In Search of a Foot

In Search of a Foot

[A version of this article appeared in The Southern Review for Summer, 2000.]

In 1917 T. S. Eliot, who had been in London and Paris for several years and who had observed the opening salvos of Imagist theory with an eye more experienced than most of the campaigners, published "Reflections on Vers Libre" in the New Statesman. "When a theory of art passes," stated Eliot, with premature sagacity, "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." (Selected Prose 31) Further on, he adds: "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. . . . What sort of a line that would be which would not scan at all I cannot say." There follows a discussion of the greatest subtlety and erudition in which he ends by arguing that anything that is verse at all must continue to be an extension of an established meter, quoting for illustration his favorite Jacobean playwrights and mentioning Shakespeare. His argument that Webster's lines in The White Devil "deliberately rupture the bonds of pentameter" is unassailable; but he fails to remark that the same playwright deliberately restores the pentameter. "There is no escape from meter; there is only mastery," said Eliot, in the frequently-quoted passage. Why not, I would ask, a mastery of escape? And yet what Eliot says is so fundamentally sensible that it seems to me to need only one more small step that would admit the possibility of extraline variation, or line substitution--call it what you will--in which the concept of the metrical foot as the fundamental division gives way to the line itself as the atomic unit.

Eliot's essay remains one of the earliest and best general assessments of what occurred in prosody in this century's second decade; it should be read and reread entire, and not quoted in snippets. Eliot continued to take exception to the idea that vers libre was really possible, and also attacked the prose poem in an article published in the New Statesmen for May 19, 1917, "The Borderline of Prose." Thirty years later, Eliot had softened considerably on these issues, but at that time he insisted on a definite distinction between prose and poetry, and insisted there must be no discussion of either free verse or prose poetry. And only four years later he came around to an admission that long poems could take on qualities of prose and that prose could aspire toward poetry; in the Chapbook: A Monthly Miscellany of April, 1921, he wrote:

Poetic content must be either the sort of thing that is usually, or the same thing that ought to be, expressed in verse. But if you say the latter, the prose poem is ruled out; if you say the former, you have said only that certain things can be said in either prose or verse. I am not disposed to contest either of these conclusions, as they stand, but they do not appear to bring us any nearer to a definition of the prose-poem. I do not assume the identification of poetry with verse; good poetry is obviously something else besides good verse; and good verse may be indifferent poetry.

Here Eliot has raised an issue that might seem to be entirely separate from the question of free verse. Much as we may enjoy "Casey at the Bat" or "The Cremation of Sam McGee," we do not promote them to equal status with Paradise Lost or with Keats's great odes. Even Robert Service knew better than that, refusing to call himself anything more than a versifier.

My purpose here is to demonstrate how efforts to construct a more positive and definite system of free-verse scansion (than Eliot's) immediately run into absurdities and self- contradictions that cannot be resolved. The reason is that, unlike Eliot who recognized that free verse required a substrate of regularity, Yvor Winters and William Carlos Williams aimed at providing the new method with its own self-consistent rationale. In the end they differed from Eliot and from each other in radically opposite ways, Winters attempting an exacting and overspecific notation, and Williams simply asserting the existence of his "variable foot" without providing any clear examples of what he meant by it.

A seldom-mentioned fact is that in avant-garde publications of the period 1913-16, Williams's name appeared almost as often as that of Joyce, Pound, and Eliot. Perhaps because most of his work consisted of short poems, and because his spare and deliberately unliterary style lacked the panache and knowingness of his contemporaries, a display of esoteric learning that T. E. Lawrence found ridiculous in Ezra Pound, Williams appeared at first to be a minor camp-follower of the Imagists. Later on, he barely had time as a full-time physician to write poetry and fiction; a completely articulated theory of prosody was not one of his achievements. Yet theorize he did--sporadically, spontaneously, thoughtlessly, obsessively, and with less self-contradiction than one could allow him, given all the distractions of his busy life. His disjointed utterances have spread and sprouted like the wild thistle.

Two recurrent obsessions lent Williams's obiter dicta a certain consistency. First, he decided early on that he agreed with what Pound later said in the Cantos, "To break the pentameter, that was the first heave." At any time during the next fifty years he was ready to get out his scalpel and cut away at the diseased tissue of British metrics. In an unpublished letter to Kenneth Burke of 19 July 1955 he wrote: "To take a flier, I am completely through with the concept and the practice of blank verse. The counting of the five regular syllables [sic] makes me grind my teeth." But along with this was the conviction that poetry could not do without order. Structure was essential to everything in the universe. At times Williams seemed willing to learn what he could from earlier prosody; prior to attending a writer's conference, at which he knew Allen Tate would be present, he set himself to studying George Saintsbury's three-volume history of English prosody and admired much that he found there. In 1947 he tried to interest W. H. Auden in assembling a seminar of four or five "master poets" to discuss technical problems in the composition of poetry; he proposed for texts Samson Agonistes, one or more of Pound's Cantos, a poem by André