Journalism is the unique literary achievement of this age. And journalism has brought some benefit to the literary tradition. It has elevated lucidity and human interest to the high place of esteem where in a democratic society they belong. It has made the laborious task of imitating library echoes in order to get into the Atlantic Monthly, unnecessary. It has rendered book-fed and literarious writers as obscure as they are tiresome. But journalism is not literature; it is business. And with some accidental exceptions the tendency of journalism to insert itself into the place of literature is a disaster to the art of writing. I am thinking of the new dilute variety of prosy poetry which is watering the country, and in order to separate myself from those who have any conventional or technical prejudice against the composition of poetry without meter I call it Lazy Verse.

Amazing are the metaphysical theories which those who produce this material put up to justify their professional incapacity for the intense rhapsodies of art. I am not going to dispute those theories, for of all obvious rationalizations of personal inclination, the so-called “sciences” which an artist constructs about his art are the most obviously unscientific. When a man starts a school of poetry, you can be sure that he has an impulse to create something unique, but lacks the energic capacity to sit down and do it. Every great poem is a school of poetry, but it does not issue circulars about itself. Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, the “Sceptric School,” Polyrhythmic Poetry—all these names, and the others, are efforts to compensate a sense of creative inferiority. So let them pass.

But that poetry is more and more being written without meter, and that in consequence more and more poetry is being written, and that those who so write are most of them convinced that they have gained in freedom and power to convey realizations to the imagination, is a fact which any true science of poetry will have to consider. It will have to estimate the motives, and weigh the values of the “free-verse”tendency in general. I am going to make a beginning in that direction by pointing out that in the majority of cases a mere lack of energetic idle time, or the habit of intense concentration, is the motive to free verse, and the only value gained is the journalistic dilution which enables poetry to expand and multiply and cover space, as all the rest of our writing does in this day of the innumerable magazines and the enormous newspaper.

To read William Blake’s poem “To the Evening Star,” or to read passages of the Psalms, or Song of Solomon, in the English Bible, or of Tagore’s or Giovannitti’s poems, is enough to prove to anyone that realizations of the utmost poignancy can be conveyed without meter by the poetic use of names. Perceptible forms too can be engendered in that exaltation in which qualities of thought or passion have as clear definition as qualities of sound. Even the very absence of form, and often of intensity itself, can have poetic value in so unique an achievement as Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” It was necessary that some miraculously powerful poet should burst up through the fine pages of recorded high passion with the uncouth realities of the hours of a man’s everyday life. This could only be done with the everyday manners of language. It could only be done irregularly, verbosely. It could only be done unsatisfactorily, for if it were satisfying it would not be the unqualified and incommensurable reality that was required. But persons who have drunk the whole draught of Walt Whitman’s poetry and realized that it is an eternal achievement in literature, and persons who think the English Bible and many other unmetrical visions are exalted poetry, are still entitled to find the general tendency of modern “ Free Verse” dissolving and wearisome in an extreme degree.

There are two kinds of people who become infected with journalistic free verse—poets and prose-writers. The motive which brings prose-writers to this form is the same as the motive which makes magazine editors fill prose full of paragraphs and little sub-heads that have nothing to do with the subject of discussion. It is a business of “breaking up the type.” It is a part of the new art of display-advertising. It makes the prose easy to read. And the necessity of that is a direct outcome of the fatness of the Sunday newspaper. We live under the weight of so much printed material, for the daily absorption of which we feel responsible, that every effort must be made to tickle us and kick us and jog us along so we will get through anything to the conclusion. So far from being a return to primitive, naive or simple styles of writing, this breaking up of continuity in lines neither demanded by mechanics nor suggested by music, is the height of effort at sophisticated stimulation of a jaded perception.