatively good poet despite radical theories, has recently composed a piece of apparent vers libre which is really a well-defined iambic composition with variation in the length of the lines. The innate poet has unwittingly triumphed over the radical theorist! We may, then, safely trust to time to bring the really gifted experimenters within the fold again.

The second or wholly erratic school of free poets is that represented by Amy Lowell at her worst; a motley horde of hysterical and half-witted rhapsodists whose basic principle is the recording of their momentary moods and psychopathic phenomena in whatever amorphous and meaningless phrases may come to their tongues or pens at the moment of inspirational (or epileptic) seizure. These pitiful creatures are naturally subdivided into various types and schools, each professing certain “artistic” principles based on the analogy of poetic thought to other aesthetic sources such as form, sound, motion, and colour; but they are fundamentally similar in their utter want of a sense of proportion and of proportionate values. Their complete rejection of the intellectual (an element which they cannot possess to any great extent) is their undoing. Each writes down the sounds or symbols of sounds which drift through his head without the slightest care or knowledge that they may be understood by any other head. The type of impression they receive and record is abnormal, and cannot be transmitted to persons of normal psychology; wherefore there is no true art or even the rudiments of artistic impulse in their effusions. These radicals are animated by mental or emotional processes other than poetic. They are not in any sense poets, and their work, being wholly alien to poetry, cannot be cited as an indication of poetical decadence. It is rather a type of intellectual and aesthetic decadence of which vers libre is only one manifestation. It is the decadence which produces “futurist” music and “cubist” painting and sculpture.
If concrete examples of the two sorts of unmetrical verse—the really poetical and the distinctly abnormal—be needed to illustrate their difference, the reader may compare Richard Aldington’s “Inarticulate Grief” (The Poetry Review, August, 1916) with the following bit of sober nonsense, written by one of the so-called “Spectrists” without any idea of humour, but found by The Conservative in one of the whimsical paragraphs of a New York “colyum conductor”; where its complete ridiculousness and irrationality recommended it for citation. Mr. Aldington is a poet of genuine depth and feeling despite his awkward medium; the reader may judge of the following without aid of critic or commentator:

Her soul was freckled
Like the bald head
Of a jaundiced Jewish banker.
Her fair and featurous face
Writhed like
An Albino boa-constrictor.
She thought she resembled the Mona Lisa.
This demonstrates the futility of thinking.

And the futility of accepting the chronic free „poets” as serious factors in the literary situation today!