He must stand or fall by these alone, since he
discarded all artificial, all adventitious helps. If interior,
spontaneous rhythm could not be relied on, and the natural music
and flexibility of language, then there was nothing to shield the
ear from the pitiless hail of words,--not one softly padded verse
anywhere.
All poets, except those of the very first order, owe immensely to
the form, the art, the stereotyped metres, and stock figures they
find ready to hand. The form is suggestive,--it invites and aids
expression, and lends itself readily, like fashion, to conceal, or
extenuate, or eke out poverty of thought and feeling in the verse.
The poet can "cut and cover," as the farmer says, in a way the
prose-writer never can, nor one whose form is essentially prose,
like Whitman's.
I, too, love to see the forms worthily used, as they always are by
the master; and I have no expectation that they are going out of
fashion right away. A great deal of poetry that serves, and helps
sweeten one's cup, would be impossible without them,--would be
nothing when separated from them. It is for the ear, and for the
sense of tune and of carefully carved and modeled forms, and is not
meant to arouse the soul with the taste of power, and to start off
on journeys for itself. But the great inspired utterances, like the
Bible,--what would they gain by being cast in the moulds of
metrical verse? In all that concerns art, viewed from any high
standpoint,--proportion, continence, self-control, unfaltering
adherence to natural standards, subordination of parts, perfect
adjustment of the means to the end, obedience to inward law, no
trifling, no levity, no straining after effect, impartially
attending to the back and loins as well as to the head, and even
holding toward his subject an attitude of perfect acceptance and
equality,--principles of art to which alone the great spirits are
amenable,--in all these respects, I say, this poet is as true as an
orb in astronomy.
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