IRRADIATIONS SAND AND SPRAY BY JOHN GOULD FLETCHER BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1915 TO AMY LOWELL BEST OF FRIENDS AND POETS Thanks are due to the Editors of Poetry (Chicago) and The Egoist (London) for permission to reprint here matter that originally appeared in the pages of their respective publications. PREFACE The art of poetry as practised in the English-speaking countries to-day, is in a greatly backward state. Among the reading public there are exactly three opinions generally held about it. The first, and by far the most popular, view is that all poets are fools and that poetry is absurd. The second is that poetry is an agreeable after-dinner entertainment, and that a poet is great because he has written quotable lines. The last and worst is that which strives to press the poet into the service of some philosophical dogma, ism, or fad. For these views the poets themselves, and no others, are largely responsible. With their exaggerated vanity, they have attempted to make of their craft a Masonic secret, iterating that a poet composes by ear alone; that rhythm is not to be analyzed, that rhyme is sacrosanct; that poets, by some special dispensation of Providence, write by inspiration, being born with more insight than other men; and so forth. Is it any wonder that the public is indifferent, hostile, or befooled when poets themselves disdain to explain clearly what they are trying to do, and refuse to admit the public into the privacy of their carefully guarded workrooms? It was Theophile Gautier, I think, who offered to teach any one how to write poetry in twenty-five lessons. Now this view has in it some exaggeration, but, at the same time, much truth. No amount of lessoning will turn an idiot into a wise man, or enable a man to say something when he is naturally one who has nothing to say. Nevertheless, I believe that there would have been fewer mute inglorious Miltons, greater respect paid to poetry, and many better poets, if the poets themselves had stopped working through sheer instinct and set themselves the task of considering some elementary principles in their craft. In this belief, and in the hope of enlightening some one as to the aim and purpose of my work, I am writing this preface. To begin with, the basis of English poetry is rhythm, or, as some would prefer to call it, cadence. This rhythm is obtained by mingling stressed and unstressed syllables. Stress may be produced by accent. It may--and often is--produced by what is known as quantity, the breath required to pronounce certain syllables being more than is required on certain others. However it be produced, it is precisely this insistence upon cadence, upon the rhythm of the line when spoken, which sets poetry apart from prose, and not--be it said at the outset--a certain way of printing, with a capital letter at the beginning of each line, or an insistence upon end-rhymes.