The process that began with the Pervigilium Veneris, the mediæval hymn-writers, and the Provençal troubadours, and which culminated in the orchestral blank verse of Shakespeare, has now passed through all the stages of reduction to formula, eclecticism, archaistic reaction, vulgarization, gramaphone popularity, and death. Milton--Gibbon among poets--reduced it to his too-monotonous organ-roll. Dryden, Pope and his followers, endlessly repeated a formula. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, attempted a return to the Elizabethan and to the even earlier ballad forms. In the later nineteenth century we come back to still earlier forms. Ballades, rondeaus, even sestinas appear. Gradually we find the public attention dropping away from these juggling feats performed with stale form, and turning to what may be called the new balladist--the street singer who is content to doggerelize and make strident a once noble form. We have our Masefields, our Kiplings, and worse. Rag-time has at last made its appearance in poetry. Let us be grateful to the man who invented it--Nicholas Vachel Lindsay--but let us admit that the force of nature can no further go. It is time to create something new. It is time to strip poetry of meaningless tatters of form, and to clothe her in new, suitable garments. Portents and precursors there have been in plenty. We already have Blake, Matthew Arnold, Whitman, Samuel Butler, and I know not how many more. Every one is talking--many poets, poeticules, and poetasters are writing--what they call "free verse." Let there be no mistake about one thing. Free verse that is flabby, in-organic, shapelessly obvious, is as much of a crime against poetry as the cheapest echo of a Masefield that any doggerel scribbler ever strummed. Let poets drop their formulas--"free" or otherwise--and determine to discipline themselves through experiment. There is much to be learned from the precursors I have mentioned. There is a great deal to be learned from the French poets--Parnassians, Symbolists, Whitmanites, Fantaisistes--who have, in the years 1860 to 1900, created a new Renaissance under our noses. But above all, what will teach us the most is our language and life. Never was life lived more richly, more fully, with more terrible blind intensity than it is being lived at this instant. Never was the noble language which is ours surpassed either in richness or in concision. We have the material with which to work, and the tools to do the work with. It is America's opportunity to lay the foundations for a new flowering of English verse, and to lay them as broad as they are strong. _January, 1915._ CONTENTS IRRADIATIONS EPILOGUE SAND AND SPRAY (A SEA-SYMPHONY) PART I. THE GALE PART II. VARIATIONS (1) SAILBOATS (2) THE TIDE (3) THE SANDS (4) THE GULLS (5) STEAMERS (6) NIGHT OF STARS PART III. VARIATIONS (1) THE GROUNDSWELL (2) SNOW AT SEA (3) THE NIGHT WIND (4) THE WRECK (5) TIDE OF STORMS