Often the best service that can be done to the
race, is to lift the veil, at least for a time, from these rules and
fossil-etiquettes.
NEW POETRY--_California, Canada, Texas_.--In my opinion the time has
arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between prose
and poetry. I say the latter is henceforth to win and maintain its
character regardless of rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic,
spondee, dactyl, &c., and that even if rhyme and those measurements
continue to furnish the medium for inferior writers and themes,
(especially for persiflage and the comic, as there seems henceforward,
to the perfect taste, something inevitably comic in rhyme, merely in
itself, and anyhow,) the truest and greatest _Poetry_, (while subtly
and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough,)
can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary
and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest
power and passion. While admitting that the venerable and heavenly
forms of chiming versification have in their time play'd great and
fitting parts--that the pensive complaint, the ballads, wars, amours,
legends of Europe, &c., have, many of them, been inimitably render'd
in rhyming verse--that there have been very illustrious poets whose
shapes the mantle of such verse has beautifully and appropriately
envelopt--and though the mantle has fallen, with perhaps added beauty,
on some of our own age--it is, not-withstanding, certain to me, that
the day of such conventional rhyme is ended.
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